Laurence Naismith

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Three Lives Of Thomasina

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Three Lives Of Thomasina

You don’t have to be a professional animal trainer to figure out why there are a lot more dog movies than cat movies. Dogs’ emotions are written all over their furry little faces. They’re known for being brave, loyal and friendly. They’re also a heck of a lot easier to train.

Cats, on the other hand, are independent and somewhat inscrutable unless they’re purring and rubbing against you. Even the most well-behaved, well-trained cats have an attitude like they’re only willing to go along with your plan as long as it suits them. It’s not an accident that the most popular cat videos are the ones capturing them doing something stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I love cats and consider myself a cat person. But it’s a lot of fun to see these self-satisfied little gremlins make fools of themselves.

When Walt Disney branched out into live-action animal pictures, he understandably focused on the canine set. It wasn’t until The Incredible Journey that a cat received a costarring role alongside two dogs. A few months after that film was released, The Three Lives Of Thomasina made a domestic house cat the center of attention for the first time.

The movie is based on the novel Thomasina, The Cat Who Thought She Was God (great title) by Paul Gallico. Gallico was a former sportswriter whose work had provided the basis of the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride Of The Yankees, earning him an Oscar nomination. He retired from the sports beat in 1938 and became a prolific fiction writer. His work for young people includes The Snow Goose and Manxmouse, a childhood favorite of J.K. Rowling. Grownups probably know him best for his novel The Poseidon Adventure, although I’d wager more people have seen the movie than read the book.

Gallico cowrote the screenplay with Robert Westerby, whose first work for Disney had been Greyfriars Bobby. Greyfriars Bobby and Thomasina have a fair amount in common. Both take place in Scotland around 1912 and both center around devoted pets who melt the hearts of cold, emotionally repressed men. So it makes sense that Walt also rehired Don Chaffey, the director of that film.

Don Chaffey had kept busy in the years between the dog movie and the cat movie. For Disney, he’d directed a pair of TV productions (The Prince And The Pauper and The Horse Without A Head) that received theatrical releases overseas. He’d also picked up a gig for producer Charles H. Schneer, directing the Ray Harryhausen classic Jason And The Argonauts. Chaffey will eventually be back in this column but not for awhile. He spent the better part of the 1960s back home in England, alternating between film and television. Some of his best work would be multiple episodes of the series Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the US) and The Prisoner starring his Three Lives Of Thomasina leading man, Patrick McGoohan.

McGoohan had been poised to become a breakout star since the mid-1950s, but it hadn’t quite happened yet. He was an acclaimed stage actor but producers couldn’t seem to find the right movie roles for him. In 1960, he was cast in Danger Man, a half-hour spy show that ran a little over a year before it was canceled. He turned down some other spy roles, including James Bond and Simon Templar on The Saint, and instead signed on with Disney. After appearing in Thomasina and TV’s The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh, Danger Man was revived as an hour-long series. This version caught on and McGoohan finally became a star. While he won’t be back in this column for quite some time, we will eventually hear from him again. McGoohan returned to Disney for his last film, voicing Billy Bones in the 2002 animated feature Treasure Planet.

In The Three Lives Of Thomasina, McGoohan stars as Dr. Andrew McDhui, a widowed veterinarian whose near-total lack of compassion isn’t exactly winning over the locals. If a beloved pet is beyond help, McDhui coldly informs the owner that old Rover needs to be put out of his misery.

McDhui lives with his daughter, Mary (Karen Dotrice), and her beloved cat, Thomasina (who narrates the film in the voice of Elspeth March). Mary enjoys dressing Thomasina up in doll clothes and pushing her around in a baby carriage (even here, the quickest way to humanize a cat is to humiliate her). One day, Thomasina is injured while making her rounds down at the market. Mary begs her father to save the cat but he’s otherwise occupied, trying to save the life of a blind man’s dog. He takes a quick glance at Thomasina, declares her beyond help and orders his assistant to have her destroyed.

Poor Mary is heartbroken and announces that her father is now as dead to her as Thomasina. She and some other children stage an elaborate funeral procession for Thomasina through the village. And it’s right around here that the movie takes a quick detour into the elaborately weird. It switches to Thomasina’s point of view as she tumbles through space and ends up in Cat Heaven. She ascends a stairway straight out of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death, makes her way through dozens of other cats to appear before a gigantic statue of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. You kind of have to see it to believe it. It’s sort of cool but it’s definitely odd.

Anyway, the kids’ funeral has attracted the attention of Lori MacGregor (Susan Hampshire), a beautiful young hermit rumored to be a witch. The kids run away at the sight of her and Lori discovers that Thomasina is still breathing. She takes the cat back to her cottage, where she nurses all sorts of different animals back to health. Thomasina slowly recovers but she has no memory of her previous life.

Meanwhile, the local kids have decided to run Dr. McDhui out of town by starting a whisper campaign focused on the fact that he didn’t even care enough to save his own daughter’s cat. The villagers’ faith in old-fashioned folk remedies returns as their distrust in science deepens (that sounds familiar). With word spreading about the beautiful witch with the miraculous healing powers, McDhui decides to pay Lori a visit. They work together to save an injured badger with Lori respecting McDhui’s knowledge and skill and McDhui admiring her compassion and gentle touch.

As Thomasina begins to remember her previous life, she finds herself drawn to Mary’s window on a stormy night. Mary catches a glimpse of the cat but Thomasina runs off before she can get to her. She chases after her pet and, because it’s raining and this is a Disney movie, immediately comes down with pneumonia. The doctor does everything he can but in the end, McDhui turns to Lori for help. Love conquers all.

The Three Lives Of Thomasina is a bit of a bumpy ride but it’s not a bad little movie. For such a low-key affair, the movie has a lot of different parts that don’t always fit together seamlessly. The Cat Heaven detour is just one extreme example. I didn’t even mention the ramshackle gypsy circus that’s brought up on charges of animal cruelty toward the end. McDhui and Lori team up to get them shut down and I suppose the sequence exists to further cement their bond and rehabilitate McGoohan’s callous character. But it comes just as McDhui is trying to save his daughter, so it’s like a climax in the middle of another climax.

It’s to Chaffey’s credit that the movie works as well as it does. He wisely stacks the supporting cast with wonderful character actors including many familiar Disney faces. Laurence Naismith and Alex Mackenzie were both previously seen in Greyfriars Bobby. Wilfrid Brambell was last seen alongside Hayley Mills in In Search Of The Castaways. Finlay Currie has been in this column several times, most recently in Kidnapped. Even the kids are familiar. Vincent Winter and Denis Gilmore were choirboys in Almost Angels. And while we haven’t seen Karen Dotrice or Matthew Garber in this column previously, we’ll be seeing them again soon enough. Thomasina ended up being a sort of screen test for the kids before moving on to Mary Poppins.

The movie also works as a technical achievement. Cats are not easy to work with on film sets and cinematographer Paul Beeson captures some impressive, long tracking shots of Thomasina making her way through the village. The animals were provided by Jimmy Chipperfield, whose family had owned and operated Chipperfield’s Circus in England since the 1680s. Jimmy left the circus in the 1950s and began training animals for films and television. He definitely earned his keep on this film, providing cats, dogs, frogs, badgers, deer and other assorted critters.

His daughter, Mary Chipperfield, would later take up the family business, serving as a trainer on the live-action 101 Dalmatians remake. Unfortunately, Mary was also eventually found guilty on multiple charges of animal cruelty, mostly surrounding her performing chimpanzees. Hopefully the animals in Thomasina were treated well, although some of those shots of the cat flying through space look a little sketchy.

Preview screenings of The Three Lives Of Thomasina took place in December of 1963 but the film didn’t go into general release until June of ’64. It did just OK at the box office and critics were fairly unimpressed. Years later, film critic and Disney expert Leonard Maltin championed the picture in his book The Disney Films. I wouldn’t rate it quite as highly as Maltin does but I agree with his claim that it deserves to be better known. At its best, this is a cute, charming little movie that carries a nice message about the importance of loving our pets. If my biggest criticism is that the movie packs in too many ideas, that’s actually a pretty good problem to have.

VERDICT: A low-key Disney Plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Greyfriars Bobby

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Greyfriars Bobby

Everybody knows that dogs are the most faithful and loyal companions in the animal kingdom. There is no better illustration of this than the Scottish legend of Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye Terrier who kept vigil at the grave of his deceased master for more than a decade. It’s an irresistible story that seems tailor-made for a sentimental dog-lover like Walt Disney.

As is the case with many stories in the oral tradition, the details in the real Greyfriars Bobby story vary depending on who’s telling the tale. Walt decided to base his version on the novel by Eleanor Atkinson, an American writer who took the broad strokes of the story and filled in the rest herself. Atkinson’s book had already been filmed once before, as the 1949 Lassie vehicle Challenge To Lassie. That version doesn’t sound all that different from the Disney movie. The only way you could argue that Walt’s version is more faithful is that he got the dog’s breed right.

Robert Westerby, a British novelist and screenwriter, was hired to write the script. Westerby will be back in this column but unfortunately, one of his best Disney projects will not. In 1963, he wrote The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh (released theatrically overseas as Dr. Syn, Alias The Scarecrow) for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color. Scarecrow became a legitimate cult favorite, one of Disney’s best-remembered TV productions, and I’m sorely disappointed that it falls outside the purview of this column.

The director was Don Chaffey, another British talent who will continue to appear in this column. Chaffey started as an art director before working his way up to directing a number of crime pictures and television episodes. Greyfriars Bobby was his first Disney project but it would not be his last. It would also not be his last dog movie. In the 1970s, he’d direct the Lassie comeback movie The Magic Of Lassie, as well as the ludicrous Hanna-Barbera production C.H.O.M.P.S. about a robot dog.

Chaffey isn’t the only one in Greyfriars Bobby with a Lassie connection. Donald Crisp (last seen in this column as the mayor in Pollyanna) had previously starred in several Lassie features, including Challenge To Lassie. In that earlier telling of the story, Crisp played Auld Jock, Lassie/Bobby’s beloved master. Here, he’s James Brown, caretaker of Greyfriars Kirkyard and Bobby’s nemesis.

Alex Mackenzie takes over as Auld Jock, a much kinder and gentler role than his previous Disney appearance as the Ferryman in Kidnapped. As the story opens, Jock is being let go from his longtime post as a shepherd on a family farm. Jock tries to make Bobby understand that he must stay with the family but the little dog is so devoted to Jock that he escapes, hurrying after him to Edinburgh. He manages to find Jock, who smuggles him into the most ramshackle flophouse in the city. Sadly, Jock isn’t well and he dies in his sleep, a victim of pneumonia.

When Jock’s body is discovered, he has enough money on him to pay for a decent burial in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Bobby follows, only to be shooed away by James Brown, strictly obeying his own no-dogs-allowed rule. Bobby heads over to a nearby restaurant run by Mr. Traill (Laurence Naismith, previously seen in Third Man On The Mountain). Jock had taken his meals at Traill’s place and Traill feeds the dog, sneaking him back into the cemetery at night to sleep atop his master’s grave.

Brown continues to want Bobby gone but after his wife sees that the dog is a skilled rat-killer, she wants to adopt him as their own. Brown reluctantly agrees but Bobby has other ideas. He continues to go back and forth between Greyfriars and Traill’s place, acknowledging no one as a master except Jock.

Eventually the police get involved, charging Traill with harboring an unlicensed animal. Traill is dragged in front of the magistrate and refuses to pay the licensing fee, arguing that Bobby really isn’t his dog. Brown turns up and volunteers to pay but Traill won’t let him. As far as Traill’s concerned, it’s a matter of principle since Bobby isn’t his dog, either. Word gets around and a scruffy band of orphans takes up a collection, scraping together the fee penny by penny. The Magistrate is so moved by this demonstration that he declares Bobby a Freeman of the City, given permission to roam wherever he may please. Even Traill and Brown put aside their differences. Edinburgh is happy at last.

Comic book adaptation of Greyfriars Bobby

Greyfriars Bobby: The True Story Of A Dog (to use the film’s complete on-screen title) is a pleasant enough little movie. The exteriors were all filmed on location in Scotland, giving the movie an authentic atmosphere. Some critics and American audiences at the time complained that the actors’ thick accents were borderline impenetrable but they really aren’t that bad. If you can make it through the first ten minutes without subtitles, you should be fine.

The cast is uniformly excellent with Crisp and Naismith playing nicely off each other. Mackenzie brings real pathos to Auld Jock. Even though you know his days are numbered from the first frame, his death still carries genuine weight. As for Bobby, he earns his place in the pantheon of put-upon Disney dogs like Old Yeller and Nikki. He mercifully isn’t put in as much physical danger as his predecessors but he definitely conveys the emotional trauma of losing a loved one. He’s an easy little dog to love.

All that being said, Greyfriars Bobby is a far cry from being an upper-echelon Disney classic. The movie has two big problems that go hand-in-hand: nothing much actually happens and what little does happen gets repeated over and over. The opening narration pretty much tells us the entire story but it’s still a good 20 minutes or so before the movie starts climbing that hill. We spend a fair amount of time with the family that ostensibly owns Bobby, including Gordon Jackson as the farmer, Rosalie Crutchley as his wife and Gennie Nevinson as their daughter (there’s also a son but he barely registers at all). But Bobby only has eyes for Jock, so all this really does is make us feel bad for the little girl whose love for this dog is so clearly not reciprocated.

Somewhere in the middle of Bobby’s Edinburgh adventures, the farmer comes back to Edinburgh looking for Bobby. He takes him back home, only to have the dog escape yet again and head back. That’s no less than four trips back and forth between Edinburgh and the farm in a 90-minute movie. We get it, the dog misses the old man.

It also doesn’t help that the movie, like Atkinson’s book, is told primarily from Bobby’s perspective. This means that the audience is frequently several steps ahead of the characters in the movie. We know all about what happens to Jock, from his backstory to his death to his funeral. But when Brown buries Jock, he has no idea who it is. When Bobby goes back to Traill, he knows Jock but doesn’t know that he’s dead. So we’re left impatiently waiting for everyone to catch up to where we are.

Still, Greyfriars Bobby has enough going for it to make it worth a look. It’s a sad and sweet little story, expertly performed by a cast of old pros and centered around a very cute and scrappy little dog. Is it going to change your life? Absolutely not. But it’s a nice rainy afternoon movie that won’t insult your intelligence. And, unlike some other movies we’ve seen in this column, it won’t make you unduly concerned over its canine star’s welfare.

VERDICT: It’s just diverting enough to earn a low Disney Plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Third Man On The Mountain

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Third Man On The Mountain

It’s a little bit hard to imagine that Walt Disney was ever an avid mountain climber. Apart from a brief phase as a polo player that came to an end after he injured his back in 1938, Walt wasn’t much of an outdoorsman. But even if he wasn’t a climber himself, he had a lot of respect for people who were. More importantly, he absolutely loved Switzerland. He and his family had taken several holidays in the Alps. In 1955, he produced Switzerland, an entry in the People And Places series of documentary shorts, sort of a travelogue cousin to the True-Life Adventures. It was nominated for an Oscar but Walt felt he still hadn’t quite tapped the country’s cinematic potential. Or perhaps he just wanted an excuse to take more working vacations in Switzerland. In any event, the country and its landscape are the real stars of the 1959 feature Third Man On The Mountain.

Producer Bill Anderson found James Ramsey Ullman’s book Banner In The Sky, based on the story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn. Anderson brought the book to Walt, who probably gave the project a greenlight as soon as he heard the word “Matterhorn”. Eleanore Griffin was hired to write the screenplay. This was her first and only assignment for Disney but she had been a veteran screenwriter since the 1920s, winning an Oscar for the 1938 Spencer Tracy drama Boys Town.

Director Ken Annakin, who had previously helmed the UK productions The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men and The Sword In The Rose, was brought back into the Disney fold. The two young leads were Disney contract players. James MacArthur, last seen pretending to be an Indian in The Light In The Forest, played novice mountaineer Rudi Matt. His love interest was Janet Munro, fresh off the set of Darby O’Gill And The Little People.

David Niven was to play gentleman climber Captain John Winter but ended up being replaced by Michael Rennie, the star of The Day The Earth Stood Still and the 1952 version of Les Miserables. This would be Rennie’s only appearance in a Disney film, while Niven had merely postponed his Date with Disney Destiny. He’ll eventually show up in this column.

Walt assembled a first-rate cast and crew for Third Man On The Mountain but the location itself was always the number one priority. Unlike Darby O’Gill, which had substituted sunny California for its Ireland setting, Third Man would be shot on location in the shadow of the Matterhorn itself. More than that, Annakin wanted the climbing sequences to look as authentic as possible. Both the cast and the crew were given an intensive two-week training course, after which Alpine guides decided if the stars were capable of doing the stunt work themselves.

The physical shoot took its toll on the cast and crew, though no one seems to have been hurt too seriously. Both MacArthur and Munro ended up doing a lot of their own stunts, although Munro’s actual climbing time was a lot more limited. She ends up dangling at the end of a rope, hoisted up the mountain like “a bundle of firewood”. Needless to say, sisters weren’t exactly doing it for themselves in little Swiss villages in 1865 or most Hollywood movies in 1959, for that matter.

The stunt work is fairly impressive, especially for its time. Annakin does a terrific job staging these sequences, making it difficult at times to tell the difference between actual location footage and special effects. No movie is seamless, of course, but in general, it’s pretty convincing. You definitely get the sense that this was not an easy movie to shoot. Walt wanted to make sure that 1959 audiences knew exactly how difficult the shoot had been. He promoted the movie with a behind-the-scenes episode of Walt Disney Presents called Perilous Assignment.

The story is pretty much exactly what you might expect, even if you know absolutely nothing about this film other than it’s a Disney movie about mountaineering. MacArthur’s Rudi Matt works for his uncle (James Donald) as a dishwasher but dreams of being an Alpine guide like his late father. He sneaks out regularly to climb the foothills around the Citadel (the fictional name given to the Matterhorn), the mountain that cost his father his life.

On one of these trips, he rescues Captain Winter (Rennie). Winter knew Rudi’s father and intends to be the first man to conquer the Citadel. Against his uncle’s wishes, Rudi goes along as an apprentice but his recklessness almost causes an accident. Winter goes off to hire a more experienced guide (the great Herbert Lom as the sinister Emil Saxo) while Rudi trains and learns about teamwork. Lessons are learned, the mountain is conquered and dreams are fulfilled.

Dramatically, Third Man On The Mountain is pretty inert. But nobody’s watching this for the gripping plot. You watch it for the scenery and the mountain-climbing and on those points, Annakin delivers. Cinematographer Harry Waxman (who would later shoot such disparate films as Wonderwall and The Wicker Man) captures every inch of the breathtaking Swiss landscape. It’s easy to see why Walt fell in love with the place.

It’s also easy to understand why people decided to just drop by the set for a visit. One such visitor was MacArthur’s mom, the legendary Helen Hayes. She thought the movie looked like fun, so Walt and Ken Annakin gave cameos to her and MacArthur’s then-wife, Joyce Bulifant. They can be spotted as a couple of American tourists leaving the hotel. Both Hayes and Bulifant will be back in this column in considerably more substantial roles. James Ramsey Ullman, the author of the original book, also popped by to see how things were going and ended up in front of the camera.

Apart from the scenery and the stunts, Third Man From The Mountain isn’t bad so much as it is bland. MacArthur is better here than he was in The Light In The Forest but he’s just not in the upper echelon of charismatic Disney stars. Munro is pretty and energetic but she doesn’t have much spark with MacArthur. That’s not a knock on him. Munro’s previous costar was Sean Connery, after all. Almost anybody would pale in comparison.

Third Man On The Mountain was released in November 1959 and most critics found good things to say about it. But it was a failure at the box office, another disappointment in a year where only The Shaggy Dog had been a hit for the studio. Today, it’s considered one of Disney’s most obscure live-action features. They’ve never released it on Blu-ray and it isn’t currently available on Disney+, although you can rent or buy a decent-looking digital version in HD.

And yet, Third Man On The Mountain has had more of a lasting cultural impact than some better-known Disney films, thanks to a consistently popular ride at Disneyland. The Matterhorn Bobsleds opened at the park in June, just a few months prior to the film. Walt had been struggling with a concept for a toboggan ride for a couple of years. While on location for Third Man On The Mountain, Walt grabbed a postcard of the Matterhorn and sent it to Imagineer Vic Greene with a simple message: “Vic. Build this. Walt.”

The Matterhorn Bobsleds ride at Disneyland, inspired by Third Man On The Mountain

Greene did exactly that, modeling his roller coaster on the Matterhorn itself. Over the years, the ride has been updated in ways that make its connection to Third Man On The Mountain more tenuous. The Abominable Snowman, for example, does not make an appearance in the film. But it has remained popular for decades, the Matterhorn becoming almost as visually associated with the park as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

Considering its connection to the ride, I’m surprised that Disney has ignored Third Man On The Mountain for so long. It’s no masterpiece but it’s a well-made little adventure movie that’s absolutely gorgeous to look at. Walt himself was happy with the way it came out, so you’d think that should count for something. It deserves better than to languish in obscurity.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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