Cinema: The Conquering Zero

Everyone should have someone he can feel sorry for. That's why Charlie Brown was born. A human Edsel, a micro-Stassen, doormat to the world, Charlie has built a career on ineptitude and defeat. As a result, millions of idolaters have hailed the conquering zero, elevated him from comic strip to national pop artifact, and transformed his creator, Charles M. Schulz, into a new Disney.

Since reversal is the key to Charlie's prominence, it is only proper for him to pull the ultimate switch in films. Formerly, animated cartoon characters —such as Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny —would begin their existence in the movies, then spin off into comics. Charlie was born back in 1949 as a newspaper feature. Only now, after six TV specials and a happily long-running off-Broadway musical, has he backed into a full-length animated cartoon, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Television viewers will find little alteration in their favorite. Director Bill Melendez and Producer Lee Mendelson (who also worked together on the TV specials) have scrupulously preserved the eternal suburb of the Peanuts parade, largely through the use of children's voices and subtle, understated colors. Once again, Lucy leads her girls' liberation movement; once again Linus and his blanket play variations on a thumb while Snoopy dogs the Red Baron in his dreams.

An hour and a half is a long time for any child—or beagle—to be amusing, and the whimsy that attempts to fill the time frequently falters. Charlie's grim pursuit of Best Speller status could use some comic-strip relief. And an interlude of Schroeder playing Beethoven's Pathètique falls into the old Fantasia trap, overly baited with pictorial gewgaws and kitsch.

But when A Boy Named Charlie Brown sticks to a boy named Charlie Brown, it becomes a good deed in a naughty world, bright, nonviolent and equipped with an animated moral, the way Snoopy is equipped with a tail. Charlie loses the National Spelling Bee and slinks back to town, looking for all the world like an extinguished light bulb. And behold!—life goes on. In spite of failure and humiliation, observes the prescient Linus, "the world didn't come to an end." It is a message that should not be missed by sensitive children. Neither should the movie.