The World of Henry Orient

The World of Henry Orient (1964) is an embarrassingly enjoyable coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a charmingly naïve New York City. Manhattan serves as the world’s biggest playground for a pair of 14 year old girls, Marian and Valarie, who pursue (or in the more criminal vernacular: stalk) a layabout, lothario of a pianist - the titular Henry Orient - as part of their imaginary adventures.

Dated in some ways, timeless in others, director George Roy Hill’s film biggest accomplishment is capturing the quirky appeal of its two main characters in loving detail. Only a year or two away from discovering the truth about true love, Marian and Valarie (played so unpretentiously by unknowns Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker) are still entertained by fantasies and friendship, despite the emotional turmoil of their respective broken families. Marian has no father, but a loving home. While Valarie is caught in the midst of her parents’ failing marriage, brought on by her mother’s string of thinly disguised affairs.

But for most of the its running time, the film avoids these impending real-world concerns, focusing on Peter Sellers’ farcical performance as the titular Henry Orient. With an affected accent that’s part Clouseau, part Bronx Bomber, Sellars creates a character that lives in the same sort of fantasy world as the girls who follow him: living the dream of a master musician and suave ladies man, when in fact he’s booed after each performance and lives in constant fear of being discovered by one of his conquests’ husbands. His hijinks were likely the studios’ big selling point, but he’s not the heart of the film.

That remains Marian and Valarie’s painful realization that reality eventually catches up to us all. It’s a lesson encapsulated most vividly by Angela Lansbury as Valarie’s unfaithful mother: emotionally abusing her daughter in an attempt to erase the living embodiment of her own infidelity. That’s pretty deep, but Lansbury makes you feel it right in the gut. Luckily, her husband is played by Tom Bosley, whose solution (just like on Happy Days) always seems to involve a glass of warm milk and sound advice.

Hill interjects some free-spirited visual experimentation, including a joyous slow-motion montage of the girls bouncing around NYC landmarks and numerous Monkees-style high-speed comic riffs, working well within a studio system that he later helped keep afloat with hits like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Like one’s own adolescence, The World of Henry Orient seems like a warm memory that grows more poignant as it fades.

Twilight Time’s 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray is another marvelous edition to their collection, with a detailed and colorful transfer that still feels like “film” plus the theatrical trailer, an isolated score track from Elmer Bernstein and audio commentary with film historians Jeff Bond, Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman.