Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Follow Me, Boys!

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Follow Me, Boys!

It should not come as a shock to learn that Walt Disney had been a Boy Scout. As an adult, he wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of an outdoorsman. But the principles of the Boy Scouts clearly resonated with him. Scout Law sounds a lot like the codes of conduct for cast members at Disney theme parks or on the Mickey Mouse Club. Like the Boy Scouts, a Mouseketeer is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

Walt had to quit the Scouts when his family moved back to Chicago in 1917. In 1946, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) presented him their highest honor, the Silver Buffalo Award. Other recipients that year included General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, both of whom received billing beneath Walt in the BSA’s writeup of the event. Clearly, Walt had enormous affection for the organization. However, I’m not sure that justifies a two-hour-plus valentine to the good work of the Boy Scouts of America.

Follow Me, Boys! is based on the novel God And My Country by MacKinlay Kantor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Civil War novel Andersonville. Another of Kantor’s war-themed works, the novella Glory For Me, provided the basis for the 1946 classic The Best Years Of Our Lives. Disney’s movie reunited director Norman Tokar with screenwriter Louis Pelletier, who’d written Those Calloways and Big Red. Tokar (who seemed to be competing with Robert Stevenson for the title of Disney’s Busiest Director) had recently branched out into comedy with The Ugly Dachshund. Follow Me, Boys! places him squarely back within his wheelhouse of earnest dramas.

Fred MacMurray (last seen in 1963’s Son Of Flubber) stars as Lemuel Siddons, a saxophonist with Melody Murphy’s Collegians and aspiring lawyer. Lem is getting tired of life on the road, so when the band makes a pit stop in the small town of Hickory, USA, he impulsively decides to get off the bus permanently. He gets a job at Hughes Mercantile Store and slowly wins over the locals, including Mr. Hughes himself (Charlie Ruggles in his final Disney appearance) and wealthy widow Hetty Seibert (silent film icon Lillian Gish in her only Disney gig).

One person who seems immune to Lem’s charm is Vida Downey (Vera Miles in her third Disney picture). Vida works at the local bank alongside Hetty’s nephew, Ralph Hastings (Elliott Reid, also MacMurray’s rival in the Flubber flicks). Hoping to impress her, Lem attends a town meeting on the topic of keeping Hickory’s boys off the streets and out of the pool halls. Lem spots a list of suggestions in her hand that includes Y.M.C.A., 4-H and (underlined) Boy Scouts.

Before Vida gets the chance to speak, Lem stands up and steals her idea to organize a Boy Scout troop. Unfortunately, no one is willing to be Scoutmaster, so Lem volunteers for the job. Vida is impressed by Lem’s willingness to lead the boys (especially since Ralph wants nothing to do with it) and she slowly starts warming up to him. Eventually, the two get married. I guess the secret to a happy marriage is never tell your spouse that you stole credit for her idea.

Over the next few weeks, Lem assembles a ragtag group of Scouts, including the bespectacled Hoodoo Henderson (Dean Moray), husky Beefy Smith (Keith Taylor), and cornet-playing Quong Lee (Warren Hsieh). Of course, there’s always one outsider, a tough guy with a slingshot who doesn’t go in for sissy stuff like the Boy Scouts. In Hickory, it’s Whitey and he’s played by a young actor named Kurt Russell. We’ll talk more about this promising newcomer in a moment.

Lem catches Whitey trying to steal from the general store. But instead of turning him in, Lem lets him go and turns a blind eye when he swipes a copy of the Boy Scout manual. Whitey’s intrigued and reads the book cover to cover. He secretly longs to join but he’s ashamed of his father Ed (Sean McClory), the town drunk. Eventually, Lem and the boys persuade Whitey that they really do want him to sign up and Whitey agrees, somewhat reluctantly.

When Lem runs into Ed at the store, he discovers that Whitey didn’t even invite him to the upcoming Fathers’ Night. Lem tries to repair the rift between father and son but only makes things worse. Ed shows up staggering drunk, toting a couple of melting, oversized containers of ice cream for the boys. Ed causes a scene and a thoroughly humiliated Whitey escorts his dad back home, angrily resigning from the troop.

Later on, Ed passes out and Whitey races back to Lem for help. Sure enough, Ed has finally drunk himself to death, leaving Whitey an orphan. Lem and Vida, who have recently learned they can’t have children of their own, take the boy in, finally providing him the home and family he never had.

Whitey returns to the troop and works his way up to a leadership role. He even performs a daring rescue when a younger boy falls off a cliff onto a ledge. But nothing’s good enough for the blue-nosed gossips of Hickory. To them, Whitey’s still a bad apple, the son of that no-account drunk. Furious that his boy would be treated so shabbily, Lem calls up the BSA and quits. At the same time, Whitey packs up his stuff and decides to run away from home. Lem finds him picking up camping gear at the cabin. The two of them convince each other to stick around just as the entire town shows up to show their support for Lem. It’s a big emotional finale as Troop 1 has been saved!

But guess what? It’s not the finale as Follow Me, Boys! just keeps on going. Time rolls forward several years to 1944. Lem is still Scoutmaster to a new troop of boys, taking them on an overnight camping trip. But this is wartime and the U.S. Army has scheduled a military exercise at the very same lake. Not realizing that he isn’t part of the war games, Lem is taken captive and held as a P.O.W. The MP in charge doesn’t buy his Boy Scout story because Lem can’t even tie a sheepshank. Meanwhile, the boys take cover in an abandoned bunker where they manage to take out an entire battalion and capture a tank. If you’re thinking this all sounds very random and tangential to the story that had been being told up until now, you’re not wrong.

After this very extended interlude, Lem and the boys return to their meeting house, only to find it sealed by court order. Turns out that Ralph found out that Aunt Hetty, who owns the valuable lakefront property, planned to bequeath the land over to the Scouts in her will. Fearful of losing his inheritance, Ralph argues that Hetty is getting senile and demands the court appoint a guardian. Lem, forever toting around law books but never finding the time to take the bar exam, is allowed to question Hetty in court. He proves that she’s still sharp as a tack, forcing Ralph to withdraw his petition.

Time marches on yet again and the movie flashes up to the 1950s. Whitey is now all grown up and played by Donald May (last seen in A Tiger Walks and no relation, as near as I can tell, to Synapse Films President Don May, Jr.). He served in the medical corps overseas and comes home to Hickory with a new wife, Nora (former Disney child star Luana Patten, not seen in this column since Johnny Tremain). Lem hasn’t slowed down a bit. He still serves as Scoutmaster and now owns the store since Mr. Hughes passed away. Concerns over his health force Lem to concede that it’s time for someone else to take over Troop 1. Since the newly expanded meeting house at the lake is ready to open, the BSA decides to throw a combination dedication and retirement ceremony.

The people of Hickory have one more surprise for Lem. The drive out to the lake turns into a parade as everyone gathers to celebrate Lem Siddons Day. All of the original Troop 1 boys turn out, even Hoodoo who grew up to become governor of whatever state this is. Lem cuts the ribbon opening Camp Siddons, leads everyone in one last round of Troop 1’s official marching song, “Follow Me, Boys” by the Sherman Brothers, and now the movie is finally allowed to end.

Re-release poster for Follow Me, Boys!

Follow Me, Boys! is very much the type of movie fans either adore or despise. It’s a lot and if you don’t have a taste for homespun cornball Americana, it’s easy to choke on it. This is like It’s A Wonderful Life if George Bailey had no regrets, would never dream of committing suicide and thought everything about life in Bedford Falls was A-OK all the time. Lem isn’t even bothered by the fact that he never became a lawyer. Good for him, I guess, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling or dramatic story arc.

The movie’s biggest flaw, and one I believe even its most ardent fans will agree with, is that it’s ridiculously overlong. Even the studio thought so. When they re-released it to theatres in 1976, they cut nearly half an hour out of it. There’s hardly a scene that doesn’t drag on just a little bit longer than it needs to. That’s not even counting the whole war game sequence, which comes totally out of left field and just does not know when to quit. I get why it’s here. It’s the kind of big, loud, silly setpiece that people had come to expect from live-action Disney movies. But it’s also completely extraneous and forgotten about the second it’s over.

Another problem is the casting of Fred MacMurray as Lem. Not that he doesn’t seem like a believable Scoutmaster and father figure. But he hits the same note so often that the character doesn’t seem to change or grow at all over the years. Both physically and emotionally, Lem seems like exactly the same guy at the end of the movie as he did at the beginning.

When Follow Me, Boys! was released, MacMurray was 58 years old. Looking at him, you’d think, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” So at the beginning of the movie, it’s impossible to figure out how old Lem is meant to be. He’s playing in a band called the Collegians but he remarks to his boss that they’re hardly Collegians anymore. Indeed, the other band members look just as old or older than Fred. Lem deciding to chuck it all for a job as a stockboy seems less like the impetuousness of youth than a late-game midlife crisis.

It gets even worse as Lem gets older (which is to say, closer to MacMurray’s actual age). Rather than wasting time with old-age makeup, they simply tried to put white in MacMurray’s already-dyed black hair. So he ends up with this extremely unnatural blue tint in his hair. Vera Miles, who was only about 37, doesn’t fare much better. They wrinkle her up and put some random streaks through her hair. It’s all so vague that I’d place their characters’ ages at anywhere from 60 to 100.

MacMurray and Miles also don’t make for a very appealing couple. Granted, plausible adult romance was never a strong suit of Walt Disney Pictures. Even their best relationships are pretty chaste (Maureen O’Hara and Brian Keith in The Parent Trap providing one notable exception). But here, it’s hard to fathom what Miles sees in this guy. During their courtship, they have a huge fight in front of the boys after Vida prepares an elaborate picnic lunch and Lem forbids her from serving it. He wants the boys to be self-reliant. So Vida throws the whole thing into the lake out of spite. She’s prone to flying off the handle and he’s an insensitive, bullheaded tyrant. It’s a match made in heaven!

Despite the movie’s many, many flaws, lots of people really love Follow Me, Boys! Believe it or not, I can understand why they do even if I disagree with them. Clichés do not become clichés because they don’t work. It’s because they do work that makes them so effective and overused. The finale goes all out tugging shamelessly at the heartstrings. It’s hard to resist the old “ordinary guy is celebrated by all the people he’s touched over the years” routine. Would it have meant more if we actually knew something about these kids beyond their names and a single personality trait? Sure. But it works well enough as is to get the job done.

Certainly the most genuinely affecting parts of the film revolve around Kurt Russell and his dad, Sean McClory. McClory manages to avoid turning Ed into a caricature. He doesn’t seem to be an abusive or angry drunk. When he sees the shame and disappointment on his son’s face, he becomes even more disappointed in himself. This guy knows he’s letting himself and his son down but is powerless to stop it. It’s a really interesting performance with more nuance than I expected. Sean McClory had earlier done some uncredited voice work on Mary Poppins and I’m happy to say he’ll be back in this column soon.

Needless to say, we’re also going to be seeing a whole lot more of Kurt Russell. Russell began acting in the early ‘60s, appearing in the Elvis Presley movie It Happened At The World’s Fair and popping up on various TV shows. In 1963, he landed the title role on The Travels Of Jaimie McPheeters, an hour-long Western that ran on ABC opposite Walt Disney’s Wondrful World Of Color on NBC. (Dan O’Herlihy, brother of Fighting Prince Of Donegal director Michael O’Herlihy, played Kurt’s dad on the show…everything is connected.)

Jaimie McPheeters didn’t last long and Russell was back to guesting on shows like The Fugitive and Gilligan’s Island (he played Jungle Boy). After he was cast in Follow Me, Boys!, Walt knew he had his next big child star. Walt took Kurt under his wing, coming to visit him on the set and showing him bits and pieces of other projects in development. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Kurt Russell would become as important to Disney as Hayley Mills had been a few years earlier.

Thanks to this chronological project, it’s very easy for me to imagine someone other than Russell playing this role. If Walt had made it earlier, it would have been Tommy Kirk or Tim Considine or David Stollery or even, God forbid, Kevin Corcoran. Some of those kids would have done just fine but none of them were Kurt Russell. It would be easy for a young actor to overplay this role. Russell can’t totally elevate the character out of the realm of cliché. Nobody could. But he does sell Whitey’s rebellious streak without being obnoxious and he plays on the audience’s sympathies without being maudlin. That’s harder than it looks, especially when you’re just starting out and the script isn’t doing you any favors.

Follow Me, Boys! was positioned as Disney’s big holiday release, coming out on December 1, 1966. Predictably, most critics were not charmed but audiences seemed to enjoy Walt’s Boy Scout Jamboree. It did reasonably well at the box office and, as mentioned earlier, warranted a rerelease in the ‘70s.

But the release of Follow Me, Boys! was quickly overshadowed by sadder news. On December 15, 1966, Walter Elias Disney died at the age of 66. The end had come quickly. He had only just been diagnosed with lung cancer in early November. His death was front-page news around the world, eventually leading to weird urban legends that his body had been cryogenically frozen (it’s not) and that his last words had something to do with Kurt Russell (again, not exactly…one of Walt’s last handwritten notes appear to be casting suggestions for a TV production called Way Down Cellar that include “Kirt” Russell and fellow Disney contract player Roger Mobley, spelling apparently not one of Walt’s strong suits).

It also left the studio that bore his name in a bit of disarray. With Walt gone, his brother Roy O. Disney became president. Roy had been with Walt from the beginning but he’d handled the business end, not the creative. Of course, the studio still had a few projects already in the pipeline that Walt had supervised but not many.

Walt’s primary focus during his last years had been EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. EPCOT would remain unrealized but Roy postponed his own retirement to fulfill one of his brother’s other last projects, a second theme park in Florida that would be named Walt Disney World. But around the studio, things were about to change. Walt Disney’s innate sense of storytelling and world-building had guided the studio for decades, leaving a legacy that’s lasted generations. Now that guiding hand was gone and other people would have to learn to steer.

VERDICT: If you have fond memories of it, I’m super happy for you. But coming at it cold in 2021, it’s a Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Fighting Prince Of Donegal

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Fighting Prince Of Donegal

When Walt Disney first started producing live action features, his favored genre was the historical adventure. This was mostly out of necessity. Since the studio was obligated to film in the United Kingdom, movies like The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men and Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue took advantage of the local scenery and talent. But swashbucklers had fallen out of favor, both at the studio and at the box office. Disney still occasionally filmed overseas but the studio hadn’t made an adventure picture since Kidnapped back in 1960.

The Fighting Prince Of Donegal was released on October 1, 1966, but it’s virtually indistinguishable from those other adventure movies released over a decade earlier. Robert Westerby, the screenwriter of Greyfriars Bobby and The Three Lives Of Thomasina, based his script on the novel Red Hugh: Prince Of Donegal by Robert T. Reilly. Hugh O’Donnell was a real Irish nobleman who fought the British in the sixteenth century, making this very much an Irish cousin to Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue.

Making his Disney debut was director Michael O’Herlihy, brother of the actor Dan O’Herlihy whom you should recognize from such films as RoboCop and Halloween III: Season Of The Witch. Michael O’Herlihy ended up working mostly in television, directing episodes of Hawaii Five-O, The A-Team and many others. If you watched TV at all during the 60s, 70s and 80s, you’ve seen his work. But The Fighting Prince Of Donegal kicked off a brief stint at Disney working on both television and feature productions. O’Herlihy will be back in this column.

As the movie opens, Red Hugh (Peter McEnery) receives word that his father has died, making him head of Clan O’Donnell. An old prophecy says that when Hugh succeeds Hugh, the Clans of Ireland will unite to stand against the British. This seems like a weirdly specific prophecy to me. I can imagine that the elder Hugh felt like he didn’t need to do much since the prophecy just has him waiting to die. Anyway, Red Hugh takes this all very seriously and immediately gets to work on this whole uniting the Clans business.

He first pays a visit to Lord McSweeney (Andrew Keir), a boisterous, hard-drinking man who pledges the aid of Clan McSweeney. Hugh also has his eye on McSweeney’s daughter, Kathleen (Susan Hampshire, last seen as the so-called “witch” in The Three Lives Of Thomasina). This annoys another would-be suitor, Henry O’Neill (Tom Adams), who decides to drag his feet before pledging the loyalty of Clan O’Neill. But after Hugh defeats him in an impromptu wrestling match, the two men become best of frenemies.

Before they can meet with more Clansmen, McSweeney and Hugh accept the invitation of a British merchant anchored just offshore. Once they’re on board the ship, they fall into a trap to arrest Hugh. It seems the British had heard about that prophecy too and managed to crack the code to figure out who the troublemaker was. Hugh is sent to a Dublin prison where he makes a powerful enemy in Captain Leeds (Gordon Jackson) after Leeds needlessly picks a quarterstaff fight with him and suffers a humiliating defeat in front of the other prisoners.

Sentenced to solitary confinement, Hugh escapes with the help of fellow prisoner Sean O’Toole (Donal McCann). He doesn’t get far before Leeds’ men pick him up and toss him back in. McSweeney and O’Neill attempt to buy his freedom with a treaty but Leeds rejects it and arrests O’Neill. With Hugh about to be transferred to the Tower of London, they enlist the help of a sympathetic waterboy to attempt a second escape, this time through the storm drains beneath the castle.

Leeds has had enough and decides to attack the O’Donnell castle and hold Kathleen and O’Donnell’s mother hostage. As John Belushi once pointed out, you should never mess with an Irishman’s mother. Hugh organizes the various Clans and attacks his own castle, soundly defeating the British and taking Leeds prisoner until a treaty can be ratified. The Clans are united and everyone celebrates in traditional Irish fashion, drinking a lot and fighting among themselves.

The Fighting Prince Of Donegal isn’t terrible but I definitely had a feeling of déjà vu while watching it. All of those British historical dramas started to blend together after awhile and this is very much cut from the same cloth. The fight sequences are active without ever feeling too dangerous or exciting. Everyone looks like they’re costumed for a renaissance fair and all the castles are Peter Ellenshaw matte paintings. If you’ve seen one of these swashbucklers, you really kind of have seen them all.

Maybe it would have been better if the fighting prince himself had been more inspiring. Peter McEnery made his Disney debut as Hayley Mills’ leading man in The Moon-Spinners. He was perfectly fine as a fired banker suspected of being a jewel thief. He has an everyman quality that lends itself to the light Hitchcockian thrills of The Moon-Spinners but doesn’t exactly make him a leader of men. With his shock of messy red hair, it’s kind of like trying to picture Ron Weasley in Braveheart.

Comic book adaptation of The Fighting Prince Of Donegal

This would end up being the final Disney roles for both McEnery and Susan Hampshire. Peter McEnery went on to a very distinguished career on the London stage, as well as roles in such films as Negatives and Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Susan Hampshire found her greatest success on television, winning three Emmy Awards for her roles in The Forsyte Saga, The First Churchills and Vanity Fair. They’re both still with us, so there’s always a chance they could pop up in another Disney project.

The most entertaining performances come from Andrew Keir as McSweeney, Gordon Jackson as the villainous Captain Leeds, and Tom Adams as Henry O’Neill. Around the same time The Fighting Prince Of Donegal was released, Adams starred as superspy Charles Vine in a trilogy of 007 knockoffs. Here, he’s saddled with an atrocious Prince Valiant wig but enough charm comes through that you can see why he’d be cast as an imitation James Bond. Tom Adams will not be back in this column. He died in 2014.

This’ll also be the last time we see Gordon Jackson, who last turned up as the farmer in Greyfriars Bobby. Like Susan Hampshire, Jackson also became a prominent TV actor. He won an Emmy for his role on Upstairs, Downstairs (which was as big as Downton Abbey in its day) and starred in the cult crime series The Professionals. Gordon Jackson passed away in 1990.

Andrew Keir also had a small role in Greyfriars Bobby. Between Disney gigs, he appeared in a number of Hammer Films. In 1967, he landed his most prominent role as Professor Bernard Quatermass in Quatermass And The Pit. He returned to the role shortly before his death on the BBC radio drama The Quatermass Memoirs. Around that same time, he also appeared in the non-Disney Rob Roy with Liam Neeson. Andrew Keir died in 1997.

The middling box office returns for The Fighting Prince Of Donegal confirmed that audiences weren’t all that interested in movies like this from Disney. So in some ways, this marks the end of an era but it’s difficult to feel too nostalgic for it. When people think of Disney movies from the 1950s and 60s, a very specific type of film comes to mind. Silly, perhaps even goofy movies with a song or three and maybe a fantasy element to it. Movies like this don’t fit that mold. It’s interesting that the studio directed so many of its resources toward serious-minded adventures rooted in history. If only they had done more to distinguish them from one another.

VERDICT: The movie’s overall been-there-done-that feeling prevents it from being a Disney Plus. Let’s put it on the high end of the Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Almost nobody got away with making just one movie for Walt Disney. Whether you were a newcomer like Hayley Mills or an established star like Fred MacMurray, if Walt liked you and you brought money into the studio, Walt was going to try to get you to stick around. So after Mary Poppins became Disney’s biggest hit in years, it must have irked him that Julie Andrews was suddenly too busy to make a return engagement. Her first musical after Poppins, The Sound Of Music, exploded at the box office and earned her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination. Ms. Andrews’ dance card was going to be full for the foreseeable future.

Dick Van Dyke, on the other hand, was ready, willing and able to work for Walt. Post-Poppins, he returned to his eponymous sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show. But his follow-up feature, The Art Of Love co-starring James Garner (who will eventually appear in this column), failed to bring in Mary Poppins-size (or even Merlin Jones-size) numbers. So when Walt pitched him on a contemporary comic retelling of Robinson Crusoe, it’s easy to understand why Van Dyke was eager to sign up. After all, a good portion of Crusoe is essentially a one-man show.

I say Walt pitched the project to Dick Van Dyke because Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. was Walt’s idea in the first place. In fact, for the first and only time in his long career, Walt took a writing credit on a feature film. Sort of. For a guy who served as the face of his company, whose name was always first in the credits and most prominently featured on posters, and had already named one theme park after himself, Walt was surprisingly modest about taking specific credits. So the story for Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is credited to “Retlaw Yensid”. You don’t exactly need an Enigma machine to crack that code.

Walt had Don DaGradi and Bill Walsh, the now Oscar-nominated screenwriters of Mary Poppins, flesh out his general idea into a screenplay. Odds are nobody involved spent too much time reviewing Daniel Defoe’s original novel. Apart from the name and the general premise of a castaway on a deserted island, any similarity between the book and the movie is purely coincidental.

Since this was shaping up to be a Mary Poppins reunion, you might expect director Robert Stevenson or the Sherman Brothers to be involved. But Dick Van Dyke wielded some influence of his own to get Byron Paul to direct. Paul and Van Dyke were old friends who first met in the Air Force back in the ‘40s. Since then, Paul had become Van Dyke’s manager. He’d also produced and directed a number of television productions including For The Love Of Willadean, The Tenderfoot and The Adventures Of Gallegher for Disney. Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. would be Paul’s only feature credit but he and Dick Van Dyke continued to work together in television through the 1970s.

As for the Shermans, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. has no original songs. The film’s score was written by Robert F. Brunner, a composer who Disney hired in 1964. His first full credit as composer had been That Darn Cat! Brunner will stick around this column for quite some time. It’s interesting that Robin Crusoe went songless since Van Dyke had acquitted himself quite well musically in Mary Poppins. I’m not sure if the plan was to make this a non-musical all along and therefore the Shermans’ services weren’t required or if the Shermans were busy and that’s why they decided to go the non-musical route.

Theatrical release poster for Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had been a young man who becomes a sea merchant against the wishes of his family, who wanted him to be a lawyer. Disney’s Crusoe (who is referred to as “Robin” exactly once…usually it’s “Rob”, probably to remind audiences of Rob Petrie, Van Dyke’s character on TV) is a pilot in the U.S. Navy. He’s on a routine mission when his plane malfunctions, forcing him to bail out somewhere over the Pacific.

With his life raft inflated, Rob takes stock of his situation by consulting the official naval guidebook Survival At Sea And Like It. In another nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show, the survival manual is read in voiceover by Richard Deacon, the manager of the drive-in in That Darn Cat! and Van Dyke’s TV costar. Rob seems to be in relatively good shape until an aggressive shark comes along and causes him to lose most of his supplies.

Days later, Rob finally washes ashore on a seemingly uninhabited island. After tending to his basic survival needs, he explores the island and discovers the wreck of a Japanese submarine. On board, he meets a fellow Navy officer and castaway: Astrochimp Floyd (played by Dinky the Chimp), whose space capsule washed ashore years earlier. Either this island is in the Bermuda Triangle or the Navy is really lax about tracking down missing personnel.

Rob and Floyd salvage a bunch of material from the sub and construct an island estate that would make the Swiss Family Robinson envious. One day while out golfing, Rob spots another set of footprints. He tracks them to a large native idol where he discovers a native girl (Nancy Kwan) praying. At first, she seems dead set on killing Rob but eventually calms down enough to explain, mostly in charades although she soon reveals that she speaks English, why she’s there. Her father, Chief Tanamashu, has sent her to be sacrificed to Kaboona, the big idol, because she refuses to submit to an arranged marriage. Rob agrees that women should have the right to marry whomever they please. He apparently does not believe that women have the right to keep their given names because he decides to call her Wednesday. Of course.

Before long, Wednesday’s sisters and cousins turn up, more potential sacrifices to Kaboona. Wednesday wants to fight back and she convinces Rob to train them into a giggly military unit. When Rob finds out that Tanamashu claims that only he can hear the voice of Kaboona, he comes up with a plan to outwit the primitive natives by booby trapping parts of the island and rigging up the idol with lights and a sound system off the submarine.

Tanamashu and his men arrive and while the plan doesn’t go off without a hitch, Rob and the girls still manage to win the day. At the celebratory feast, Wednesday asks Rob to dance. Tanamashu thinks this is hilarious because she’s tricked him into performing a ceremonial wedding dance. (“Tanamashu not lose daughter! Tanamashu gain wise guy son!”) Rob runs for his life and spots a passing Navy helicopter just in the nick of time. They airlift Rob and Floyd off the island to safety and a gala reception on an aircraft carrier. For Floyd. It seems that nobody even noticed Rob was missing.

Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. movie tie-in book

So yeah, Cast Away this ain’t. In fact, it frequently struggles to rise to the level of Gilligan’s Island. Dick Van Dyke is a very gifted and funny performer but this is not the showcase he was hoping it would be. Rather than traditional voice-over narration, the story is told through Rob’s letters back to his fiancée. Which is fine, except that…Van Dyke…reads them…very…slowly…so we…can…understand…that…he is…writing. Honestly, if he just read the letters in a normal cadence, it would probably shave five minutes off this unnecessarily long movie.

Van Dyke has a real gift for physical comedy and you’d think that’s where this movie would shine. But for the first 20 or 30 minutes, he’s either trapped in the cockpit of a plane or stuck splashing around on a rubber life raft. There’s only so much you can do under those conditions. Things don’t improve much on land. The slapstick is either too restrained or too unimaginative. DaGradi and Walsh call on their animation background a bit in the grand finale but not enough.

Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. was Nancy Kwan’s first and only Disney movie. Kwan shot to stardom as the title character in The World Of Suzie Wong. That role got her a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer, an award she shared with Hayley Mills for Pollyanna. She followed that up with the even more popular Flower Drum Song. But by the time Disney came along, she’d already begun having a hard time finding roles in American movies. As the years went on, she’d make more and more films in the UK, Europe and Hong Kong.

If Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is indicative of the kinds of roles Kwan was being offered, no wonder she went abroad. This is one of those only-in-the-60s movies that thinks it’s making a stand for equal rights by arguing against arranged marriage while accepting marriage as a woman’s natural, inevitable fate. Wednesday and the rest of her sister cousins don’t really want any other rights. They ask to be trained but spend most of their time giggling and serving fruit to Rob (or, as they call him, “Admiral Honey”). As soon as Rob rejects her, Wednesday is out for blood, leading an angry mob of women and throwing spears. It’s dispiriting to see someone as vibrant as Nancy Kwan stuck in a movie like this. She’s a fascinating person and a genuine trailblazer for Asian performers in Hollywood’s modern era. She deserves better.

Wednesday’s father, Chief Tanamashu, is played by Akim Tamiroff, an actor who is decidedly not Asian. Tamiroff was an Armenian actor who emigrated to America from Russia in 1927. He’d worked steadily in Hollywood since the 1930s, earning two Oscar nominations and working with such greats as Preston Sturges and Orson Welles. This would be Tamiroff’s only Disney appearance and he goes waaaaay over the top with it. His performance could almost be considered offensive if it was more specific. As it is, there’s no real way of telling what exactly he thinks he’s doing. He’s certainly not trying to do an impression of a stereotypical Chinese or Japanese or even Polynesian accent. It’s just his own goofy voice delivering a lot of pidgin English gobbledygook. Some of it’s a little amusing but a little goes a long way.

Even though nothing about this movie seems particularly special, Walt Disney had a lot of confidence in Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. It was positioned as the studio’s big summer release of 1966, opening just a few weeks after The Dick Van Dyke Show aired its final episode on June 1. The studio held a gala premiere on board the USS Kitty Hawk in San Diego, the same aircraft carrier featured in the film, attended by such Disney all-stars as Fred MacMurray, Annette Funicello, Dean Jones and, of course, Dick Van Dyke. Most critics rolled their eyes at the movie but audiences turned it into a decent-sized hit. It was no Mary Poppins. Few movies were. But it did well enough to get a theatrical re-release in 1974.

Today, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is a footnote in Disney history, a fate it more than deserves. This is just not a good movie. At nearly two hours, it’s a real drag that quickly overstays its welcome. It borrows less from Robinson Crusoe than from Swiss Family Robinson but with less excitement and fewer laughs. Even Dick Van Dyke’s drunk scene falls flat. If you can’t milk a couple of chuckles out of a drunk Dick Van Dyke and a chimpanzee, you’ve got serious problems. Nevertheless, Dick Van Dyke will be back in this column. As will the chimpanzee, for that matter.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Ugly Dachshund

When Walt Disney decided to hire Dean Jones, he really went all in. The Ugly Dachshund, Jones’ second film for the studio, opened February 16, 1966, just two months after his first, That Darn Cat! I guess having shown he could work with cats, Walt wanted to make sure Jones could handle dogs as well.

The Ugly Dachshund was based on a book by G.B. Stern, an extremely prolific writer of novels, short stories, plays, biographies, literary criticism and even the occasional screenplay. Not this one, though. Disney assigned the project to Albert Aley, a radio and TV writer who’d written a few animal-oriented shorts for the studio like The Hound That Thought He Was A Raccoon. The Ugly Dachshund would be Aley’s only feature credit and his last Disney credit. He continued to work in television, writing and producing such shows as Ironside and The Paper Chase before retiring and eventually passing away in 1986.

By now, co-producer Winston Hibler and director Norman Tokar were old hands at making dog pictures. They’d made such adventure dramas as Big Red and Savage Sam. Their last film had been the heartfelt Those Calloways. But they hadn’t really taken a crack at comedy before now. This kind of wacky slapstick was usually the work of folks like Robert Stevenson and Bill Walsh. But with comedies rapidly becoming Disney’s most popular and profitable commodity, everybody would have to learn how to stage a pratfall.

Dean Jones stars as Mark Garrison, a commercial artist who lives with his wife, Fran (Suzanne Pleshette), and her prized, pregnant dachshund, Danke. Danke births a litter of three puppies that Fran hopes to train into prize-winning show dogs. But when Mark goes to pick the dogs up from kindly veterinarian Dr. Pruitt (Charlie Ruggles, last seen as the judge in Son Of Flubber), he gets a surprise. Turns out that a Great Dane also gave birth to a big litter of puppies. Too big, as a matter of fact. The mother has rejected the littlest one because she doesn’t have enough milk. Danke, on the other hand, has too much since her litter was too small. Do you think, maybe…?

Well, Mark doesn’t need too much convincing, especially since he’s always wanted a big male dog instead of all these little females. At first, Fran thinks the pup is just an ugly dachshund born after the others and Mark does nothing to dissuade her of this idea. But as the weeks go by, Fran figures out something’s amiss. She’s no dummy. Maybe it’s the fact that the puppy, now named Brutus, is twice as large as the others and looks nothing like a dachshund. Or maybe it’s that Mark is obsessively drawing pictures of Great Danes everywhere. Who can say what subtle clues she picked up on?

The rest of the movie follows a fairly strict pattern. Every so often, Tokar stops everything to stage an elaborate slapstick sequence wherein the three dachshunds are the primary agents of chaos while poor Brutus is an innocent bystander or victim who ends up shouldering the blame. Fran will get fed up, sometimes with good reason and sometimes not, and insist they return Brutus to Doc Pruitt. But a change of heart inevitably brings the big dog back into their lives.

Admittedly, Tokar’s three big setpieces are pretty funny. The first has the dachshunds tearing around the living room with multiple balls of yarn and creating an elaborate maze. The second is even more impressive as the animals completely destroy Mark’s studio, creating a slick, multicolored slide out of one of his commissions and a can of paint thinner. They’re not unlike live-action versions of the animated showdowns between Pluto and Chip and Dale.

The biggest one is also the weakest. Fran decides to throw an elaborate house party for their friends and neighbors because that’s what you did in 1966. The party has an “Oriental” theme and is catered by Mr. Toyama (Robert Kino) and his assistant Kenji (Mako, soon to be Oscar nominated for The Sand Pebbles), two very broad Asian stereotypes. Whenever Brutus appears, they shriek “Rion!” (‘cause, y’know, they think it’s a lion) and Mr. Toyama plays dead, lying flat on the ground and becoming stiff as a board. Sigh. I guess it could be worse. At least they cast actual Japanese actors instead of Mickey Rooney but that’s a super-low bar to cross.

Anyway, things go sideways when Chloe, Fran’s best hope for a show dog, steals a bone from Brutus. He chases after her and wackiness ensues. Kenji gets hit in the face with several cakes and takes a ride on a trolley. Everyone crowds on to a small bridge over a pond and ends up in the drink, including Fran. It’s your garden-variety big dog gets loose at a fancy event sequence you’ve seen a zillion times.

At the party, Doc Pruitt convinces Mark to secretly enter Brutus into the dog show. Mark’s always been somewhat contemptuous of Fran’s interest in dog shows but agrees partly to train the dog but mostly out of spite. As they work with Brutus, Mark realizes that the Great Dane actually believes he’s a dachshund. Whenever he sees one, he’ll try to mimic it by stretching out and walking low to the ground.

This delusion almost costs Brutus a championship when he starts walking like a dachshund in front of the judge. Fortunately, Brutus catches the eye of a female Great Dane. Wanting to impress her, he stands tall and proud, ultimately winning the blue ribbon. Mark hurries off to rub this victory in Fran’s face but has a change of heart when he sees that Chloe only managed to come in second. But Fran’s not jealous. She’s proud and happy that they now have multiple prize-winning show dogs in the family. But the Garrisons agree it’s time to put all this competition behind them. They decide to quit the dog show circuit so Mark can concentrate on his work and Fran can focus on keeping house and being a good wife. Seriously. That’s the compromise they arrive at. Ugh.

There’s one other sort-of subplot worth mentioning, if only because it never amounts to anything. In the opening scene, Mark has a run-in with Officer Carmody (Kelly Thordsen, who appeared in The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones and will be back in this column several times, usually as a cop). Carmody tries to escort the Garrisons to the hospital but ends up citing Mark on a number of traffic violations when he finds out that it was the dog who was pregnant and not Fran.

Carmody shows up again later warning Mark that a cat burglar has been spotted in the neighborhood. Now if you’re thinking that this sounds like an opportunity for Brutus to prove himself by scaring off the cat burglar, you’re half right. What actually happens is Mark gets locked out of the house later that night just as Carmody drives past. Carmody thinks Mark might be the cat burglar, so he gets out to investigate. Then Brutus shows up and scares Carmody off, chasing him up a tree where he spends the night. The actual cat burglar never shows up and Carmody disappears entirely from the story after this. As with most things in The Ugly Dachshund, the stakes couldn’t be lower.

Putting aside the movie’s regressive gender and racial stereotypes (which, I understand, can be a big ask), The Ugly Dachshund’s biggest flaw is simply that it’s uninspired. Which is not to say that it can’t be watchable. Dean Jones continues to demonstrate a knack for physical comedy. But he isn’t quite charming enough to pull off everything required of him. In the birthday scene where Fran surprises him with a dachshund-centric evening at home, he just comes across as petulant, even though he has a right to be pissed off.

Part of the problem is that he’s being mean to Suzanne Pleshette, who has Dean Jones beat in the charm department. Stunningly beautiful and gifted with a smooth bourbon voice, Pleshette had been a theatre actress who made a big impression in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. While The Ugly Dachshund was her first actual Disney project, she’d earlier costarred with Tony Curtis in the 1962 comedy 40 Pounds Of Trouble, the first film to shoot on location in Disneyland. This was such a big deal at the time that Universal advertised the fact on the poster, like Disneyland was a featured actor.

Theatrical release poster for 40 Pounds Of Trouble

The Ugly Dachshund doesn’t provide Pleshette with one of her best roles. Fran alternates between acting selfish and frivolous or turning into a complete doormat who’ll put up with any indignity or inconvenience. The fact that the audience likes her at all is entirely thanks to Pleshette’s winning personality. Suzanne Pleshette, I’m happy to report, will be back in this column several times.

Critics were not enthusiastic about The Ugly Dachshund but audiences ate it up. The movie brought in over $6 million at the box office. Give them credit for this much, Disney knew how to put movies like this together. Cute dogs plus attractive costars plus colorful slapstick comedy equals money in the bank.

Of course, there might have been another reason for the movie’s success. In 1966, Disney was still in the habit of attaching short subjects to their feature presentations and The Ugly Dachshund was no exception. On its original release, moviegoers were treated to an all-new animated short: Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree.

Theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree

This quickly became one of Disney’s most popular cartoons, re-released several times over the next few years. Eventually, Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree would be edited into the feature-length film The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh. This column will have a lot more to say about Pooh and his many friends when we get there. For now, let’s just acknowledge that The Ugly Dachshund wasn’t alone when audiences were flocking to see it back in ’66.

Even on its own modest terms, The Ugly Dachshund isn’t much of a movie. At its best, it’s an undemanding sitcom-level comedy that might raise a chuckle or two from kids. At worst, it’s a rambling mess with some stuff that has aged so poorly you’ll get yanked right out of the picture. You might have some fun with it but I guarantee you won’t have enough fun to make it worth your while.    

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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