Directed by: David Swift
Starring: Hayley Mills, Maureen O’Hara, Brian Keith
I don’t know about the history of split-screen one person playing two characters movies (and I’m sure as fuck not going to look it up), but I would imagine that this was one of the earlier and more popular efforts in that generally terrible genre. But hey, I could be wrong. There might be some Charlie Chaplain movie out there that I haven’t seen where he does the same thing only a thousand times better, it’s entirely possible.
Two twins meet each other at summer camp and realize that, when their parents split up, they each took one kid and didn’t tell them about the other. Thinking that this is totally bullshit, they decide to switch places and try to get their parents back together. The problem is, the father is getting ready to marry some other woman (who only wants him for his money, so she can effectively be the bad guy), and the twins prank her incessantly until she gives up, thus giving the original parents no reason not to get back together. Except, in theory, the same reasons they split up in the first place.
My parents got divorced when I was in elementary school, and coming from that background, I gotta say that people do it for a reason. When you get divorced, the mistake is not splitting up, it’s getting together in the first place. Only the greatest idiots in the world would re-marry after getting divorced. Still, their whole idea of not telling their kids about each other is extremely fucked up, so they probably deserve that title.
Films in Boxes 
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