Bernard McEveety

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Bears And I

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Bears And I

When The Bears And I was released on July 31, 1974, the movie’s biggest marquee name was not star Patrick Wayne, the son of the legendary John Wayne. It arguably wasn’t even Walt Disney, whose name had been attached to so many nature movies by then that audiences barely noticed them. It was John Denver, the country boy singer-songwriter who contributed the theme song, “Sweet Surrender”. The day The Bears And I hit theatres, Denver had the number one song in the country. “Annie’s Song” was Denver’s second number one hit and he was at or certainly near the height of his popularity. Of course, hit records don’t necessarily sell movie tickets. Usually it’s the other way around. Still, Denver’s involvement certainly helped raise the profile of a movie that would have otherwise looked like every other Disney nature movie of the past twenty-plus years.

The funny thing is The Bears And I isn’t just like every other Disney nature movie. Sure, there’s plenty of footage of cute woodland creatures frolicking in the forest. But that story is just part of a larger narrative involving (sigh, brace yourselves) Native Americans fighting to keep their land. I’ll give Disney credit for this much: they certainly made an effort to tell stories about Indigenous peoples and they were doing it at a time when almost nobody else was. They weren’t great at it and these movies inevitably end up saying more about the white folks telling the stories than the Natives they’re ostensibly about. But hey, “A” for effort, right?

Based on a book by Robert Franklin Leslie, the screenplay was written by TV veteran John Whedon. If that name sounds familiar, you may be familiar with his grandsons, Joss, Jed and Zack. The elder Whedon had written the four-episode series Kilroy for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color back in 1965. The Bears And I was one of only two feature films John Whedon wrote. We’ll be getting to the second one very soon.

Like most Disney nature movies, extensive voiceover narration is used to explain what the hell’s going on during the many dialogue-free sequences. For that, producer Winston Hibler brought in Jack Speirs. We’ve seen his name before on movies like Charlie The Lonesome Cougar and King Of The Grizzlies. This will be Speirs’ last appearance in this column. He next brought his animal expertise to short films, directing movies like A Tale Of Two Critters and The Footloose Fox released theatrically alongside animated features. 

This will also be the last time we see director Bernard McEveety’s name in this column. The eldest McEveety brother had the shortest Disney career, directing just three movies released between 1972 and 1974. He’d make one more Disney project, the TV-movie Donovan’s Kid in 1979. But he continued to be a wildly prolific TV director up until his retirement. His last credit was an episode of Simon & Simon in 1988. Bernard McEveety died of natural causes February 2, 2004, at the age of 79.

Patrick Wayne naturally started making movies with his dad, although his first credited role was in the 1955 West Point drama The Long Gray Line. John Wayne wasn’t in that one but it was directed by his old friend, John Ford. In 1959, Patrick Wayne made an early bid for stardom, taking the lead role in The Young Land, produced by Ford’s son, also named Patrick. It didn’t make much impact and Wayne went back to honing his craft in supporting roles, mostly with his father and/or John Ford.

When he signed on to The Bears And I, Patrick Wayne had just begun taking lead roles again. In 1973, he starred in the Filipino sci-fi movie Beyond Atlantis. When it flopped, producer John Ashley blamed it on the PG rating, something Wayne had insisted on before taking the part. Moving over to Disney was a much more natural fit for the family-oriented actor.

Wayne stars as Bob Leslie, a recently discharged serviceman making a pilgrimage to the Pacific Northwest. He’d planned on making this trip with his brother in arms, a Native American named Larch who’d grown up in the area. After Larch was killed in action, Bob took it upon himself to make the trek solo and deliver Larch’s personal effects to his father, Chief Peter A-Tas-Ka-Nay (Chief Dan George, last seen in the underwhelming Smith!).

While the word “Vietnam” is never once uttered in the movie itself, it’s understood that Bob is a Vietnam veteran. Unless I miss my guess, this is the first Disney movie to even obliquely refer to the Vietnam War, which makes it something of a landmark. Even after Walt’s death, Disney movies would bend over backwards to avoid referring to anything remotely unpleasant in the real world. So it’s a bit of an eye-opener when Bob bluntly states that Larch was killed by a mortar shell.

Chief Peter accepts his son’s bundle of personal items but nobody in the small settlement welcomes Bob with open arms. The closest thing to a friend is Oliver Red Fern (Michael Ansara, who was not Native but was frequently cast as one. You may recognize him as the Klingon Kang on Star Trek or the voice of Mr. Freeze on Batman: The Animated Series). Oliver runs the general store and agrees to rent Bob a very dilapidated cabin upriver when Bob announces his intention to stick around awhile.

Bob immediately gets on the bad side of Sam Eagle Speaker (Valentin de Vargas, a Latino actor best known for Touch Of Evil), the settlement’s token drunk. Sam harbors a deep mistrust of white people in general and Bob in particular. But since none of the locals seem all that fond of Sam either, Bob doesn’t pay him much mind.

Things go well for Bob at first. He fixes up the cabin as best he can and Chief Peter softens a bit, stopping by the cabin to give Bob some of Larch’s old tools and fishing gear. But the peace is shattered when Sam leads a hunting expedition that shoots and kills a mama bear. Bob finds her three orphaned cubs hiding up a tree. After luring them down with food, he decides to adopt them, as people invariably do in movies like this. He names the cubs Patch, Scratch and Rusty.

Bob doesn’t plan on keeping the bears indefinitely or domesticating them. He just can’t bring himself to leave them unprotected and alone. But he soon learns that’s exactly what he should have done when he brings the cubs along on a supply run. The Chief is furious that Bob has tied the bears up like dogs. He explains that theirs is a Bear Tribe and even though Bob’s intentions are good, what he’s doing is deeply offensive. Unless he frees the bears immediately, nothing but evil will befall the Taklute people.

Bob doesn’t take the warning super-seriously. Once he gets back to the cabin, his solution is to simply not bring the bears back to the general store. I kind of feel most people wouldn’t need to be told that but I guess you can’t blame a guy for wanting to show off his bear cubs.

But Bob’s reputation takes another hit when he gets a visit from a couple representatives from the National Park Service. Commissioner Gaines (Andrew Duggan) and his right hand man, John McCarten (Robert Pine, last seen in One Little Indian), have been trying to meet with the Taklute but the Natives make themselves scarce whenever they hear their seaplane approaching. Turns out the land has been earmarked for a new National Park and the Taklute need to relocate (although Gaines and McCarten assure Bob that the new land is even better than where they are now, which makes you wonder why they don’t just open a national park there instead). Bob promises to try and arrange a meeting but cautions that he doesn’t exactly have a lot of influence with the Elders.

Meanwhile, Bob’s still having a good time teaching the cubs everything he knows about being a bear. In fact, his experience has been so transformative that he’s decided to enroll in correspondence courses to study forestry. But when he goes to the general store to send away for his books, he’s surprised to receive an even frostier reception than usual. Oliver begrudgingly explains that Sam and the Chief saw him talking to the government men and everyone believes they’re all in cahoots since white folks stick to their own kind.

Bob is shocked and appalled by the accusation. He just can’t figure out what’s wrong with “you people”. (Note: making a drinking game out of the number of times the phrase “you people” is tossed around in this movie is not only dangerous, it also doesn’t make the expression any less cringy.) After all, the government is making a very generous offer! They didn’t have to do anything. They could have just come in, torn everything down and been done with it.

Shunned by “you people”, Bob returns to the cabin and gets ready for winter. Remembering that bears need to hibernate (perhaps he saw it in a True-Life Adventure), Bob opens up the root cellar to the three cubs. A few weeks later, Oliver pays a call to deliver Bob’s correspondence school materials. Some of the Taklute have had a change of heart, figuring most white people wouldn’t spend a harsh winter in a crappy cabin if they could help it. But when he finds out Bob still hasn’t set the bears free, Oliver warns him that he’ll lose all that good will if they’re still around in the spring.

When the warmer weather arrives, Bob finally decides to let the bears be bears and fend for themselves. Well, sort of. Recognizing an easy mark when they see one, the bears keep coming back and Bob keeps feeding them. Oliver and Chief Peter drop by with a letter just in time to see one of these visits. Bob tries the old “Hey, it’s not my fault if the bears just happen to come here on their own” excuse but the Chief’s not having it. The curse isn’t lifted and the letter seems to prove it. The Park Service is pulling the trigger on their plan, which means the Taklute have less than a month to pack up and go.

McCarten arrives with his crew and sets to work tearing everything down. But the Natives aren’t giving up their land without a fight. They sabotage the crew and their equipment at every possible opportunity. While McCarten phones his boss for reinforcements, Bob tries to play peacemaker between the two sides. Naturally, it’s Sam Eagle Speaker riling everybody up. Sam’s been looking for an excuse to fight Bob since day one and now they finally have it out.

Sam gets the worst of it but he’s not about to leave well enough alone. He follows Bob back to the cabin and lies in wait with his rifle. He shoots Patch, Bob’s favorite bear cub, and sets the cabin on fire. The blaze soon roars out of control, setting a forest fire visible from the settlement. Both the Taklute and the construction crews set aside their differences and band together to fight the fire. But Bob’s primary concern is Patch and he convinces Oliver to help bring the wounded bear to Chief Peter.

At first, the Chief refuses to help. But when Bob claims that Larch would have wanted Patch to live, the Chief relents under the condition that Bob finally agrees to release the bears once and for all. The Chief’s medicine does the trick and Patch begins to show signs of life. With Patch on the mend, the fire under control and Sam Eagle Speaker permanently banished from the tribe (and the movie…we won’t see him again), everything seems to be all right.

Of course, it isn’t. The commissioner arrives to try to reason with “you people” again but it seems there can be no compromise. No one is allowed to live on national park land except for forest rangers and their families. Bob suggests just making the Taklute rangers but the process isn’t that simple. So the Chief and the other three elders retreat to a sacred spot on the mountain where they plan to fast, meditate and eventually die.

Bob risks pissing the Chief off one last time by barging into their sacred space and violating their sacred rituals. This doesn’t go over well and the Chief essentially orders Bob to get lost and mind his own business. Having lost everything in the fire, Bob is resigned to packing it in but not before fulfilling his promise to free the bears. He takes Patch to search for Scratch and Rusty, who fled the area during the forest fire. Miraculously, he finds them and is finally able to let the bears live their own lives.

After Bob makes his goodbyes, Oliver paddles up the river with the Chief. McCarten actually looked into Bob’s suggestion and found he was able to make the Taklute deputy rangers. And so, the curse is lifted and everything turns out OK. The Taklute are allowed to stay and work on the national park can continue.

Now, based on my description of The Bears And I, you might be thinking the movie should more accurately be titled The Indians And I (or, even less charitably, You People And I). That’s because if you watch The Bears And I on Disney+, which is by far the easiest way to see it currently, the first thing you’ll see is a disclaimer. Not the usual one apologizing for racially insensitive material that has aged poorly. This one warns that the film has been edited for content. And that is not a phrase anyone wants to see at the beginning of a movie.

The Disney+ version carries a listed run time of 83 minutes. Way back in 1999, Anchor Bay Entertainment released The Bears And I on DVD. That version runs 90 minutes. I was curious about those missing seven minutes. So I enlisted my good friend, longtime writing partner and former Digital Bits colleague Todd Doogan to track down the uncensored version of The Bears And I. And we found what happened to all your missing bear footage.

Early on, there are a few quick trims surrounding an elk-bear fight. But later, there are several significant sequences that have been cut entirely. First up, about half an hour into the picture, there’s a cute bit where the bear cubs capsize Bob’s canoe. We don’t get to see what happens after they make it back to shore and encounter a wolverine. The wolverine attacks Patch, then goes after Bob after he comes to the rescue. Bob beats the wolverine off with a stick.

Next, when Bob first brings the bears to the settlement, their arrival draws the attention of Sam Eagle Speaker’s dogs. The scene is still in the Disney+ version but it’s edited to remove shots of the dogs actually attacking the bears and Bob throwing rocks at the dogs to scare them away. Without any of that context, Bob’s snarky comments to the locals just come across as petulant.

When winter arrives, Bob lets us know the bears are now double the size and “double the trouble”. We don’t get to see an example of this when Patch sends a wood cart careening down the mountain with Scratch precariously perched on top of it. As in Charlie The Lonesome Cougar, Disney had no compunction about sending wild animals on dangerous trips down mountains at breakneck speed.

Finally, once the bears emerge from hibernation, Bob heads out in the woods wondering if they’re now big enough to fend off predators. He finds out when they track down a cougar enjoying a carrion feast off a dead elk. The bears send the cougar packing and tuck into the elk themselves.

What’s interesting about all this isn’t that The Bears And I once included some nature footage depicting the less cute-and-cuddly side of nature. This column has included plenty of movies with intense animal action, from the aforementioned Charlie The Lonesome Cougar to Nikki, Wild Dog Of The North to True-Life Adventures like White Wilderness. But Disney has kept most of those titles off its streaming service. So you have to wonder why they would bother going to the effort of editing The Bears And I to include a more family-friendly version on Disney+. The edits themselves are not badly done. If you didn’t know they were there, you probably wouldn’t even notice most of them. But we’re not talking about an A-list title here. If The Bears And I wasn’t on Disney+ at all, how many people would have noticed or been disappointed? Probably fewer than the number of people who actually remember this movie and are disappointed to lose the footage that makes it about bears in the first place.

Even with about 11% fewer bears, The Bears And I remains an odd movie. I really admire the attempt to do something contemporary and meaningful, two things that were not exactly in the Walt Disney wheelhouse in 1974. But Patrick Wayne is not the guy to carry a movie like this. His dad wasn’t necessarily a great actor either but he was an icon. John Wayne could command the screen. Patrick Wayne could not. He seems like a nice enough guy and he’s got movie-star looks but he doesn’t have the charisma to back them up. Later on, he became a frequent celebrity panelist on game shows and even hosted Tic Tac Dough for a stint in 1990. Frankly, that seems more his speed.

There is a good movie to be made here. A Vietnam veteran returns home with a desire to embrace nature and honor his fallen Native American comrade sounds like a compelling story. But Whedon’s script makes it really hard to sympathize with Bob. It would help if we knew more about Bob’s life before the movie begins. I don’t know how much he learned from Larch but I’m guessing the answer is nothing. Bob seems to know even less about Native Americans than he does about bears. Nevertheless, he inserts himself directly into both communities with the supreme confidence of a genuine idiot.

The Bears And I wasn’t a huge hit at the box office. John Denver’s song “Sweet Surrender”, on the other hand, didn’t do too badly. It got as high as No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit number one on the Adult Contemporary chart. Surprisingly, this would be Denver’s only real Disney credit although he enjoyed a long association with Jim Henson’s Muppets in their pre-Disney days and appeared in the 1986 TV-movie The Leftovers on The Disney Sunday Movie.

But another bear movie came out in 1974 and it became one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams was an independent movie released through Sunn Classic Pictures. This was the kind of movie Disney used to make in its sleep. Now a fly-by-night company best known for releasing cheap-o documentaries about UFOs and the paranormal was beating them at their own game. That had to sting a little bit, especially for True-Life Adventure veterans like Winston Hibler. The success of Grizzly Adams proved there was still an audience for family-oriented nature movies. Disney had simply forgotten how to reach them.

VERDICT: A nice try but it’s a Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: One Little Indian

~ electrictheatre
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 Party, Curse 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

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Napoleon And Samantha

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Napoleon And Samantha

In 1988, Michael Douglas won his first Academy Award for acting in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street (he’d already won one as a producer on One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). A year later, Jodie Foster won her first Oscar for her work in the movie The Accused. So if you’d asked me a week ago if Michael Douglas and Jodie Foster had ever appeared in a film together, I’d have said sure, probably. They were both A-list stars who hit the upper echelons of their profession around the same time and continue to be huge to this day. I would not have guessed their paths crossed only once and very early on in the bizarro nature movie Napoleon And Samantha.

Napoleon And Samantha appears to be the brainchild of screenwriter Stewart Raffill. Raffill started his career as an animal supervisor. In that capacity, we’ve seen his work in this column before in movies like Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. and Monkeys, Go Home! In 1971, Raffill made his writing and directing debut with The Tender Warrior, an independently made animal adventure starring a pre-Grizzly Adams Dan Haggerty. It’s pretty lousy but Haggerty’s later fame ensured that it hung around kiddie matinees, school auditoriums and gymnasiums, and church basements for much of the 1970s.

Raffill was able to interest Disney and producer Winston Hibler in his script but evidently couldn’t convince them to let him direct (although he did get an associate producer credit). That job went to Bernard McEveety, whose younger brothers Joseph and Vincent have already appeared in this column a few times. Bernard was mainly a TV guy and always would be. He directed episodes of Gunsmoke, Combat, Trapper John M.D., Knight Rider and countless others. But for a few years in the early 70s, he followed his brothers into a brief theatrical detour at Disney. We’ll see his work again.

The Disney Machine has always worked in mysterious ways, so it’s difficult to retrace all the steps a relatively obscure movie like this made on its way to the screen. But Vincent McEveety had just directed The Biscuit Eater starring Johnny Whitaker. Whitaker probably had a three-picture contract at Disney. His next movie just so happened to be Napoleon And Samantha, directed by Bernard McEveety. If I had to guess, I’d assume Johnny was assigned to the picture first. Maybe Hibler tried to get Vincent to direct and he recommended his brother. I don’t know the exact chain of events but I’d be shocked if it was a coincidence. It’s a small world but it ain’t that small.

Regardless of how it worked out, Winston Hibler and Bernard McEveety were able to assemble an impressive cast for this oddity. Michael Douglas was obviously born into show business but he hadn’t been acting all that long when he was cast in Napoleon And Samantha and movies like Hail, Hero!, Adam At 6 A.M. and Summertree weren’t exactly setting the world on fire. Napoleon And Samantha probably didn’t do a whole lot for his career, either. His breakthrough role came a few months later on the hit cop show The Streets Of San Francisco. Douglas also would have been in the early stages of putting Cuckoo’s Nest together around this time, which is kind of fun to imagine.

Jodie Foster would have been about 9 years old when she made Napoleon And Samantha and she’d already been in the business for more than half her life. She made her Disney debut in Menace On The Mountain, a 1970 two-parter on The Wonderful World Of Disney directed by Vincent McEveety. Napoleon And Samantha was her first feature film after amassing a lengthy resume of TV and commercial credits. She’ll be back in this column several times.

Johnny Whitaker and Jodie Foster play the title characters but they’re billed beneath Douglas and Will Geer. Geer had a long, fascinating career dating back to the 1930s when he was on tour with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and fellow Disney alum Burl Ives. His activism made him a target for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and he was blacklisted for a time in the ‘50s. Like Michael Douglas, Geer also found fame on a TV show that premiered in September 1972, starring as Grandpa Walton on The Waltons, a role he’d play until his death in 1978.

Coincidentally, Grandma Walton also appears in Napoleon And Samantha. Ellen Corby was a familiar character actress who’d been Oscar nominated for her role in 1948’s I Remember Mama. Since then, she’d turned up in dozens and dozens of movies and TV shows including Disney’s The Gnome-Mobile. The Waltons became one of those transformative shows that overshadow everything else the cast has ever done. Corby suffered a stroke in 1976 but recovered and returned to the show just before Geer’s death. She’d continue to play Grandma Walton until her own death in 1999.

Napoleon and Samantha are best friends who live in an idyllic small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Napoleon lives with his grandfather (Geer), who regales him with tall tales of his adventures. Samantha’s parents are frequently absent, so she’s cared for by the family’s housekeeper, Gertrude (Corby). They spend their afternoons stealing empty bottles from the general store that they immediately return to the shopkeeper (Henry Jones from Rascal) for the deposit money.

One evening, Napoleon and his grandfather go to the movies (Disney’s Treasure Island is playing, naturally). On their way home, they encounter an aging clown camped out with the remnants of his circus. (That’s Vito Scotti, last heard from as Italian Cat in The AristoCats, as Dimitri the clown.) The circus has closed and Dimitri plans on going home to the old country but can’t take Major the lion with him.

Napoleon remembers that Grandpa once told him that he used to be a lion tamer and volunteers to take Major off Dimitri’s hands. Grandpa tries to get out of it (without actually admitting that he made the whole thing up) but Dimitri assures him that Major is tame as a kitten. Besides, he won’t cost much to feed since his teeth are so bad that he only drinks milk. Unable to think of a single reason why they shouldn’t accept a full-grown lion from a random clown they just met in the woods, Grandpa and Napoleon bring Major home and set him up in the chicken coop.

Things are OK for a little while until Grandpa reveals that he’s dying. He writes a letter to Napoleon’s only other living relative, an uncle in New York, and prepares the boy as best he can. But before you know it, the old man has passed away. Worse yet, his letter has been returned as undeliverable. Faced with the prospect of being sent to an orphanage and having Major taken away, Napoleon decides to keep his grandfather’s death a secret.

At this point, you might want to grab yourself a drink because from here on, things get weird. That’s right, stumbling across a clown and a lion in the middle of nowhere is not the weird part of this movie.

Napoleon wants to bury his grandfather up on the hill where they used to watch the sunset. But Samantha points out there’s no way two small children will be able to drag a six-foot corpse all the way up a hill, much less bury him. She suggests Napoleon go down to the employment office and hire somebody to help. That’s our Samantha. A real problem-solver, that one.

Down at the employment office, Napoleon meets Danny (Douglas), a freedom-loving poli-sci major who isn’t interested in steady work. He really just wants to earn enough to buy a five-dollar textbook. Napoleon’s got that much, so the two of them strike a bargain. Danny doesn’t seem too phased by having to bury an old man and hold a funeral for a couple of kids and a lion. But he’s not totally irresponsible because he doesn’t want to leave until he knows Napoleon will be taken care of. Samantha says he can come stay at her place and that’s good enough for Danny! He’s out the door and back up to his remote cabin in the woods with a “Hey, stop by if you’re ever in the area!”

Fooled ya, Danny! Napoleon has no intention of staying at Samantha’s house. He keeps on keeping on until old Amos the shopkeeper grows suspicious of the copious amounts of milk and candy Napoleon’s been buying. When Amos promises to stop by and check on his grandfather, Napoleon resolves to join Danny up at his cabin, taking the long way across the mountains. Samantha wants to make sure they’re OK, so she joins the perilous cross-country trek. The journey also gives Raffill a chance to show off a few more of his animals, including a mountain lion and a bear to wrestle with Major.

After a few days, Napoleon, Samantha and Major finally stumble across Danny sitting in the middle of a field reading a book, surrounded by goats. Danny is thrilled to see his new friends again. Really, words cannot express how happy he is. I wish someone would make a gif that really shows the sheer elation he’s feeling in this moment. Oh, wait! Somebody did!

Yeah, so anyway…after the initial thrill wears off, Danny’s a little mad that Napoleon lied to him. He tries to persuade him that the orphanage won’t be such a bad place and says that if he goes, Major can stay at the cabin with Danny. While Napoleon is mulling it over, Danny drives to town to let Gertrude know Samantha’s safe and sound. Of course, it wouldn’t be safe to leave the kids alone in the cabin (or just take them home, it seems) but not to worry. Danny’s new friend Mark the drifter (Rex Holman, presciently cosplaying as Jeffrey Dahmer) can take care of things!

The next day, Danny blithely knocks on Gertrude’s front door. Naturally, she calls the cops the second she sees who it is. The police haul Danny off to jail and Gertrude leads a mini-mob of gossiping locals after them. Between this and A Tiger Walks, there’s just something about big cats that brings out the worst in Disney townies. Danny, who is weirdly confident that this is all just a big misunderstanding for a guy who helped get rid of a body only a week ago, loses his cool when he spots Mark the drifter’s face on a wanted poster. Turns out, Mark is an escapee from a nearby insane asylum, which is something most people probably would have guessed the second they caught him creeping around outside their cabin peering in the window.

Danny is unable to convince the police chief (Arch Johnson) that he asked an escaped lunatic to babysit the kids. So he busts out of jail, steals a motorcycle and leads the cops on a chase back to the cabin. They arrive in the nick of time and even though Napoleon and Samantha are sad their little tie-up game was interrupted, they understand that the doctors have come to help Mark the drifter get better. Thanks, helicopter doctors!

All would seem to be well that ends well. Except that Napoleon’s thought things over and decided he and Major will be better off going to find a tribe of Indians to live with. Danny points out that they’ll be in for quite a hike since there aren’t any Indians left in the area (I mean, I’m sure there are but not in the romanticized sense Napoleon means, so point taken, Danny). After one more speech about the importance of family and more reassurance that Major can live with Danny in the cabin (and hopefully protect him from any more escaped mental patients), Napoleon agrees to go back home with Samantha.

Since I started this project, there have been a handful of movies that just kind of left me gobsmacked, wondering what the hell I had just watched. A Tiger Walks, Moon Pilot, even to some extent Perri and Nikki, Wild Dog Of The North have all been head-scratchers to some degree. Napoleon And Samantha may have them all beat. There just aren’t that many movies, Disney or otherwise, that have an adult hippie aiding and abetting two children in the disposal of a dead body in front of an ex-circus lion. Add in Michael Douglas, a preteen Jodie Foster, two Waltons and a probable child molester and you’ve got a recipe for wackiness.

It’s hard to even say what McEveety and Raffill were going for with this movie. Raffill’s background would suggest that the focus should be on Major the lion and their incredible journey across country. But a relatively small portion of the film is dedicated to the trek. And there’s no reaction to a boy with an unusual pet the way there is in Rascal. Most people never even find out there is a lion. They’re only concerned about the alleged child abductions.

That said, Major (or Zamba, the lion who plays Major) is an impressive beast. He wrestles a bear, allows chickens to crawl all over him, drinks gallon after gallon of milk and even gives rides to Johnny and Jodie. He’s a huge, magnificent cat and every single time he was on screen, I tensed up a little bit, even though I knew this was a Disney movie and nothing was really going to happen.

As a matter of fact, something did happen. After one take, Zamba turned on Jodie and grabbed her, shaking her around like a rag doll. The animal supervisor, presumably Raffill, got Zamba to “drop it” and she was rushed to the hospital. Jodie Foster has lion scars on her back and stomach to this day thanks to Zamba. Nevertheless, she was right back at work as soon as she was able. Nobody has ever accused Jodie Foster of not being a true professional.

Napoleon And Samantha ended up being Stewart Raffill’s last Disney picture, though not necessarily because one of his lions almost killed Jodie Foster. He went back to independent pictures and, in 1975, wrote and directed The Adventures Of The Wilderness Family. That movie was a surprise hit and he followed it with the very similar Across The Great Divide. In the 1980s, Raffill directed The Ice Pirates, The Philadelphia Experiment and Paul Rudd’s favorite movie, the E.T. ripoff/McDonald’s commercial Mac And Me. In 1998, he made the Disney-adjacent The New Swiss Family Robinson, which I might cover in an upcoming installment of Disney Plus-Or-Minus+.

Released on July 5, 1972, Napoleon And Samantha wasn’t a huge hit with either critics or audiences. And yet, it still managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Buddy Baker’s original score. It was a peculiar year for that category and not just because Baker’s pleasant but forgettable music was in the mix. One of the five nominations, Nino Rota’s The Godfather, was withdrawn after the score was ruled ineligible. It was replaced by John Addison’s Sleuth, which is a better score than Napoleon And Samantha, if you ask me. In the end, Baker, Addison, and John Williams (nominated for both Images and The Poseidon Adventure) all lost to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, a film that had been made 20 years earlier but was able to compete because it had never played theatrically in Los Angeles until its 1972 re-release. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Napoleon And Samantha stood out enough to get a nomination in this crowded and confusing landscape.

Napoleon And Samantha is a weird little movie and I know full well that things are only going to get stranger as Disney plunges deeper into the 1970s. The studio didn’t want to stray far from the established genres they were known for: gimmick comedies, the occasional animated effort, and nature movies were all forms they knew inside and out. But their attempts at making something the same but different occasionally resulted in flailing, misguided efforts like this one. It might not be a very good movie but hey, at least nobody got hurt. Except for Jodie Foster, of course, but hey, she’s fine.

VERDICT: Disney WTF?

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