Walter Catlett

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Davy Crockett And The River Pirates

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Davy Crockett And The River Pirates

Davy Crockett At The Alamo, the third and supposedly final episode of Disneyland’s Crockett miniseries, aired February 13, 1955. The title of that episode would seem to indicate a fairly definitive conclusion to the Crockett saga. But 40 million viewers, a wildly profitable theatrical release and millions upon millions of dollars in Crockett merchandise changed those plans very quickly. By November, Crockett was back on the air for Disneyland’s second season.

The two new episodes proved to be just as popular as the originals. So since the studio had already struck paydirt with a theatrical release, they had nothing to lose by trying to pull it off a second time. Davy Crockett And The River Pirates hit theatres July 18, 1956. Perfect timing for crowds of Crockett-crazed, coonskin-cap-wearing kids just starting to get bored as summer vacation hits its peak.

Having covered the highlights of Crockett’s actual life in the first film, director Norman Foster and writer Tom Blackburn allow themselves to play a bit more fast and loose in the prequel. As the rewritten lyrics to “The Ballad Of Davy Crockett” make plain during the opening credits, “Most of his chores for freedom and fun / Got turned into legends and this here is one.” In other words: calm down, history nerds. We’re all just having a good time here.

It’s hard to say whether or not Walt always intended to release the new episodes as a feature. They would have been in production at roughly the same time Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier was being rushed into theaters. But even though nobody knew for sure if that gamble would pay off, it was a low-stakes risk, so it would make sense for Foster and Blackburn to have a potential theatrical release in the back of their minds.

That could explain why Davy Crockett And The River Pirates feels less episodic than its predecessor, despite the fact that it’s literally two television episodes stitched together. This time out, Davy (Fess Parker) and his faithful sidekick George (Buddy Ebsen) are taking a load of furs downriver where they’ll fetch a higher price. They attempt to book passage on a keelboat owned by Mike Fink, “King of the River” (Jeff York). He agrees to take them…for $1,000.

Balking at Mike Fink’s terms, Davy and Georgie hit up the only other boat in town, owned by old-timer Cap’n Cobb (Clem Bevans). Cobb’s crew has run off, frightened by rumors of murdering bands of Indian pirates along the Ohio River. But Cobb reckons he could muster up a new crew if men knew that Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter, was on board. Davy’s not one to toot his own horn but he’s willing to let folks believe the legends if it means a free boat ride.

Davy and Georgie split up to find some able-bodied rivermen. Georgie thinks he’s found a likely candidate when he runs into a pugnacious redhead named Jocko (Kenneth Tobey, who had already appeared as Colonel Jim Bowie in the previous film). But Jocko already works for Mike Fink, King of the River. Mike Fink and Jocko proceed to get George blind drunk. By the time Davy catches up with him, George has challenged Mike Fink to a race, betting their entire load of pelts that they’ll reach New Orleans first.

As the race gets underway, Mike Fink resorts to every dirty trick in the book. He sends Davy down a channel full of dangerous rapids. He sabotages their rudder. He gloats when Davy’s sense of decency and fair play causes delays. Davy comes to the rescue when they’re attacked by the Indian pirates, even though Mike Fink insists he could have easily handled the situation himself. Like Davy, Mike Fink even has his own theme song, although you get the idea that he wrote it himself and forced everybody else to learn it.

But in the end, hard work and decency pay off as Davy edges out a victory. A humbled Mike Fink lives up to his end of the bargain, eating his own hat, and the King of the River and the King of the Wild Frontier part as friends. They haven’t gone far before Davy and George are captured by a Chickasaw hunting party. Brought before the Chief, Davy learns that war is about to break out. Whites have been murdering Indians suspected of piracy but the Chief insists that there are no Indian pirates.

Davy and George promise to get to the bottom of the mystery and reteam with Mike Fink to trap the pirates. With Mike Fink disguised as a rich banker, the team spreads the word that they’re traveling with sacks and sacks of gold. They attract the attention of Colonel Plug (Walter Catlett), a traveling peddler and musician, who readily accepts the invitation to join them.

Plug turns out to be the advance man for the river pirates, led by Samuel Mason (Mort Mills) and the Harpe brothers (Paul Newlan and Frank Richards). Disguised as Indians, the river pirates attack, only to be laid low by Davy and his men. The river is cleared, the good name of the Chickasaw is restored and Davy and Georgie are off to their next adventure.

The tone of Davy Crockett And The River Pirates is much, much lighter than the first film. Jeff York’s performance sets the tone as he and his men pitch everything way over the top. These are broad, physical performances that are playing for the cheap seats way in the back. But surprisingly, it doesn’t quite become overbearing. Fess Parker’s laid-back, easy-going performance grounds the movie and prevents it from spiraling out of control.

Buddy Ebsen also benefits from the new direction. He’s a more active participant here, occasionally causing problems but more often helping to solve them. Ebsen’s gift for physical comedy is given a proper showcase in his drunk scene and his comedic timing is pitch perfect throughout. It’s a little surprising that Disney didn’t cast him more often after this. Buddy Ebsen will only appear once more in this column, well after The Beverly Hillbillies made him into a household name.

The tone of Davy Crockett And The River Pirates is very much in keeping with Disney’s animated tall tales and legends like Paul Bunyan. Parts of the film feel just like a live-action cartoon, like the display of trick shooting put on by Mike Fink and Davy. It would be completely understandable if you walked away from this movie assuming that Foster and Blackburn had invented the whole story.

But there’s more here based on historical fact than you might think. Mike Fink was a real person, the self-proclaimed “King of the Keelboaters”. He was a blowhard and a loudmouth who loved nothing more than promoting his own myth. Disney sanded down some of his rough edges and was smart to pair him with Davy Crockett. He makes a great foil and partner here.

Samuel Mason, the Harpe brothers and the River Pirates are also rooted in fact. Mason did indeed lead a group of pirates, disguised as Indians, along the Ohio River. The film was even shot at Cave-In-Rock, the very location Mason used as a base of operations. Davy Crockett had nothing to do with bringing them to justice but the historical mishmash of characters and incidents makes sense.

The Harpe brothers are really only identified in passing, which also makes sense. If Mike Fink’s character had to be softened before he could be included in a Disney movie, the Harpes had to be completely sanitized and disinfected. In real life, they were notorious outlaws, sometimes cited as America’s first serial killers. Even Mason thought they went too far. He was so disgusted by their savage nature that he kicked them out of the river pirates gang. It’s a little bit like if The Shaggy D.A. just happened to be prosecuting Charlie Manson.

Like its predecessor, Davy Crockett And The River Pirates was a sizable hit at the box office. On TV, Disneyland would continue to mine Frontierland in search of the next Davy Crockett with miniseries like The Saga Of Andy Burnett, The Nine Lives Of Elfego Baca and Texas John Slaughter. None of these hit Crockett-levels of popularity and none of them warranted a domestic theatrical release.

It wouldn’t be until 1960 that another TV compilation hit theatres and it probably wasn’t the one Disney was expecting. For season seven of what was now titled Walt Disney Presents, Walt commissioned two new miniseries: Daniel Boone starring Dewey Martin and Zorro. Daniel Boone must have seemed like the natural successor to Davy Crockett but Zorro was the one to hit.

Adding insult to injury, four years later a freed-from-his-Disney-contract Fess Parker signed on to star in a different Daniel Boone TV series for NBC, coonskin cap and all. Parker’s Daniel Boone would run for six seasons, never quite eclipsing Davy Crockett in popularity but it did just fine. But Fess Parker still owed Disney some work before any of that could happen. He’ll be back in this column.

By 1988, Disney’s anthology TV series had morphed into The Magical World Of Disney and it was time to give Davy Crockett another shot. Davy Crockett: Rainbow In The Thunder was the first of several new adventures featuring Tim Dunigan (Captain Power himself!) as Davy. Johnny Cash appeared briefly as an older Davy, looking back on his life before heading to Texas. The New Adventures Of Davy Crockett didn’t exactly set the world on fire either, although I seem to recall them turning up on The Disney Channel fairly often.

Disney’s theatrical Davy Crockett features were an unqualified success. Over the years, made-for-TV productions would occasionally make the jump to the big screen. The practice became especially common overseas, in territories where the shows hadn’t aired yet. Walt’s insistence on giving TV productions feature-film budgets was paying off in a big way.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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An Honor To Be Nominated: Cain And Mabel

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THE CONTENDER: Cain And Mabel (1936)

Number of Nominations: 1 – Best Dance Direction (Bobby Connolly for “1000 Love Songs”)

Number of Wins: 0

When I expanded the parameters of this column to include any movie that had been nominated for any Academy Award, it was out of a desire to explore the fringes of Oscar history. There have been a lot of pictures nominated for a single award like Best Original Song or Best Make-Up whose achievement has been forgotten, sometimes rightly, sometimes not.

The Oscars’ early years are chockfull of curios like that. The biggest reason for this is simply that it took them a number of years to figure this shit out. The number of nominees in any given category could vary wildly, from as few as three to a dozen or more. At the 17th Academy Awards, 20 (!) movies were nominated for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. This was just a few years after several technical categories (including Cinematography) were split in half between Color and Black-and-White. That tradition lasted well into the 1960s, resulting in a whole lot of weirdly bloated categories.

And then there’s the case of the Categories That Time Forgot, defunct categories that were introduced, hung around for a year or three, then vanished. The very first ceremony had several that were immediately dropped, including Comedy Direction and Artistic Quality of Production. For a number of years, the Academy handed out special Juvenile Awards to outstanding child actors like Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. But those were non-competitive awards and only given out intermittently.

All of which brings us to today’s subject: the obscure musical comedy Cain And Mabel which racked up a single Academy Award nomination in the long-gone Best Dance Direction category. Even by Oscar standards, this was a weird one. It was given out only three times, from 1935 to 1937. And unlike most other categories which recognize the overall quality of the production, nominees for Best Dance Direction were honored for a specific dance sequence within a film. This is how you could end up with Merian C. Cooper’s adventure movie She competing against the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers classic Top Hat.

Cain And Mabel was directed by Lloyd Bacon, a man who knew his way around the dance floor thanks to his work on such musicals as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade. Marion Davies stars as Mabel O’Dare, a waitress at a busy New York cafeteria. She takes pity on suicidal ex-reporter Aloysius K. Reilly (Roscoe Karns, whose rat-a-tat delivery is immediately recognizable from classics like It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday), giving him a breakfast that was being sent back to the kitchen. After her altruism gets her fired, Reilly vows to make things right. Realizing that his propensity for making up phony stories made him a lousy reporter but would serve him well as a publicity agent, he takes the seemingly talentless Mabel on as his first client.

Reilly marches Mabel into the office of theatrical producer Jake Sherman, claiming they’re old friends and promising to get her an audition. But Reilly stops the first person who walks out the door, assuming he must be Sherman. It’s actually Broadway star Ronny Cauldwell (Robert Paige, then going under the name David Carlyle). For a laugh, Ronny pretends to be Sherman and says he’ll give Mabel a shot at the lead role if she comes to rehearsal the next day.

Mabel and Reilly show up at the appointed time and place where the real Sherman (Walter Catlett) is understandably confused. Fortunately for Mabel, she shows up just as Sherman’s temperamental star Toddy (Pert Kelton) throws a tantrum and threatens to quit (perhaps because her producer stopped rehearsal dead for a good five minutes to banter with some rando off the street). Feeling bad about the trick he played, Ronny convinces Sherman to give Mabel a shot. Of course he does and of course she gets the lead. Why not? It’s not like he has a stage full of chorus girls directly in front of him who would probably kill for an opportunity like this.

The untested Mabel works day and night to prepare for her Broadway debut. It’s the “night” part that brings prizefighter Larry Cain (Clark Gable) into her life. He has the hotel room directly beneath hers and her hoofing practice is preventing him from getting much-needed rest the night before a big fight. Why Mabel is practicing in a hotel and not, say, at the theatre or a rehearsal space is not clear, nor is it understandable why the management of the hotel sides with her over the comfort of literally every other guest but whatever. Mabel’s show goes on, Cain loses his fight, and the two go their separate ways, happy to be out of each other’s life.

Some time later (Weeks? Months? A year? Who knows?), Cain has fought his way to the top but receipts are down. It seems nobody really cares about Larry Cain. Mabel’s having the same problem. People think her show’s OK but don’t have any real investment in her. So Reilly concocts a plan to sell the press on a phony romance between the two, giving them both a much-needed public persona. Both are reluctant at first, hardly a surprise considering they can’t stand the sight of each other, but agree to the arrangement once they realize how many other jobs depend on them. I don’t want to go into spoiler alert territory but if you don’t think Cain and Mabel end up falling in love for real, please let me know how you enjoy your first movie after you see it.

Cain And Mabel is one of those zippy Hollywood confections that has no agenda other than to make you smile for 90 minutes. By that measure, it’s fairly successful. The script, credited to Laird Doyle and H.C. Witwer, is fast-paced and quippy. The story is ludicrous but it manages to work in themes like economic insecurity and the easily-manipulated media that are still relevant today.

Clark Gable was one of the biggest stars in the country, if not the world, at this time and every ounce of his considerable charm and charisma is on display. He has a relaxed, easy chemistry with the other members of his team, Allen Jenkins as corner man Dodo and William Collier Sr. as trainer Pops Walters. And it’s always a pleasure to see Roscoe Karns in action. He could read the want ads and make them sound hilarious.

But the real surprise here is Marion Davies, an actress who is too often given short shrift by movie fans today, most of whom I’d argue haven’t seen a single one of her films. Her career was overshadowed by her relationship with publisher William Randolph Hearst and his behind-the-scenes role in her career. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures was behind many of Davies’ films, including this one, which explains how such a trifling entertainment could boast such an extravagant budget. Today, too many people assume that the character of talentless singer Susan Alexander in Orson Welles’ Hearst-inspired Citizen Kane is an accurate depiction of Davies’ abilities. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Davies is a gifted comedic actress, more than holding her own against Gable and Karns. She’s tough, funny, sharp and even acquits herself reasonably well in the musical numbers. She’s no Ginger Rogers but she doesn’t need to be. Dance director Bobby Connolly finds other uses for her physicality that don’t require elaborate movements.

About that Oscar-nominated Dance Direction: Cain And Mabel is one of those “musicals” where the production numbers are part of the show within the show. There are two of them and both could be lifted out in their entirety without hurting either the narrative of the film or the integrity of the musical numbers. They’re that superfluous. Davies is involved in both but a couple of ringers are brought in to make her look good, vaudeville entertainer Sammy White and featured dancer Charles Teske. Both of them do their routines and vanish, never to be seen again.

Connolly’s nomination was for the second number, “1000 Love Songs”. The song itself by Harry Warren and Al Dubin is pretty unbearable, performed by Paige in a quavering falsetto. But the production surrounding it is jaw-dropping. Hearst supposedly paid upwards of $100,000 to have the roof of Warner Bros.’ Stage 7 raised 35 feet to accommodate the sets, which included a movable floor over a pool of water and enormous archways and sculptures. The sequence includes ethereal chorus girls suspended in midair, dozens more dancing everywhere you look, and elaborate costumes that render Davies completely immobile. In other words, it’s a number that would be impossible to stage in the Broadway theatre where it’s supposedly being performed.

The non-Oscar-nominated number, “Coney Island”, is even weirder. Sammy White does the song and dance around Davies, describing how they met and fell in love during a trip to Coney Island. Then, the set revolves, revealing a giant carousel. White and Davies proceed to promenade into the Wax Museum, where various historical figures come to life, including Napoleon, Julius Caesar and…um, Popeye. So if you thought Robin Williams was the first actor to play a live-action Popeye, guess again.

(If you’re wondering what the hell Popeye’s doing here, as I was…E.C. Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theatre featuring Popeye ran in the New York Journal and was syndicated by King Features Syndicate, both of which were owned at the time by, you guessed it, William Randolph Hearst. So there you go. Corporate synergy was alive and well even in 1936.)

In the end, Connolly lost the Oscar to The Great Ziegfeld, which also won Best Picture. He probably never stood much of a chance. Cain And Mabel had been a box-office flop and his competition included Swing Time, one of the very best Astaire-Rogers pictures. Connolly never did win an Oscar. The Best Dance Direction category was already a thing of the past by the time his best-known movie, a little thing called The Wizard Of Oz, was released. Marion Davies only made one more picture after this one before she retired to Hearst’s San Simeon estate. It would be decades before critics and audiences would begin to reappraise her work, a process that is still ongoing. As for Clark Gable, he grew his mustache back and continued to do pretty well for himself.

The Best Dance Direction category was a short-lived experiment. Even when musicals were at the height of their popularity, the Academy never really knew how to recognize achievements in choreography, opting instead to give honorary awards to people like Gene Kelly and Jerome Robbins. But, for a few years anyway, at least they could say they tried.

Cain And Mabel is available on DVD and Digital from the Warner Archive Collection.