From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler aka The Hideaways (1973)

(On Cable TV, December 2021) The first hour of The Hideaways is borderline exasperating, as the film takes up the twee story of a boy and a girl escaping from their small town to hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s the kind of precocious claptrap that, for some reason, rubs me the wrong way — and since some of the worst examples of the subgenre date from the 1970s, the film seemed built to annoy from the get-go. Things pick up slightly once the two kid protagonists discover a statue in the stockrooms of the museum that may be worth a small fortune. The two kids become obsessed with proving the value of the statue, which eventually brings them to the house of an elderly woman, and viewers to the far more interesting third act of the film. The Hideaways significantly improves the moment Ingrid Bergman walks into the picture, bringing not only her usual charm, beauty and class, but the film’s most interesting character in the form of an older woman with a secret. Her character eventually lays down the film’s most interesting philosophical point about knowing a secret and eventually revealing it. That comes too late in The Hideaways to save it from an overall bad impression, but it does rescue it from complete worthlessness.