This is based on a novel. Written for adults. Set in New York. Apparently, authors David Eliades and Robert Forrest Webb—who wrote under the pseudonym of David Forrest—were appalled at the very idea of its being made into a family movie. I’m curious about the idea of reading it, because I want to know if the racism is original to the novel. If it was added, that’s much worse and hopefully something the authors would also have felt the need to complain about. If it’s original to the source, ye Gods, why didn’t Disney take it out?

Lord Southmere (Derek Nimmo) is initially in old age makeup, telling us about his greatest adventure. “After World War I,” he was sneaking out of China. Eventually, he ends up safe in London. Or so he thinks. A group of Chinese spies led by Hnup Wan (Peter Ustinov—yes, really) are after him, seeking what everyone calls Lotus X. He doesn’t know what it is. Lord Southmere manages to hid the microfilm on a dinosaur at the Museum of Natural History. He is hit on the head—and found by his old nanny, Hettie (Helen Hayes). He tells her she must find the formula and keep it safe, but she cannot go to the authorities. She enlists a herd of nannies to help her in this task.

Honestly, there are some good concepts to this movie that are just overwhelmed by everything else. Literally the only person in the entire movie who is actually Chinese, despite the plot, is “fake chauffeur.” He is uncredited. I’m aware that IMDb lists people alphabetically, and that’s why Vincent Wong is the last one listed, but it is still a little pointed-feeling, that you have to scroll through to literally the fiftieth person in the credits. I get that his character is unimportant and is out of the movie almost immediately, but you still feel really uncomfortable when any other allegedly Chinese character is on the screen. Also, there are two characters who are in a single scene together who are credited.

This movie is ridiculously padded. The dinosaur skeleton gets loaded onto a steam-powered truck at some point (because okay), and Helen Hayes ends up behind the wheel. She is driving through a London fog with the intention of losing the car and bus full of “Chinese” characters following her. This sequences goes on for far, far too long before they end up on a train, still in their truck, and then they pad it some more. As if no one has quite figured out what can be done with the concept we’re going with here.

I, as always, have some suggestions. For example, I quite like the character of Susan (Natasha Pyne), and they don’t do much with her other than have her be young and a bit wild. She’s got a a personality, which is more than much of anyone else, but she doesn’t get to do anything with it, and there are a bunch of things you could develop further. I’m also fond of Lord Castleberry (Andrew Dove) and Truscott (Max Harris), and they’re also characters who seem to have been developed only to go nowhere.

There’s also the idea that Peter Ustinov’s character—please don’t make me repeat that name, which is . . . just not Chinese—is himself the son of an ambassador and grew up in London with an English nanny. That he knew Hettie when he was young and obeys English nannies instinctively. Hell, you can get some interesting class stuff going by developing Quon (Clive Revill) as more than just “surly underling” and maybe suggesting that he’s one of many people held back by Chinese classism who hopes for a little upward mobility in the changing political structure.

Sure, you’d also want to cast some, you know, actual Chinese people. Peter Ustinov’s family was from a lot of places—he actually had Ethiopian heritage—but ye Gods he’s awful here. Not entirely his fault; no one could do good things with this role. Helen Hayes is better done by, but not by a whole lot. Mostly she’s just not carrying a whole bunch of racist stereotypes. Her character almost doesn’t seem to notice that the man she once knew as a boy nicknamed “Panda Nose” is Chinese at all.

Also, it’s minor compared to the racism, but the paleontology of this movie is dreadful. For some reason, the brontosaurus skeleton—yes, I know it’s called brachiosaurus now, but that’s what they say in the movie—has pointy teeth. Never mind how fragile dinosaur fossils can be and how cavalierly everyone whacks this one around. Helen Hayes refers to dinosaurs as having last killed a person two million years earlier, and the curator of the museum (Frank Williams, possibly?) refers to dinosaurs as having been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Which is technically true, I suppose. Even the well-read Lord Castleberry refers to a pterodactyl as an ancient bird, which is manifestly is not.

All in all, we could do better. It’s no wonder that this one isn’t on Disney+ and that I’d never actually seen it before. It’s quite racist, and it’s not good even beyond the racism, and there are seeds of a better movie here but no one’s going for it. I’d really like to have a free hand to remake things like this, or at least be part of a team over at Disney that took these names people have vaguely heard without ever having seen the movie and improving them, even if the results are purely streaming. I couldn’t do worse than the original, anyway.

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