Disney Plus-Or-Minus: One Little Indian

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's One Little Indian

James Garner’s first screen appearance was on the debut episode of the TV western Cheyenne in 1955. By 1973, less than twenty years later, his career had already been a rollercoaster ride. He shot to stardom in 1957 when he landed the lead on Maverick. But his big break came back to bite him just three years later. After a writers’ strike halted production on the series, Warner Bros. put their newest star on suspension. Garner sued the studio for breach of contract and won but, needless to say, wasn’t the most popular guy around Hollywood after that.

After leaving Maverick, Garner transitioned into movies. It took a little while but he eventually broke through as a popular and charming leading man. In 1963, he starred in two very different but equally successful hits: the classic adventure movie The Great Escape with Steve McQueen and the Doris Day rom-com The Thrill Of It All. Once again, James Garner’s career appeared to be back on track.

Wanting to exercise more control over his projects, Garner started his own production company, Cherokee Productions. But his next several projects failed to connect with audiences. When the expensive 1966 racing drama Grand Prix made less money than its studio had hoped, director John Frankenheimer threw Garner under the bus, claiming the movie would have done better if he’d been able to cast his first choice, Garner’s old costar McQueen, or even his second, Robert Redford.

With his movie career moving in fits and starts, Garner went back to television in 1971 with the sorta-western Nichols. Audiences expecting another Maverick were disappointed and the series was canceled after a single season. Shortly after Nichols went off the air, Garner signed a two-picture deal with Disney. This says a lot about both the state of James Garner’s career at the time and the state of Walt Disney Productions.

At the time, A-list movie stars were not lining up to sign contracts with Disney. Garner was by far the biggest name to set up shop at the studio in a long time. But he’d once again become a bigger draw after his Disney contract expired. At the moment, he was a fading leading man in his mid-40s whose best days might have been behind him. Garner lent Disney a bit of credibility at a time when talent was giving the studio a wide berth. In return, Disney gave Garner a gig while he regrouped and figured out his next move.

One Little Indian, Garner’s first Disney project, finds the actor squarely in his comfort zone. It’s a western with comedic elements that casts Garner as a possibly roguish but fundamentally decent man of action. True-Life Adventures veteran Winston Hibler produced the film, so if you’re thinking some type of exotic animal will be involved, you’re not wrong. Hibler also brought back Napoleon And Samantha director Bernard McEveety, who had plenty of experience directing episodes of TV westerns.

Unlike a lot of Disney movies, One Little Indian wasn’t based on an existing book or story. The sole credited screenwriter is Harry Spalding. Spalding was a prolific writer of low-budget pictures like Surf PartyCurse Of The Fly and Wild On The Beach. He continued to work for Disney throughout the 1970s and, while most of that was for television, we’ll see him in this column again.

There’s also a new and somewhat surprising name composing the music. Jerry Goldsmith, already a five-time Oscar nominee for his work on such films as Planet Of The Apes and Patton, made his Disney debut on One Little Indian. Disney had a long, long history of relying on its own in-house music department. Seeing Goldsmith’s name pop up so soon after Marvin Hamlisch’s score for The World’s Greatest Athlete makes me suspect the studio was reconsidering the need to keep fulltime songwriters and composers on the payroll.

In One Little Indian, Garner plays Corporal Clint Keyes, a cavalry soldier arrested for desertion. We find out later that he turned against his commanding officer to save the lives of women and children during a raid on an Indian camp. But when we first meet him, he’s handcuffed and riding hellbent for leather across the prairie away from his captors including Sgt. Raines (Morgan Woodward, again reporting for bad guy duty after The Wild Country). Once Raines captures him, he decides Keyes can’t be trusted on horseback, so he forces him to walk, tied to the back of a horse.

After the opening credits, Raines’ party encounters another cavalry unit escorting a ragged band of Cheyenne to the reservation. Raines asks Lieutenant Cummins (the first of several Disney movies for veteran character actor Robert Pine, who you have definitely seen in something if you’ve watched any movies or TV shows over the past few decades) if he can spare an extra man to help with his unruly prisoner. Cummins refuses the request but is pretty sure Raines will meet up with the rest of his unit in a day or two.

Raines rides off with Keyes and the movie decides to follow Cummins and his party back to their fort where Captain Stewart (hey, it’s Pat Hingle!) has been expecting them. Stewart takes stock of his new captives…uh, I mean, guests…and orders the doc to give them a once-over. I probably don’t need to point out that the movie makes zero effort to place any of this business with the Cheyenne into the broader context of the Trail of Tears. These Natives are just part of the background like the mountains and trees.

While the white folks are distracted with the medical exam, a 10-year-old Cheyenne boy sees his chance to escape. He puts up a good fight but is eventually yanked down from a fence, exposing his pale white backside. Yes, it turns out that it’s a white boy, captured by the Cheyenne and raised as one of their own. It’s James MacArthur in The Light In The Forest all over again. I don’t know why Disney decided to go back to this particular well but I’m really hoping this is the last white-child-raised-by-Indians movie I’ll have to sit through. Disney wasn’t equipped to handle this kind of story in 1958 and they still weren’t in 1973.

As in The Light In The Forest, the cavalry is obliged to rip this kid away from the only family he’s ever known and find some well-meaning but misguided stranger to raise him. Here, the fort’s chaplain (Andrew Prine) is that stranger and he’s only too eager to volunteer his services as foster parent. He wastes no time in baptizing the kid and renaming him Mark.

That’s young Clay O’Brien as Mark, by the way. O’Brien made his film debut in the 1972 John Wayne picture The Cowboys. He appeared in a lot of westerns in the 70s, including another one for Disney, before leaving Hollywood to become a cowboy for real. In 1997, he was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. You just never know where these Disney kids are going to end up.

Mark bides his time for a bit and finally manages to sneak away while most of the fort is attending the Christmas Eve service. He sets off in search of his Cheyenne mother, Blue Feather, but the elements take a toll. He’s practically on his last legs when he’s accidentally shot by our old buddy Keyes, who turns out to be a part of this movie after all. He’s had a busy few days himself, escaping from Sgt. Raines and liberating a couple of camels from the military. Really, he just wanted the one but Rosebud (Rosie, for short) wouldn’t leave without her daughter, who Mark names Thirsty.

Keyes douses Mark with carbolic acid and patches him up, offering to travel with him as far as he can before he cuts out to Mexico. A quick stop for a bath reveals Mark’s true identity to Keyes. A couple of points to be made here. First, who decided that showing this kid’s butt was the only way to show he’s not indigenous? Second and more importantly, what difference does it make? It’s not as if the movie has some point it wants to make about Native Americans. It’s like McEveety and Spalding decided the kid had to be an Indian to justify him running into Keyes and he had to be white to justify him speaking English. Neither of those things are true. They’re just lazy.

In any event, Sgt. Raines and his team (which now includes tracker Jimmy Wolf, played by Jay Silverheels, last seen in Smith!) catches up to the pair at the watering hole but Keyes turns the tables on them. His plan does encounter a rather significant hitch. Instead of taking their horses for themselves, they end up scaring them away. But at least their pursuers end up on foot while Keyes and Mark still have their camels.

Next there’s some goofy business with Garner trying to sneak into a cowboys’ camp to steal some food only to have Rosie crash the party and spook the cattle. But the next significant thing to happen story-wise is an encounter with a middle-aged widow (Vera Miles of The Wild Country and a surprisingly large number of other Disney films) and her daughter (Disney appearance #2 for Jodie Foster). Doris McIver recently lost her husband and she plans on taking young Martha back to Colorado in just a few days. That suits Keyes fine, since he just wants to rest up, shave and maybe scrounge a hot meal or two for himself and Mark.

Martha is delighted by the camels and tries her best to befriend Mark, while Doris is delighted by Keyes, especially after he shaves. Keyes explains their situation to the widow and confesses that he really doesn’t know what to do with Mark. He can’t bring him to Mexico but he also can’t escort him back to the reservation without putting his own neck in a noose. Doris sympathizes with the fugitives and can’t ignore the spark between her and Keyes, so after thinking it over for all of thirty seconds, she agrees to bring Mark to Colorado with them. Mr. McIver must have been a real catch for his wife to agree to adopt a kid who thinks he’s an Indian on the off-chance it might eventually help her land a new man.

Satisfied that Mark’s in good hands, Keyes sneaks off in the middle of the night. The next morning, Mark is understandably upset. But he can’t pout for long because that mean old Sgt. Raines requisitioned some new horses off the cowboys Keyes tried to steal from earlier and he shows up demanding satisfaction. Mark runs away and soon, both he and Raines are tracking Keyes. As for Doris and Martha, they pack up and head for Colorado as scheduled. This might be the only normal human behavior depicted in the entire film.

Mark turns out to be a better tracker than Raines and Jimmy Wolf. Keyes had grabbed his gear and sent Rosie off alone, so while the bad guys were following a riderless camel, Mark picks up the scent of carbolic acid and catches up to Keyes. Mark is plenty pissed off and Keyes’ explanation that Blue Feather and the rest of the Cheyenne would reject Mark even if he could find them doesn’t help. The dynamic duo is about to split up again when Raines finally shows up. Mark escapes with the camels but Keyes is captured and taken to the nearest cavalry outpost, which happens to be the same one Mark escaped from, which means the chaplain absolutely could have found Mark if he’d put any effort into it.

Captain Stewart returns to the fort and is not amused by the freshly constructed gallows in his courtyard. He demands to see both Raines and Keyes and wastes no time in sizing up Raines as an enormous asshole. Still, orders are orders. Stewart allows Raines to continue with the hanging with the understanding that none of his men will have anything to do with it and Raines had better be on his way the second the deed is done.

As his last request, Keyes asks the chaplain to find Mark and see him safely brought to the McIvers in Colorado. The chaplain agrees, probably just relieved to be off the hook from his impulsive decision to adopt the kid himself, and escorts Keyes to the gallows. Raines slips the noose around Keyes’ neck and is ready to drop him when Mark and Rosie come to the rescue. Keyes drops but the scaffold is destroyed before he’s hung. In the ensuing melee, Keyes is able to escape with Rosie but Mark is recaptured.

Raines takes off in hot pursuit but eventually is forced back to the fort for reinforcements. However, Captain Stewart informs him that the case is officially closed. Raines’ orders were to hang Keyes and Keyes has now been hung. Whether or not he died is irrelevant. Stewart’s not going to hang a man for the same crime twice. The chaplain rides out to let Keyes know he’s a free man and deliver Mark. Sadly, Rosie was fatally wounded in the getaway. After a proper funeral, Keyes, Mark and Thirsty saddle up and head north for what they hope will be a happy reunion in Colorado.

In his memoir The Garner Files, James Garner is pretty harsh on One Little Indian. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” he writes. “This is one of them.” Part of me wants to push back against that sentiment and say it’s not that bad. But I appreciate Garner’s candor and far be it from me to disagree with someone who always seemed to possess a healthy and accurate degree of self-evaluation. He’s right. One Little Indian sucks.

In its meager defense, Garner himself is always a pleasure to watch. I’m not going to say he’s doing his best because I don’t think he was and frankly, the material didn’t deserve his best. Even so, you can’t help but like him no matter how weak the movie. James Garner made Polaroid commercials fun to watch. Of course he elevates this.

The same is true of Pat Hingle, who gets probably the most purely satisfying scene in the movie when he chews out Sgt. Raines. And it’s still fun watching Jodie Foster grow up on screen. In the year between this and Napoleon And Samantha, she’d had a smallish role in the Raquel Welch roller derby movie Kansas City Bomber, starred as Becky Thatcher opposite Johnny Whitaker in the Sherman Brothers non-Disney musical Tom Sawyer, and done a bunch of live-action and animated TV work. One Little Indian would be her last Disney movie for a little while. The next time we see her in this column, her career will be in a very different place.

Unfortunately, everything else about One Little Indian is bottom-of-the-barrel Disney at its worst. The comedic hijinks of the camels aren’t that funny and they’re shoehorned in between mawkish melodrama about Mark’s quest for a real family. As in The Light In The Forest, McEveety and Spalding are either unwilling or unable to admit that Mark’s family was the Cheyenne who raised him. But James MacArthur’s character in The Light In The Forest was older than Mark, so that movie was a bit more interesting in its depiction of the tension between his two sides. Mark’s ten years old. As far as we know, he doesn’t remember his birth parents at all. So if you’re not prepared to address his relationship with the Cheyenne, and Spalding and McEveety most definitely are not, you’re just not engaging with this material in any meaningful way.

Mark doesn’t display much personality at all. He keeps saying he wants to get back to Blue Feather but he doesn’t show it. And we get absolutely no indication what Blue Feather thinks about him. So it’s really difficult to care what happens to this kid, even after the chaplain, Keyes, Doris, Martha and half the camp go on about how much they want to help him. I feel worse for the camels than I do for Mark.

At the end of the day, James Garner wasn’t the only one who didn’t care for One Little Indian. The movie was released June 20, 1973. It ended up making about $2 million which, even in 1973, was not a lot. It came and went quickly, leaving barely a ripple to mark its passing. And yet, Garner still owed the studio another picture. Something tells me he hoped to knock it out and get it over with as quickly as possible.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

Like this post? Help support Disney Plus-Or-Minus and Jahnke’s Electric Theatre on Ko-fi!

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Wild Country

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Wild Country

In their 2021 book The Boys: A Memoir Of Hollywood And Family, brothers Ron and Clint Howard dedicate the better part of an entire chapter to the summer they spent in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, filming The Wild Country. It was a formative experience for them both and their memories of the summer of ’69 are warm and fond. It’s a good book. You should check it out. But I think it’s fair to say that the Howard Brothers have spent more time thinking about The Wild Country over the past 50 years than most of us. It’s not a bad movie. In fact, it’s pretty good. But it’s definitely one of the deeper cuts in this column.

The Wild Country had actually been in development at the studio for quite a while. Disney bought the rights to Ralph Moody’s book Little Britches, the first in a popular series of autobiographical stories, back in the late 1950s. Now this is pure conjecture on my part, so don’t sic Leonard Maltin on me if I’m wrong. But at that time, The Wild Country almost certainly would have been being developed as a vehicle for Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcoran. The personalities of and dynamic between brothers Virgil and Andy Tanner is exactly like roles played by Kirk and Corcoran in Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog and many others. But Kirk started to be on the outs with the studio around the time he and Corcoran made Bon Voyage! in 1961. Between that and the disappointing reception to the Old Yeller sequel, Savage Sam, it’s little wonder that The Wild Country ended up on the shelf.

Producer Ron Miller dusted off Moody’s book and brought on board a whole bunch of TV people. Screenwriters Calvin Clements Jr. and Paul Savage had both worked on the TV western Gunsmoke, as had director Robert Totten. Of course, Gunsmoke ran for twenty seasons, so odds are everybody involved with The Wild Country worked on Gunsmoke sooner or later in some capacity.

Clements later wrote a few Wonderful World Of Disney episodes, including Justin Morgan Had A Horse and The Flight Of The Grey Wolf. He was later a writer and producer on such series as Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, Matt Houston and Walker, Texas Ranger. Savage also continued to work in television on shows like The Dukes Of Hazzard and Murder, She Wrote. He returned to the studio years later writing an installment of the late 80s revival of Davy Crockett for The Magical World Of Disney.

As for Robert Totten, he had directed dozens of TV episodes but few feature films. He’d made an independent war movie in 1963 called The Quick And The Dead that starred Victor French and Star Trek fixture Majel Barrett. His next movie was Death Of A Gunfighter starring Richard Widmark. Widmark hated Totten and had him fired, bringing in Don Siegel to finish the picture. Siegel refused to put his name on it, since Totten only had about a week left to shoot when he was let go. But Totten didn’t want his name on it, either, so Death Of A Gunfighter became the first movie directed by the pseudonymous Allen Smithee.

In The Boys, Ron Howard describes Totten as a Peckinpah-like figure who aspired to make tough, independent movies but never quite got the breaks he needed. For Disney, he’d already made a couple of TV two-parters like Ride A Northbound Horse and he’d do a couple more after The Wild Country, including The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle. He was also a bit of a mentor to young Ronny, who even then wanted to be a director. Totten was encouraging and took the time to explain his methodology to Howard, who was 15 at the time. Howard says Totten was the first director who didn’t treat him like a kid. That’s a lot better legacy than simply being remembered as the original Allen Smithee.

The artist formerly known as Ronny Howard was squarely in the awkward teen years of child stardom in the summer of ’69. In 1967, Howard made his Disney debut in A Boy Called Nuthin’, a two-parter for Wonderful World Of Color. The Andy Griffith Show went off the air in 1968. Since then, he’d popped up in a few guest spots on shows like (surprise, surprise) Gunsmoke and his little brother Clint’s show, Gentle Ben. But The Wild Country was his highest profile project since the Opie days.

Clint Howard first made his way to Disney via animation. He’d been the voice of Roo in the Winnie The Pooh shorts and the young elephant in The Jungle Book. This wasn’t the first time Clint and Ron had worked together but I believe it is the first and possibly only time they played brothers on-screen. Their dad, Rance Howard, also appears in The Wild Country as a cowhand on the bad guy’s ranch.

The boys’ on-screen father was played by Steve Forrest, the thick-haired, mustachioed single father from Rascal. When I wrote that column, I was under the impression that Forrest only made one Disney feature, which just goes to show how far under the radar this film has flown. I’d clocked the title on Forrest’s filmography but had assumed The Wild Country was a TV production. Anyway, I like Forrest, so I’m glad to see him back. I’m pretty sure this really will be Forrest’s only other appearance in this column but I’ve been wrong before.

The Wild Country was Vera Miles’ fourth Disney movie, following A Tiger Walks, Those Calloways and Follow Me, Boys! She’d already appeared as Clint’s mom in Gentle Giant, the 1967 movie that begat Gentle Ben. Miles’ concerned mom roles for Disney were all fairly similar and pretty thankless. Nevertheless, she must have enjoyed working for the studio. We’ll be seeing her a couple more times.

We’ve seen rugged tales of the frontier in this column before and you can rest assured we’ll be seeing them again. In its broad strokes, The Wild Country isn’t too dissimilar from earlier Disney westerns. The Tanner family arrives in Wyoming full of hope for the future, having left Pittsburgh for reasons that are never made entirely clear but are apparently irreversible. Jim Tanner (Forrest) has purchased a farm at a rock-bottom price from his fast-talking cousin Phil (Dub Taylor, last seen here in The Adventures Of Bullwhip Griffin). The Tanners don’t know a whole lot about farming but they’re determined to make it work.

They’re in for a rude awakening when they arrive at the property to discover that their fixer-upper farm needs a lot more fixer-uppering than Cousin Phil let on. Their second surprise is finding a trapper named Thompson (Jack Elam, making his first Disney western feature after the crime comedy Never A Dull Moment, although he’d appeared on a few episodes of Zorro) and his pet wolf sleeping in their house. Thompson roams the country with his Indian buddy, Two Dog (Frank DeKova, last seen impersonating a Native American in Those Calloways), and they’ll prove helpful in the months ahead.

Thompson warns Jim to head back to Pittsburgh now and save his family the trouble of trying to work this land. The Tanners aren’t the first people to work this farm. The problem is that all the water comes from the land above owned by a real piece of work named Ab Cross (Morgan Woodward, not seen around these parts since making his film debut in The Great Locomotive Chase and Westward Ho, The Wagons!). Even though Jim’s deed plainly states that he’s entitled to all the water above a certain mark on Ab’s dam, he routinely shuts off the supply come summer.

After Ab’s cattle trespasses on to the Tanner farm and destroys Kate’s garden, Jim and Virgil decide to pay a neighborly call on Ab and work things out in a civilized manner. When Jim threatens to get the law involved, Ab and his gang of roughnecks laugh in his face. Seems there ain’t no law in Jackson’s Hole, a fact that local shopkeeper Jensen (Karl Swenson) later backs up. Since the nearest marshal is in Cheyenne, Jim writes him a letter and bides his time.

This was not the outcome Ab was hoping for. When he and the boys run into the Tanners at the general store, Ab tries to get Jim to settle their differences the old-fashioned way. Jim doesn’t want to get sucked into a fight in front of his wife and kids but Ab leaves him no choice. It’s a brutal fight, especially by Disney standards, and even though both men are left reeling, Ab gets the worst of it. Humiliated in front of his men, Ab shuts off the water supply completely.

Jim decides to ride to Cheyenne himself but before he can go, Virgil sneaks up to Ab’s property and tries to unblock the dam. Jim rides after him, preferring to let the law run its slow, natural course. But when Ab finds the Tanners trespassing on his dam, he comes out firing, shooting Jim in the leg.

Temporarily beaten, the Tanners return home so Jim can recover. But it isn’t long before a tornado tears through, devastating the farm and wiping out what little progress the Tanners have made. This is one calamity too many for Kate, who finally decides enough is enough. The family is going back to Pennsylvania. Jim lets her have her say, then quietly but firmly takes her aside to let her know they’re not going anywhere. I’m sure this is meant to come across as a positive message about the resilience of family but given everything that’s happened, it comes across as borderline abusive.

While Jim is reminding Kate who wears the pants, the Marshal finally shows up (and he’s played by Larry D. Mann, probably best known as the voice of Yukon Cornelius in the Christmas classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer!). They head on up to Ab’s place, who petulantly agrees to get the water flowing again. That should be the end of it but because Ab Cross is such an unrepentant asshole, you know the Tanners aren’t out of the woods yet, right?

That night, the Tanners are celebrating their victory when Andy goes outside to find their barn in flames. While they scramble to put out the fire, Ab skulks out from the shadows and shoots Jim again! In the back! Kate wallops him with a two by four and does her best to fend him off. But just as Ab is about to finish Jim off, Virgil emerges from the house with a rifle and kills Ab. The next day, Ab’s men come to collect the body and, with much apologetic hand-wringing, admit their boss went a smidge too far. They vow to pitch in and get the Tanners back on their feet.

Alternate theatrical poster for The Wild Country

Considering that The Wild Country evokes memories of several earlier Disney westerns, none of which were all that great to begin with, it’s a little surprising that this movie works as well as it does. Clint Howard’s character, Andy, is very much cut from the Kevin Corcoran cloth. He spends most of the movie attempting to trap various animals, including a skunk, a porcupine and a hawk, to keep as pets, all of which he names Ralph. But Clint’s not as uncontrollably manic as Kevin was and his antics don’t overshadow the rest of the movie. He’s also effective in dramatic scenes, like when he breaks down over the prospect of his mom heading back to Pittsburgh.

The movie’s biggest problem, and it’s far from a deal-breaker, is that it feels more like an extended episode of a TV show than a movie. Maybe it’s the lingering influence of all the Gunsmoke alumni. Part of that is the very episodic story. There’s another subplot about Virgil accidentally shooting at a wild horse that turns out to be pregnant. He misses her but she injures herself in a fall. Thompson and Two Dog are summoned to help deliver the filly (which is actually shown on camera), who Andy of course names Ralph. The whole sequence feels like a Very Special Episode of The Wild Country.

The movie might feel more cinematic if Disney treated it with more respect. The Wild Country is not currently available on Disney+ and the only way you can see it at all is in an old-school TV-friendly 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Cinematographer Frank Phillips seems to do a lovely job capturing the Wyoming landscape. It’d be nice if we could actually see his work the way he intended it to be shown.

Robert Totten may never have become the next Sam Peckinpah but he knows his way around a camera and stacks his cast with great character actors from the golden age of westerns. Dub Taylor is a lot of fun in his small role and it’s always a treat to see Jack Elam. Morgan Woodward is eminently hissable as the bad guy. Whenever one of these old pros is on the screen, which is most of the time, the movie always has something fun to offer.

The weakest link in the cast is probably Ronny Howard. At this point in his career, he had a tendency to go big at the slightest provocation. Totten reels him in when it counts, like in the tense climax, but there are still plenty of moments where you wish he’d dial it back a notch or three. Kurt Russell was a little too old to play Virgil in 1970 but if the movie had been made a few years earlier, he’d have been better suited to the role.

Interestingly enough, Howard admits in The Boys that he was hoping the movie would be a flop before it premiered. He was actively trying to distance himself from his goody-two-shoes Opie Taylor image and he knew that The Wild Country would only cement it. As it happens, Howard got his wish. The Wild Country received some decent reviews but barely made a dent at the box office.

The same year he filmed The Wild Country, Ron Howard also performed a voice on the record The Story And Song From The Haunted Mansion, released to coincide with the opening of the Disneyland attraction. Later in 1970, he appeared in the boy and his dog drama Smoke, a two-parter for The Wonderful World Of Disney. And for a while, that seemed to mark the end of his association with the studio. A few years later, George Lucas cast him in American Graffiti and from there, he went on to Happy Days. Howard would eventually return to Disney as a director and his return launched a whole new era for the studio. But it’s a little surprising we won’t be seeing Ron Howard the actor in this column again. Clint, on the other hand, will be back.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

Like this post? Help support the Electric Theatre on Ko-fi!

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.

Like this post? Help support the Electric Theatre on Ko-fi!

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Those Calloways

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Those Calloways

By 1965, Walt Disney had perfected the art of making two very specific types of live-action pictures. His True-Life Adventures team, including writer, producer and narrator Winston Hibler, found their documentary skills transferred well to dramatic animal movies like Nikki, Wild Dog Of The North. At the same time, Walt continued to indulge his love of Americana with nostalgic period pieces like Pollyanna set in his favorite era, the early 1900s. Those Calloways gave him an opportunity to combine the two. The results are surprisingly effective.

Those Calloways is based on the novel Swiftwater by Paul Annixter, a prolific writer of young adult fiction primarily about nature and animals. Louis Pelletier, who had recently written Big Red, wrote the screenplay, reteaming him with Big Red’s director, Norman Tokar. Hibler produced the film, bringing along several True-Life Adventure veterans. Dick Borden, who had shot some of The Vanishing Prairie, captured the wild geese footage in the film. The other animal unit was run by Lloyd Beebe and William R. Koehler, fresh off their work on The Incredible Journey.

The animals are important to Those Calloways but they aren’t the focus of the film. Rather, this is a slice-of-life drama depicting a year in the life of the title family, husband Cam (Disney regular Brian Keith), wife Liddy (Vera Miles, last seen as Keith’s wife in A Tiger Walks) and son Bucky (Brandon De Wilde). They live up in the mountains outside the little New England town of Swiftwater, where they’re viewed as local eccentrics. Cam was raised by the Mi’kmaq Indians (and as soon as you heard that bit of news, you could probably figure out why Disney+ slapped its standard “outdated cultural depictions” disclaimer on this). His upbringing has given him a deep affinity for nature, especially the wild geese considered to be a totem of the Mi’kmaq. This marks Cam as a bit of an outsider in a town where most everyone else hunts geese for food and/or sport.

Now before you get all excited and retroactively nominate Those Calloways for a PETA Award, be aware that Cam earns his living as a fur-trapper. And if you watch the movie through 2021 goggles, that dichotomy is going to cause some cognitive dissonance for you. Just keep in mind that conservationism was not an all-or-nothing proposition back in the 1910s. Living off the land very much included hunting, fishing and trapping in order to survive. You can do all that and still be against hunting for sport without being considered a hypocrite.

Cam has big plans for this trapping season, heading out to untapped land that the Mi’kmaq believe holds bad energy. They seem to have a point about that. Cam and Bucky are only on their first preliminary scouting expedition when Cam falls and breaks his leg. With his dad out of commission, Bucky heads out on his own. After the first day, he discovers a wolverine is killing all the game along his trapping line. Bucky and his faithful dog, Sounder, track the wolverine back to its den underneath an enormous treefall. After some intense close-quarters combat, Bucky manages to kill the wolverine with a hatchet, salvaging the season.

Despite a record haul of furs (including enough to make Liddy an ermine wrap as a surprise Christmas present), the market bottoms out. The furs go for less than five hundred bucks, which Liddy assumes will go toward paying off their mortgage. But Cam can’t let go of his dream of building a sanctuary for the geese and spends the entire sum on a down payment for a piece of land with a lake. Liddy is understandably upset but when push comes to shove and the Calloways are evicted from their home, she stands by her man, encouraging him to build a bigger, better cabin by the lake.

A lack of money means that work on the new house and sanctuary proceeds slowly at first (there’s even some shades of Swiss Family Robinson in the Calloways’ makeshift shelter by the lake). But soon traveling salesman Dell Fraser (Philip Abbott of Miracle Of The White Stallions) turns up, claiming to be a fellow nature-lover. He offers Cam some literal seed money to plant the corn Cam believes will bring the geese down to the lake. In reality, Dell represents an investor who plans on turning Swiftwater into a sportsman’s paradise, providing Cam’s plan guarantees that the geese will stop every year.

Not everyone in town has ulterior motives. The other villagers band together and volunteer for a community roof-raising, complete with a couple original songs by the Sherman Brothers! With the Calloways’ new home finished, everything looks on track for a happy ending. But then the geese come back, along with Dell and his entourage of wealthy hunters. When Cam gets wise to what’s happening, he burns down the corn and confronts the hunters, accidentally ending up with a bellyful of buckshot. A town meeting is arranged and while Cam recovers from his wounds, the townsfolk vote to reject Dell and his slick, out-of-town friends. Now you can have your happy ending.

I’ll be honest with you. I had very little expectation of enjoying Those Calloways. And for a while, it looked as though I wouldn’t. With a run time of over two hours, the film is leisurely to a fault and crams in a whole lot of extraneous business. I haven’t even mentioned the burgeoning romance between Bucky and shopkeeper’s daughter, Bridie Mellott (future Dynasty star Linda Evans, making her only Disney appearance). Or the rivalry between Bucky and mechanic Whit Turner (future Nostromo captain Tom Skerritt, who would later romance Hayley Mills in the made-for-TV The Parent Trap II). Or the semi-domesticated bear who hibernates in the Calloways’ root cellar. Or Cam’s occasional struggles with alcohol. Clearly, there’s a lot going on in Those Calloways.

But this is a movie that sneaks up on you and before I knew it, I was invested in these characters. It’s an uneven movie but its high points cover up a lot of sins. For instance, Tokar does a great job staging the wolverine sequence. The claustrophobic cinematography by Edward Colman and tight editing by Grant K. Smith creates a sense of real danger. It’s so good that it’s easy to forget that it’s preceded by several banal minutes of Sounder just scampering through the snow, chasing after weasels and other woodland critters.

Theatrical release poster for Those Calloways

The film’s stars work overtime bringing the audience into the story. Brian Keith and Vera Miles make for a compelling, believable couple. There’s a lot that goes unsaid between them but the way they look at each other speaks volumes. In their first scene together, Keith seems to be apologizing for an earlier fight. We never learn the details of what happened between them but it’s enough to tell us that things aren’t always easy between these two.

Those Calloways offers Vera Miles a much better showcase than her largely unnecessary role in A Tiger Walks. She has several terrific moments but the Christmas scene is by far the most moving. Even before she opens her gift, she takes her time admiring the wrapping and speculating what might be inside. When Cam and Bucky try to hurry her up, she refuses to be rushed. She’s not getting another present until next year, so she wants to savor the moment. When she sees the ermine wrap, she breaks down sobbing, overcome with emotion. Is this all a little bit corny? You bet. Does it work anyway? Absolutely. Miles sells it for all she’s worth. She’ll be back in this column before too long.

Brandon De Wilde was a somewhat unusual choice for a Disney star in that he was already famous by the time Walt signed him. He’d been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the movie Shane when he was just 11 years old, making him one of the youngest nominees in a competitive category ever. Since then he’d worked steadily in film and television. Walt hired him to star opposite Brian Keith in The Tenderfoot, a Wonderful World Of Color three-parter released theatrically overseas.

De Wilde’s a good actor and a natural Disney star. He’s good-looking, earnest and capable of handling the physical stuff, even when the just-barely-adequate fight choreography lets him down. But he never made another Disney film after Those Calloways. He stayed busy on stage and television but struggled to establish himself in movies, in part because he looked young for his age even by Disney standards. He harbored aspirations to break into music, becoming close friends with Gram Parsons. But in 1972, Brandon De Wilde was killed in a car accident in Colorado. He was just 30 years old.

De Wilde had also worked with costar Walter Brennan before. Brennan was a three-time Academy Award winner now in the autumn years of his career. Those Calloways marked his first Disney project but it won’t be his last. We’ll also see Ed Wynn again, whose performance as the slightly deaf Ed Parker is downright restrained by Ed Wynn standards.  

One name we won’t be seeing in this column again is composer Max Steiner. Steiner was a Hollywood legend having composed the scores to such classics as King Kong, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca and countless others. He had never worked for Disney before but in a way, his rendezvous with Walt seems inevitable. Critics of Steiner’s old-fashioned style of film music consistently accuse him of “Mickey Mousing”, the overly-precise synchronization of on-screen movement to music. Like a glissando to accompany throwing an object or a descending scale when a character walks down a flight of stairs. Steiner’s Those Calloways score largely avoids those pitfalls. And if it doesn’t rank among his best work, it’s still a fine score. Unfortunately, it would end up being his last before his death in 1971.

Those Calloways struggled to find an audience in 1965 and critics were split. Quite honestly, I don’t blame them one bit. This is a long, imperfect movie that squeezes all of its best stuff into the middle. It takes a little too long to get going and then a lot longer than necessary to wrap things up. But it’s a rewarding picture for those who can meet it halfway with some beautiful cinematography, excellent performances and real heart. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and I get it. But if you’re on the fence, give it a shot. You may be pleasantly surprised.

VERDICT: Despite its flaws, this is a Disney Plus.  

Like this post? Help support the Electric Theatre on Ko-fi!

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: A Tiger Walks

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's A Tiger Walks

When you see the words “Walt Disney Presents” at the beginning of a film, you probably have certain expectations about what you’re going to get. If there is comedy, it will be broad. If there is danger, it won’t be particularly threatening. The virtues of small-town American life will be extolled and a warm feeling of sentimental nostalgia will cover everything like a down comforter. Almost every single one of those expectations goes unmet in the deeply odd 1964 film A Tiger Walks.

Director Norman Tokar, who joined the studio with Big Red and Savage Sam, moves from dogs to cats with this one. Lowell S. Hawley, who most recently had written In Search Of The Castaways, based his screenplay on a novel by Scottish author Ian Niall. Hawley transports the action from Wales to the US but apart from that change, I don’t know how closely the film follows Niall’s book. But Niall isn’t really known as a children’s or young adult writer, so I’m guessing A Tiger Walks wasn’t necessarily intended for young readers.

Our story takes place in the remote little town of Scotia located in what appears to be the Pacific Northwest, although the state itself goes unnamed. A traveling circus passes through and the truck carrying the tigers gets a flat tire. The local service station doesn’t stock tires that size, so while they’re waiting, the two tiger handlers Josef Pietz (Theodore Marcuse) and Ram Singh (Sabu in what ended up being his final role before his unexpected death at the age of 39) head over to the hotel bar for an early happy hour.

Pietz ends up getting good and drunk, so when he returns to find a crowd of children hanging around clamoring for a peek at the tigers, he’s only too happy to oblige. He jabs the big cats with a stick, riling them up. When he foolishly opens the cage a crack, Raja, the male tiger, makes a break for it. The kids scatter and Raja corners two of them, the sheriff’s daughter Julie (Pamela Franklin) and her friend Tom (Kevin “Moochie” Corcoran), in a dead-end alley. But rather than attacking, Raja leaps a fence and makes for the hills with Pietz and Mr. Singh in hot pursuit.

Sheriff Pete Williams (Disney regular Brian Keith) returns to organize a search party before dense fog moves into the area. They haven’t gone far before one of the men literally stumbles over the mutilated body of Josef Pietz. This is too much for most of the posse and they head for the safety of their homes.

Meanwhile, a local aspiring journalist (Doodles Weaver) has contacted the editor of the area’s biggest newspaper. By the time Sheriff Pete makes it back to town, a media circus has descended on the hotel determined to milk the story for all its worth. While the sheriff tries to prevent a panic, the hotel’s owner (Una Merkel) is charging reporters and other curiosity seekers double her normal rates. She even rents her office to the sheriff as a temporary headquarters. No wonder she glides around the place singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” while everybody else is barricading their doors and windows.

Temporarily stymied by the fog, the reporters decide to capture some human interest shots of Julie and Tom feeding the baby tigers. During her interview, Julie speaks out of turn and says her father has promised to capture Raja alive. Word gets back to the governor (Edward Andrews, one of Disney’s favorite avatars of ineffectual authority), who happens to be up for reelection. One of his advisers (Jack Albertson) convinces him that the sheriff is bungling the job, so the governor orders the National Guard to take over.

The sheriff asks the guardsmen to wait until the fog has lifted but the trigger-happy soldiers are eager to start their tiger hunt. Sure enough, it isn’t long before one of them accidentally shoots an old man (Arthur Hunnicutt). He had spotted Raja by his place, ran off the road in the fog and was coming down the mountain on foot to bring the news. Not wanting to risk another accident, the soldiers retreat to wait out the fog.

By this point, Julie’s impromptu press conference has become a children’s crusade thanks to a TV host named Uncle Harry (Harold Peary) who bears a slight resemblance to one Walter Elias Disney. Kids across the country are staging “Save That Tiger” demonstrations and sending in cash donations to purchase the tigers from the circus. Neither Sheriff Pete or the governor are pleased by this turn of events but the sheriff swears he’ll do his best, borrowing a tranquilizer gun from a nearby school.

Eventually the fog lifts and the soldiers spot the tiger from a helicopter. While the soldiers move in from the front, Mr. Singh figures that the noise will drive Raja further up the hill so they move to outflank him with nets. Julie and Tom arrive at the last minute with the tranquilizer rifle. Raja leaps and mauls Pete’s shoulder but not before the sheriff gets a dart in him. The soldiers arrive too late but the governor still wants them to pump a few bullets into the now harmless tiger. Pete intervenes, the tigers are donated to the zoo and the governor loses his bid for reelection, while Sheriff Pete is elected to another term.

There’s just a whole lot going on in this movie and none of it is your typical Disney fare. The cynical look at all the opportunists looking to exploit the situation comes across as Preston Sturges Lite. It’s not as clever or biting as Sturges would have been but it’s pretty sharp for Disney. This is one of Walt’s few films to depict smalltown America in anything less than glowing terms. Most of the folks who live in Scotia are quick to panic and only too happy to take advantage of out-of-towners.

This all plays out against the suspense of tracking down the loose tiger and those scenes are deadly serious. Tokar and cinematographer William E. Snyder make great use of shadows and fog. When Raja stalks the old farmer in his barn, the scene feels like something out of a horror movie. The juxtaposition works surprisingly well and A Tiger Walks could have been a minor classic if it had been produced by anybody other than Walt Disney. The Disney touch softens everything just enough to turn this into a curiosity piece.

Walt attracted an impressive cast of familiar faces and newcomers to this oddity. We’ve obviously seen Brian Keith in this column before and we’ll see him again. The great Vera Miles made her Disney debut as Keith’s wife. She’ll also be back soon. Pamela Franklin had only made a few film and TV appearances, including a role in the Wonderful World Of Color production The Horse Without A Head. A Tiger Walks was her only Disney feature. She’d go on to win acclaim in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and as a scream queen in such horror classics as And Soon The Darkness and The Legend Of Hell House.

This would be the last major film appearance for Kevin Corcoran, who has been a near constant presence and frequent source of irritation here since Old Yeller. And yet, he will be back in this column. After A Tiger Walks, he graduated high school and went to college, where he majored in theatre arts. After graduation, he went back to Disney to work behind the scenes. The next time Moochie appears in this column, it will be as an assistant director and producer in the 1970s. Later in life, he’d be a producer on the TV shows The Shield and Sons Of Anarchy, which is kind of wild to think about.

A Tiger Walks came out on March 12, 1964. Critics greeted it with confusion, trying to figure out who exactly this picture was aimed at. That question remained a mystery as audiences stayed away for the most part. The budget probably wasn’t high enough to make it an outright bomb but it certainly didn’t make much of a dent at the box office. Even today, A Tiger Walks is a bit of a head-scratcher. It’s not available on Disney+ and the studio has never released it on Blu-ray. You can only get it on DVD as a Disney Movie Club Exclusive. It isn’t a great movie but for the curious, it’s worth a look. It’s certainly unlike any other Disney movie from the era.

VERDICT: I’m glad I watched it, so let’s call it a minor Disney Plus.

Like this post? Help support the Electric Theatre on Ko-fi!