The Parent Trap (Buena Vista) might be expected to create pandemic jaundice among adult viewers, since it concerns the efforts of teen-aged twins to kid their divorced parents into remarrying. Surprisingly, the film is delightful—mostly because of 15-year-old Hayley Mills, the blonde button nose who played the endearing delinquent in Tiger Bay.
The twins—Hayley plays both—know nothing about each other; their parents separated when they were babies. Hayley the First is a demure Bostonian who lives with her mother (Maureen O'Hara); Hayley the Second is a rowdy Californian who ranches with her roughneck father (Brian Keith). The girls meet at camp, tumble to the situation, and switch places. At summer's end, Hayley the Second gets her first look at Boston and mother, and Hayley the First sees her dad. But dad is about to marry a proprietary blonde (Joanna Barnes) who plans to send her stepdaughter-to-be off to school in Switzerland and, no doubt, tack chintz up all over pop's adobe ranch house. After some wonderfully Balkan sabotage, the errant parents are lured back together.
The important thing about a children's picture is that children like it. If they are old enough to enjoy some mild mush and young enough to know childhood's most prized secret—that all adults are boobs—they should like this one. Best touch: the two Hayleys, on report for squabbling at camp, are trotted off to a detention cabin. Following them is a line of marchers, each aware that she has been gotten rid of by her parents, merrily whistling the concentration camp march from The Bridge on the River Kwai.