The Boy Who Owned a Melephant

The Boy Who Owned a Melephant is a 1959 American short film directed by Saul Swimmer and featuring Tallulah Bankhead as narrator.

The Boy Who Owned a Melephant
Directed bySaul Swimmer
Produced byPeter Gayle
Saul Swimmer
Tony Anthony
Screenplay bySaul Swimmer
Tony Anthony
Story byMarvin Wald
StarringBrockman Seawell
Molly Turner
Narrated byTallulah Bankhead
Production
company
Gayle-Swimmer-Anthony Productions
Distributed byUniversal International
Release date
1959
Running time
30 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Plot

After seeing his first circus, young Johnnie (Brockman Seawell) asks for an elephant to keep as a pet. To placate him, his mother (Molly Turner) whimsically "gives" him the elephant in the local zoo. The boy's classmates resent his pride in "owning" the pachyderm, and the boy learns to share, making his peers equal "owners".[1][2]

Production

Shortly after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, future feature-film director-producer Saul Swimmer directed the half-hour[3] children's short "The Boy Who Owned a Melephant". Co-written by Swimmer and Tony Anthony, adapting a story by Marvin Wald, it was produced by a team credited as Gayle-Swimmer-Anthony,[4] which included frequent collaborator Peter Gayle.[5] It was released by Universal Pictures on October 6, 1959[4] or November 9, 1959[1] (sources differ). Narrated by actress Tallulah Bankhead, it starred her godson, Brockman Seawell, actress Eugenia Rawls' son, and played the Palace Theatre in New York City.[4]

The film screened at the 1959 San Francisco International Film Festival,[6] and won a 1959 Gold Leaf award at the Venice International Children's Film Festival.[4] On March 19, 1967, it was paired with the 1952 French short "White Mane" as an episode of the television anthology series CBS Children's Film Festival.[2]

References
  1. "A Cavalcade of Short Subject Reviews Part 23: 1958-1963". Turner Classic Movies based on reviews in Boxoffice magazine. Archived from the original on April 24, 2012.
  2. The CBS Children's Film Festival 1967 (fan site). Archived from the original on January 23, 2018.
  3. "Saul Swimmer, 70, Film Documentarian, Dies". Associated Press. March 22, 2007. Archived from the original on January 30, 2013. Retrieved January 22, 2018 – via The New York Times.
  4. Carrier, Jeffrey L. (1991). Tallulah Bankhead: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-0313274527.
  5. Kilgallen, Dorothy (September 13, 1960). "Voice of Broadway". New York. (Syndicated column) – via Schenectady Gazette. The youngest film producers in the United States — 22-year-old Peter Gayle, Saul Swimmer and Tony Anthony — are negotiating for the film rights to Arthur Miller's '[A] Memory of Two Mondays'.
  6. "The Boy Who Owned a Melephant". San Francisco International Film Festival. Archived from the original on April 24, 2012. Retrieved April 24, 2012.
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