George Sanders

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Jungle Book

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Jungle Book

In many ways, The Jungle Book marks the end of a journey that began all the way back in 1921 when Walt Disney founded the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City. Walt didn’t invent animation by any stretch of the imagination. But he had revolutionized the format many times over since those early days back in Kansas. As the last animated feature Walt Disney had a hand in, The Jungle Book automatically earns a special place in history.

Of course, the studio had gone through some major changes since their first animated feature, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Back then, the entire operation revolved around nothing but animation. Walt was personally involved in every aspect of production, poring over every cel and story beat until it was just right.

By the time work began on The Jungle Book in the mid-‘60s, animation was a small fraction of the studio’s output and Walt was trusting his staff to make most of the major decisions. It’s a testament to Walt’s love of animation that the studio was even continuing to make cartoons. The animation division had been on the chopping block more than once during economic lean times. Animation was expensive and time-consuming and Walt certainly didn’t need the extra work. Most of his attention was now devoted to live-action films, television production, Disneyland and his ambitious new Florida venture, EPCOT.

There had once been an entire department devoted to story development. Story meetings could turn into raucous affairs with Walt and his team acting out entire films. For the last several years, Bill Peet had been a one-man story department. After proving himself on One Hundred And One Dalmatians, Peet had been entrusted with The Sword In The Stone. It was Peet’s idea to develop a feature based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Walt thought that sounded like a swell idea and Peet went off to work his magic.

But The Sword In The Stone hadn’t quite turned out the way Walt had hoped, so he decided to get a bit more involved with The Jungle Book. He looked at Peet’s treatment and storyboards, which were heading in a very dark and dramatic direction, and essentially told him to lighten up. Peet strongly disagreed, arguing that it went against Kipling’s original stories (he wasn’t wrong about that). Walt didn’t really care. He wanted to make a movie everybody could enjoy, not just members of the Kipling Society. When Walt continued to insist on significant changes to the script, Peet quit, a bad end to a relationship that stretched back to the 1930s.

With Bill Peet gone, Walt turned The Jungle Book over to Larry Clemmons. Clemmons started with the studio as an assistant animator back in the ‘30s but left when World War II broke out. He came into his own as a writer working for Bing Crosby’s radio shows. When he returned to the Disney studio in the 1950s, it was as a writer and producer for the Disneyland and Mickey Mouse Club TV shows.

Clemmons struggled with the assignment at first. Kipling’s book was so episodic that he couldn’t find an actual story to hang his hat on. Walt advised him not to worry about it and instead focus on the characters and their personalities. He also brought in the Sherman brothers, whose songs had helped shape Mary Poppins’ story. They would be replacing Terry Gilkyson, a folksinger who had written several original songs for Peet’s abandoned, darker version of the film. Gilkyson was no stranger to the Disney studio. He’d contributed songs to Swiss Family Robinson, Savage Sam, The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh, The Three Lives Of Thomasina, and The Moon-Spinners.

By all accounts, everyone was having a hard time wrapping their minds around what Walt envisioned for The Jungle Book until he suggested casting jazzman and radio star Phil Harris as Baloo the bear. Harris had been the bandleader on Jack Benny’s program. His appearances were so popular that he eventually got his own show, headlining with his wife, Alice Faye. Everyone knew Harris’ voice and it was nobody’s idea of what a Rudyard Kipling character should sound like. Even Harris didn’t think he was the right man for the job. Once he got to the studio, he was uncomfortable delivering the lines as written and asked to permission to just do it “his way”. All of a sudden, Baloo came to life as a fully-formed character, albeit one that didn’t have much to do with Kipling.

Theatrical re-release poster for The Jungle Book

After that epiphany, things seemed to click for The Jungle Book crew. The character designers and animators were inspired by the vocal performances. Once Harris joined the cast, someone (I’ve seen multiple people take credit for it) had the idea to cast Louis Prima, another instantly recognizable voice from the jazz and swing world, as King Louie the orangutan. Disney legend Sterling Holloway was cast against type as the villainous snake, Kaa, another of Walt’s suggestions. And to lend at least a little British authenticity, Sebastian Cabot was tapped to play Bagheera the panther and the great George Sanders was cast as Shere Khan, the man-hating tiger. Cabot had previously done voice work on The Sword In The Stone and appeared in Johnny Tremain, while Sanders was previously seen menacing Hayley Mills in In Search Of The Castaways.

This wasn’t the first time Disney had relied on celebrity vocal performances. Bing Crosby was near the peak of his popularity when he voiced his half of The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad. Even Cliff Edwards was a known commodity when he was cast as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. But this was certainly the starriest cast Disney had assembled to date and not everyone was happy about it. You can draw a straight line from Phil Harris’ improvised performance as Baloo to Robin Williams’ Genie in Aladdin.

Today, there is absolutely an over-reliance on celebrity voices in animation. But young audiences discovering The Jungle Book for the first time have no idea who Phil Harris, Louis Prima, George Sanders or any of these people are (you’ll be doing them a kindness if you continue to expose your kids to these talents after they watch this). I was born just a couple years after The Jungle Book was released and this was certainly my introduction to them. A voice either works or it doesn’t work, regardless of how famous the face attached to it might be. There’s no denying that the voices in The Jungle Book are absolutely spot-on.

That extends to the youngest members of the cast. Bruce Reitherman, son of director Wolfgang Reitherman, got the part of Mowgli after the original actor’s voice changed midway through. Woolie Reitherman also battled puberty on The Sword In The Stone, cycling through no less than three kids (including two more sons, Richard and Robert) as Wart. Bruce had already performed the voice of Christopher Robin in Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree, so he knew his way around a studio. He was also young enough to make it through production without a voice change.

Bruce wasn’t the only young Winnie The Pooh alum in the cast. Clint Howard, the voice of Roo, provides the voice of the young elephant. Howard made his screen debut at the ripe old age of 2 on The Andy Griffith Show and he’s been busy ever since. Around this same time, he was guesting on shows like Star Trek and starring in Gentle Ben, which premiered just a few months before The Jungle Book. Clint will be back in this column before long, alongside his older brother, Ronny.

Theatrical re-release poster for The Jungle Book

The Sherman Brothers ended up contributing five original songs to The Jungle Book, the best of which is unquestionably “I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)”. Louis Prima is a perfect fit for the song. His signature style sounds nothing like any Disney song that had come before. It’s one of the biggest indications so far that Disney could change with the times, even if that change came slowly.

The Shermans’ other songs are honestly not up to the same level. Kaa’s “Trust In Me (The Python’s Song)”, which recycles a melody from an abandoned Mary Poppins song, isn’t bad and it’s imaginatively animated. But it doesn’t stay with you. “Colonel Hathi’s March”, on the other hand, does stick with you and not in a good way. It’s an annoying military-style earworm, so of course that’s the song that gets a reprise.

Probably the biggest miscalculation is “That’s What Friends Are For (The Vulture Song)”, a barbershop quartet number performed by four vultures modeled after The Beatles. It was originally meant to be performed as a rock & roll song until Walt got cold feet, worried that the style would date the picture. So naturally the Shermans changed it to that most timeless of styles, barbershop. That never gets old.

This is one of those rare times that Walt’s usually unerring sense of what will or will not stand the test of time failed him. For one thing, rock & roll has proven to be a whole lot more enduring than Walt predicted. Certainly more than barbershop, a time machine back to the days of vaudeville and straw boaters.

More importantly, the musical style certainly wouldn’t date the movie any more or less than the fact that the vultures are physically and vocally modeled after The Beatles. Two of their voices were even provided by Lord Tim Hudson, a Los Angeles DJ with a dubious claim to being a friend of the Fab Four, and Chad Stuart of the British Invasion pop duo Chad & Jeremy (the others were J. Pat O’Malley and Digby Wolfe). So now you’ve got The Beatles singing a barbershop quartet, a reference that’s both dated and incongruous.

Ironically, the one song from The Jungle Book to receive an Academy Award nomination and arguably its most popular number overall was the one that almost got cut. Terry Gilkyson’s “The Bare Necessities” survived from Bill Peet’s abandoned version. If Walt had his way, it also would have ended up on the cutting room floor. When he brought the Shermans on board, he wanted to eliminate all of Gilkyson’s songs and start fresh. The animators fought for the song and Walt eventually relented.

Today, it’s impossible to imagine The Jungle Book without “The Bare Necessities”. It’s one of the best, most iconic numbers in the Disney Songbook. Plenty of classic Disney songs failed to win Oscars but Gilkyson really got robbed. The Oscar went to “Talk To The Animals” from the overstuffed musical Doctor Dolittle. Terry Gilkyson never quite became one of Disney’s go-to songwriters but he’ll be back in this column at least once more.

The Jungle Book is a hard movie to dislike. Walt instructed his team to focus on character and personality and they followed his mandate to the letter. Everybody remembers Baloo, King Louie, Shere Khan and the rest. They’re vivid, fun, highly entertaining characters that pop off the screen.

Theatrical re-release poster for The Jungle Book

The movie’s biggest flaw is Mowgli himself. Everything revolves around him and our investment in the story depends on us believing that Baloo and Bagheera really love this little man cub. But he’s a total blank slate. His only goal is a negative. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, he only knows that he does not want to go to the man-village. And for a kid who was raised for years by wolves in the jungle, he displays virtually no wolf-like characteristics. The wolves, not so coincidentally, are also the animals we spend the least amount of time with. They’re theoretically his family, right? If anybody should care about Mowgli leaving the jungle, you’d think it would be them.

Walt didn’t want his team getting too hung up on story but it would have been nice if they’d put a little bit more effort into it. The movie ends up turning into a series of encounters that don’t necessarily feed into one another. Even the threat of Shere Khan feels underbaked. When the final showdown does arrive, it’s difficult to feel like the stakes are too high. Walt continues to keep things light and jaunty up to the end, even when a tiger is trying to eat a little boy. It’s one of the most tension-free climaxes in Disney history.

The movie comes to a rather abrupt end when Mowgli sees a girl fetching some water by the river. He’s instantly smitten, shrugs his shoulders and follows her into the man-village as Baloo and Bagheera bop back into the jungle. The Blu-ray release storyboards an “alternate ending” from Peet’s version that’s really more like an alternate second half. Here, Mowgli is reunited with his birth parents and runs afoul of a treasure-seeking hunter. The movie is probably better without this lengthy digression. The quick pace allows The Jungle Book’s strengths to come into clearer focus. If the choice is between the movie slowly petering out or just stopping all of a sudden, I suppose I prefer the latter.

The Jungle Book was released on October 18, 1967, not quite a year after Walt Disney’s death. Critics and audiences alike were very pleased with Walt’s farewell animation. It was the studio’s highest-grossing film of 1967 and the 9th highest-grossing movie of the year overall, ahead of Camelot and just behind Thoroughly Modern Millie. Over the years, re-releases have added to its total both at home and overseas. According to a 2016 Hollywood Reporter article, it’s the biggest movie of all-time in Germany, ahead of Avatar, Titanic or any of those other also-rans.

More Jungle Book album cover

In 1968, Disney tested the sequel waters, bringing back Phil Harris and Louis Prima for the book-and-record set More Jungle Book. The album didn’t do well and The Jungle Book went back on the shelf for awhile. In the 1990s, Disney brought the characters to television, first on the show TaleSpin and later on Jungle Cubs. Not long after, the studio brought Baloo and company back to theatres, in animation, in live-action and in whatever you want to call the CGI hybrid style employed by Jon Favreau. This column will be getting to many of those eventually.

Disney’s original The Jungle Book continues to have a place in the hearts of fans around the world. Walt had made better, more important animated features before and the studio that still bears his name has made better movies since. But it’s hard to argue against a movie with no ulterior motive other than showing its audience a good time. It’s fun, breezy and as easy to swallow as sweet tea on a hot day. It really does provide the bare necessities of what you want out of a Disney movie.

VERDICT: Disney Plus  

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: In Search Of The Castaways

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's In Search Of The Castaways

In 1962, Hayley Mills was on top of the world. Her first two Disney films, Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, had been huge hits. The latter movie even netted her a hit single, “Let’s Get Together” by the Sherman Brothers. After The Parent Trap, Disney allowed her to return to England to make Whistle Down The Wind, based on a novel by her mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Whistle Down The Wind was another hit and Mills scored a BAFTA nomination for Best British Actress. Stanley Kubrick offered her the title role in Lolita but her father, John Mills, nixed that idea. Walt himself probably also played a part in keeping Hayley out of Kubrick’s film. After all, his contract players were typically kept on a very short leash.

Hayley Mills was by far the most bankable box office star Walt had ever had under contract. Up to this point, his biggest live-action hit had been his 1954 adaption of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. So it isn’t difficult to piece together how In Search Of The Castaways came about. The combination of Hayley Mills with the spectacle of another Jules Verne fantasy adventure must have seemed like a license to print money.

Robert Stevenson, who had proven himself equally adept with drama (Old Yeller), adventure (Kidnapped) and comedy (The Absent-Minded Professor), was assigned to direct. Lowell Hawley, the screenwriter of Swiss Family Robinson and Babes In Toyland, adapted Verne’s novel, originally titled Captain Grant’s Children.

Associate producer Hugh Attwooll had a somewhat unusual arrangement with Disney. He’d been working in the British film industry since he was a teenager, steadily working his way up through the ranks. His career was briefly interrupted by World War II and he spent a little while in Hollywood, working mostly for RKO, before heading back to England and Pinewood Studios. In 1959, Disney hired him to work on Kidnapped, beginning a long association with the studio. But unlike most other Disney crew members, Attwooll was never under contract. The studio simply liked his work and continued to hire him to as a producer for nearly everything they shot in England. His final credit was 1981’s Condorman, so we’ll be seeing a lot more from Hugh Attwooll.

Walt ran into a couple of small hiccups when it came to casting the film. He wanted Hayley Mills’ younger brother, Jonathan, to play her on-screen brother. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the time off school and wasn’t able to follow in his sister’s footsteps. The role instead went to Keith Hamshere, who was then appearing on the West End in the musical Oliver!

In Search Of The Castaways ended up being Hamshere’s only big movie role but it was still a formative experience for him. At the time, he was interested in photography as a hobby and spent much of his downtime hanging out with the film’s stills photographer, John Jay. Jay encouraged Hamshere’s passion and gave him lessons. A few years later, Jay hired Hamshere to work as his assistant on 2001: A Space Odyssey (a surprising number of Kubrick connections to this movie). After that, Hamshere had a new career. He went on to become a much-celebrated stills photographer in his own right, working behind-the-scenes on such films as Barry Lyndon, Superman II, and a whole bunch of James Bond movies. He makes a cameo in License To Kill as, what else, a wedding photographer.

Walt also cast Charles Laughton as Lord Glenarvan, the shipping magnate who leads the titular search. But Laughton was forced to drop out of the picture after he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on December 15, 1962, just a few days before In Search Of The Castaways had its American premiere. Laughton was replaced by Wilfrid Hyde-White, the delightful British character actor.

The other two marquee names in the cast were Maurice Chevalier and George Sanders. Chevalier started his career in Parisian music halls before coming to America in the 1920s. He was a huge star in Hollywood throughout the 30s before a contract dispute sent him back to France. He had only recently begun making American films again with a role in Billy Wilder’s Love In The Afternoon in 1957. He followed that up with Gigi, an enormous hit and winner of multiple Oscars including Best Picture. In Search Of The Castaways would be his first collaboration with Disney but not his last. He’ll be back.

So will George Sanders, the great Oscar-winning star of All About Eve. Sanders was one of those rare actors who moved effortlessly between leading roles and supporting character parts. Sanders’ career (and life) had some tumultuous ups and downs but in 1962, he was still doing reasonably well. Two years earlier, he’d played the lead in Village Of The Damned, a low-budget horror movie that seemed to surprise everyone by becoming a sleeper hit. Between Village and Castaways, Sanders appeared in four more films and a few TV episodes, so he was certainly busy.

Alternate poster design for In Search Of The Castaways

Our story opens in 1858 Glasgow as Mary and Robert Grant (Mills and Hamshere) along with eccentric Professor Paganel (Chevalier) attempt to crash a bon voyage party hosted by Lord Glenarvan. Mary and Robert’s father vanished without a trace when his ship, one of Glenarvan’s fleet, went down. But Paganel recently found a bottle with a note in it that appears to have been written by Captain Grant. It isn’t entirely legible but Paganel and the kids believe it contains enough clues to be track Grant’s location.

At first, Glenarvan refuses to believe any of it. But his son, John (played by Michael Anderson Jr., the son of director Michael Anderson, who had himself filmed a Jules Verne adaptation, Around The World In 80 Days), started crushing on Mary the second he laid eyes on her. He persuades his father to mount an expedition. After some deliberation, Paganel decides that Grant’s most likely location is South America.

Up to this point, director Robert Stevenson has been setting us up for a relatively straight-forward adventure like Swiss Family Robinson. But once the searchers arrive in South America, Stevenson changes course and steers his ship toward Wackytown. The adventurers spend the night high up on a mountain in an area prone to earthquakes. When the quake hits, their rock shelf splits off, sending them careening down the mountainside and through a spectacular ice cavern on a stone toboggan. At the end of the ride, a giant condor appears and plucks Robert out of the snow, carrying him off to his aerie. Things look grim for Robert until a well-placed shot from a passing Indian, Chief Thalcave (Antonio Cifariello, continuing the tradition of Italians passing for Indians), rescues the lad.

Thalcave says he knows where the castaways are being held prisoner and agrees to lead the group. But before they get there, they decide to camp for the night by an enormous tree in a flood plain (these folks don’t use the best judgment when selecting campsites). Sure enough, a tidal wave floods the area, stranding the adventurers in the tree. Thalcave goes for help. While they’re awaiting rescue, a jaguar arrives to menace the group and a lightning storm threatens to burn down the tree.

They are eventually rescued by Thalcave but when they arrive at the village, it turns out that these aren’t the men they’re looking for. Paganel finally admits he was wrong about South America. They should be looking in Australia, which was where Lord Glenarvan wanted to go in the first place. So this entire trip (and basically the whole first half of the movie) has been a complete waste of time.

Off they go to Australia, where they encounter Thomas Ayerton (Sanders), who also claims to know where Grant’s ship went down off the coast of New Zealand. Turns out that Ayerton is actually a gunrunner. He and his men took over Grant’s ship, setting him adrift, and now intends to do the same thing to Glenarvan and his crew.

Glenarvan and company reach shore where they’re promptly taken prisoner by a tribe of Maori cannibals. They’re thrown into a hut with Bill Gaye (Wilfrid Brambell, best known, depending on where you’re from, as either Steptoe on the long-running British sitcom Steptoe And Son or as Paul McCartney’s Grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night). Bill Gaye was a shipmate of Captain Grant and has been planning to escape and rejoin him. But his plan depends on squeezing through a small window, just big enough for a boy Robert’s size.

They manage to escape the Maori, losing them by hotfooting it across an active volcano. Finally, they find Captain Grant (Jack Gwillim, who will always be Poseidon from Clash Of The Titans to me) dealing with the treacherous Ayerton. With Glenarvan’s ship left relatively unguarded, they recapture the vessel and rescue Captain Grant. All’s well that ends well.

In Search Of The Castaways soundtrack album

If Walt’s goal was to recapture the magic of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, he didn’t quite succeed. This is an unrepentantly goofy and amiable film. It doesn’t have a strong presence like James Mason at its center. The action sequences are treated with all the gravity and realism of a Donald Duck cartoon. The songs by the Sherman Brothers are silly little tunes with little to no bearing on what’s actually happening on screen. But if you can get on the movie’s wavelength, it offers some minor pleasures.

The cast certainly appears to be having a good time. Chevalier and Hyde-White are both a lot of fun, reacting to various life-or-death perils as if they’re minor inconveniences. Hayley Mills continues to be a charming screen presence. If she fails to generate many sparks with her romantic lead, that can probably be forgiven considering she was all of 15 or 16 years old at the time. And Keith Hamshere manages to avoid the Kevin Corcoran trap of overly precocious child actors.

The movie’s light touch works against it in some ways. It’s hard to become too invested in the search when every character sings a jaunty song in the face of mortal danger. And the midway revelation that they’ve been looking in the wrong place elicits groans more than anything else. It’s easy for the audience to check out at this point. If nothing we’ve seen so far has actually mattered, why should we expect that to change in the second half?

The film also borrows liberally from other Disney films. The search for castaways feels like it could be the flip side to Swiss Family Robinson. The oversized bird that captures Robert feels like an attempt to outdo some of the giant creatures from 20,000 Leagues. And the third act appearance of Bill Gaye brings to mind Treasure Island’s Ben Gunn, another long-haired, half-crazed sailor. They even have the same initials. But despite the film’s many flaws, it’s a hard movie to dislike. It coasts by on charm and spectacle, even as you find yourself rolling your eyes at some of its more unbelievable aspects.

In Search Of The Castaways was Disney’s big Christmas release for 1962. Critics weren’t exactly rapturous in their praise but most admitted that it was harmless fun, if nothing else. Audiences, on the other hand, seemed to love it. It became one of the highest-grossing films of the year in both the US and the UK. Hayley Mills’ winning streak wasn’t over yet. Neither was Robert Stevenson’s. He’ll be back in this column almost immediately.  

VERDICT: I had enough fun with it to make it a minor Disney Plus.

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