There is a theory among students of television that the fatal flaw in
the "Dennis the Menace" TV series was that the Dennis character was
old enough to know better. That is not the case with the new feature-
length film "Dennis the Menace," in which the little monster and the
actor who played him (Mason Gamble of Oak Park, Chicago) were about
7. Dennis' tender years allow him the luxury of innocence, and even
Mr. Wilson, his long-suffering next-door neighbor, seems to
understand that Dennis is not malevolent, just very, very bad at
decision-making.

Cartoon movies do not often look like the cartoons that inspire them,
but "Dennis the Menace" does an uncanny job of recreating the little
world that Hank Ketchum drew for years in the famous comic panel. I
almost felt I could recognize the terrain of many of Dennis'
adventures: His yard, Mr. Wilson's yard, the driveway separating
them, and various trees, garages, lawn tools and other props. And as
Mr. Wilson, Walter Matthau captures the incredulity, the martyrdom
and what can only be called the masochism of the original. Wilson's
tendency to lose his patience tends to obscure another of his traits,
which is patience itself (who else could live next to Dennis day
after day and week after week?).

The best parts of the movie are those in which Dennis' games and
plans go astray, often in the direction of Mr. Wilson. The worst
parts involve an unnecessary and ambiguous subplot involving an
ominous drifter named Switchblade Sam (Christopher Lloyd), who
menaces the little boy.

Thirty or 40 years ago, in the innocence of a Capra movie, I might
have been able to accept this character, who is a thief and threatens
Dennis with a knife. These days, characters like that make me feel
extremely uneasy when they are around small children - and I would
imagine a lot of smaller children may be disturbed by the movie.

The good parts have a charm based on Dennis' inexorable logic. He
sees a situation, interprets it, and acts as he thinks he should. He
is almost always wrong. Wandering into Mr. Wilson's house on an
apparently necessary errand, for example, he finds Mr. Wilson in bed.
(We know that Mr. Wilson has jumped under the covers only seconds
earlier, to pretend to be sleeping in the hope that Dennis will go
away.) Dennis tries to awaken Mr. Wilson, grows alarmed by his
snoring and appearance of great fatigue, decides Mr. Wilson has a
headache, tries to give him an aspirin, and finally shoots the
aspirin into his mouth with a slingshot. All perfectly logical.

I also enjoyed the comfortable domesticity in the Wilson household,
where Wilson and his wife (a serene performance by Joan Plowright)
answer at least some of our questions about them; I always knew there
was something to define the Wilsons apart from the fact that they
lived next to the Mitchells.

Those good qualities are undermined, unfortunately, by the
Switchblade Sam character, who is dirty, threatening and scary. Of
course, he's no match for Dennis (in scenes inspired by O.
Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief"), but that doesn't explain why
producer-writer John Hughes put him into the movie in the first
place. Wasn't there a way to contrive 90 minutes of adventures for
Dennis without leaning so heavily on a character who seems menacing
to children?

A great performance from Mason Gamble as Dennis for such a young age.