The Gnome-Mobile (G)
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Caution: spoilers!

This came out in 1967 (eight years before I was born). I first saw it in 2017, as part of a DVD set that also includes Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and a couple other movies. I don't remember when or where I first heard of "The Gnome-Mobile," but I'm fairly sure it was sometime within the last few years before watching it. I feel like I must have read a review somewhere, but it could have been anywhere: in a magazine, or on some website, maybe even in a brochure from Disney Movie Club. Or maybe I saw a video review, or heck, maybe a friend recommended it. It really bugs me that I don't remember where I heard of it, I just remember thinking it sounded interesting, and it seemed odd that I hadn't heard of it before that. In any event, "Darby O'Gill" is a movie I had wanted to see for years, and this movie is the reason I bought the DVD set instead of just buying the Darby movie by itself. (I'm still planning on watching the other two movies in the set eventually, and I expect I'll enjoy them, but I wouldn't have probably ever bothered about them if they didn't happen to be part of this set.) Anyway, I could have put my review under "fantasy," as I did with Darby O'Gill. Or I could have put it under "classics" (except that whole never having heard of it thing makes that a bit iffy). But I do rather feel that "family" is the best fit. And I'm very glad to have finally seen it, because it's a really fun and funny movie.

The movie stars Walter Brennan, who plays a lumber tycoon named D.J. Mulrooney. He seems like a pretty affable old guy, and after leaving a business meeting, he goes to the airport to pick up his grandchildren, Rodney and Elizabeth. (The opening credits refer to them as "The Mary Poppins Kids," Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice. Because of course they're instantly recognizable as the kids who played Jane and Michael Banks in that movie, though obviously they're playing different characters, here.) I suppose the kids must live in England, because of course they have British accents. D.J. has a noticeable Boston accent, which I thought was odd, since he lives in San Francisco, and I got the impression that's where he's from, originally. What's even weirder is that any vehicle he drives (particularly the titular car) has the steering wheel on the right, British-style, but another car in the movie, driven by someone else, has it on the left, American-style. Maybe this is something the producers just expected kids not to notice or care about, but I'm not a kid. (And I feel like most kids are savvy enough to notice such glaring inconsistencies, but I could be wrong.) Anyway, I digress.

D.J. takes Rodney and Elizabeth for a picnic in the woods. Actually, it's a Redwoods park that D.J. himself had bought and set aside for the public to enjoy, where no trees could be cut down. Elizabeth wanders off exploring the beauty of nature, while her brother and grandfather stay behind at the picnic site. She meets a gnome named Jasper, and goes back to tell her grandfather about him. Jasper had told her about a problem he has, and she told him her grandfather was a great problem solver. At first D.J. and Rodney don't believe her about Jasper, as he went back into hiding. But soon he comes out, and takes them to see his old grandfather, Knobby (also played by Brennan, though unrecognizable under the long beard). Knobby is "fading away," because he's lost the will to live. That's because he and Jasper are the only two gnomes left in their forest, which means there's no one for Jasper to marry... which of course means Knobby wouldn't be getting any great-grandchildren. D.J. offers to take the two of them in his Rolls Royce, to look for gnomes in other forests. And as they all drive along, D.J. and the kids start singing a song that dubs the car "the Gnome-Mobile" (to the tune of a song D.J. had sung for his grandkids earlier, about a much older "Jaunting Car" from his youth).

Well, beyond this point, I feel like anything I say will be too spoilery, but I feel like I must mention some things, anyway. So read on if you like, or don't, if you don't.

The five of them stop at a hotel for the night, which happens to be owned by D.J. Which was lucky, because Knobby was making a lot of noise, from his and Jasper's hiding place in the picnic basket, and the concierge wouldn't have let them take any "pets" with them, if he hadn't been the owner. But unluckily, Knobby hears the concierge call him "Mr. Mulrooney," and we already knew he hated Mulrooney. During the car ride, he had complained about his company having cut down a lot of trees, which was apparently why all the other gnomes had left the forest. So D.J. had wanted to keep his identity a secret from the gnomes, knowing they wouldn't trust him to help them, otherwise. Now, they get into an argument. And... well, D.J. and Rodney leave the hotel room for awhile, to get the car serviced. Elizabeth stays behind, but soon receives a phone call saying her grandfather and brother had been in an accident. That was a trick by a man named Quaxton, the owner of a traveling freak show, who had overheard all that was going on, and wanted Elizabeth to leave the room so he could kidnap the gnomes for himself.

When D.J. and the kids get back to their hotel room and find the gnomes missing, he calls his company's head of security, Ralph Yarby, wanting him to get his security team to look for the gnomes. However, Yarby happened to be with a doctor at the time, who recommends a psychiatrist for Yarby to bring D.J. to talk to, pretending the psychiatrist is a detective. Naturally, D.J. immediately gets himself committed with his talk of gnomes. Yarby calls the woman who's looking after the children to tell her what happened, but the kids listen in on an extension, and decide to go bust Grandfather out of the loony bin. Which they do (or Rodney does) with comical ease. Then the three of them are on their own, trying to figure out how to find the gnomes. Luckily, before Quaxton even knew of the gnomes' existence, he had given a pair of free tickets to his show to Rodney, who now realizes he's probably the one who kidnapped them. So they go looking for him, to rescue the gnomes. By the time they find them, Knobby had already escaped, but D.J. does rescue Jasper, who was planning to meet up with his grandfather at a nearby forest. Meanwhile, Yarby and a couple of guys from the asylum were out looking for D.J., and they end up in a very amusing car chase through the woods.

After the Gnome-Mobile shakes its pursuers, they finally reach the forest where Knobby had gone, and it turns out he had met more gnomes there, the leader of whom was Rufus (Ed Wynn, being as Ed Wynn-ish as ever). Rufus brings out a bunch of old male gnomes for Jasper to meet, but of course Jasper wonders where the girls are. So then Rufus calls for the girl gnomes to come out, and there are a bunch of them, all quite beautiful. Rufus mentions all of their names, but the one Jasper seems to fall for at first sight is the bashful Violet. (Rufus would have preferred for Jasper to end up with his niece, Snapdragon.) Then Rufus tells us it's not about who Jasper picks, it's who picks him. Which I thought, at first, was a good thing, like maybe an actual hint of feminism (though of course it really should be about two people choosing each other, but at least this is better than just assuming the woman doesn't get any choice in the matter). However, it seems that all the female gnomes want Jasper (or at least, I'm assuming these are just the ones who weren't already in relationships). So... there ensues a comical chase scene with all the gnomes trying to catch Jasper (in what D.J. compares to a greased pig-catching contest). Violet is constantly downtrodden or shoved aside by the more forceful gnomes, but Jasper is constantly trying to avoid them and let Violet catch him. Which, of course, she eventually does. (This whole thing seemed... well, as Elizabeth said, "not very romantic." But after all, it's just a silly comedy movie, and it was rather amusing. And who am I to judge the customs of gnomes?) After that, Rufus marries the two of them, and D.J. offers to take any of the gnomes who wish to go, in his Gnome-Mobile, to live in the Redwood park. (Or... I'm not sure if he was taking them there, or to a different forest than he was planning to sell, earlier. I think it would have made more sense to take them somewhere that had already been declared off-limits for logging, rather than call off an impending business deal, but whatevs.)

So, a happy ending all around, though it's unclear if or how D.J. will get out of having been declared insane, since he seems committed to keeping the gnomes' existence a secret. (Yarby did get a brief glance of Jasper at the end of the car chase, from a distance, though I don't think that would be enough to clear D.J. with the psychiatrist.) But whatever. I'm sure we can assume he won't be going back to the asylum, and instead go back to running his ever-growing business empire. And that that empire will probably include a lot less tree-cutting than it used to. (It was nice that the business meeting at the start of the movie showed he was branching out, however reluctantly, into other ventures. Now I expect he'll fully embrace those ventures.) Anyway, whatever. The whole movie is pretty redonkulous, but like I said, really fun. And I think it really deserves to be better known and more popular than it seems to be.