Let's Get Together: Hayley Mills and the Ongoing Appeal of 'The Parent Trap'

Few family films have the multigenerational staying power of The Parent Trap. Grandmothers who saw Hayley Mills play feuding twins in 1961 watched the 1998 remake with granddaughters who knew Lindsay Lohan first; both camps can sing 'Let's Get Together' on demand. The machinery underneath is older still: Erich Kästner's 1949 German novel Das doppelte Lottchen — 'Lisa and Lottie' in English — about twins separated as infants who swap lives to reunite their parents.

Mills, then Disney's biggest star, played both Sharon and Susan through split-screen trickery so convincing that audiences routinely refused to believe there was only one of her. The effects work — body doubles, matte lines, weeks of choreographed eyelines — still holds up, but what really carries the film is Mills differentiating the twins with nothing but posture and tempo.

Kästner's novel was radical for its moment: a mainstream children's book about divorce, written by an author the Nazis had banned and burned only a decade earlier. Its optimism — children repairing what adults broke — survives every transplantation, from Bavaria to Boston to Napa Valley.

Disney has adapted the story twice, and world cinema dozens of times more (Japan, India and Iran all have versions). The catalog entry for Kästner's original tracks them; start with 1961 and the remarkable double act that started it all.