Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Snowball Express

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Snowball Express

If Disney’s live action comedies prove anything, it’s that the line between predictability and familiarity lies entirely within the eye of the beholder. To the jaded critic, the studio’s reliance on formulaic stories and a stable of stars that are rarely allowed to venture out of their comfort zones can give the films a cookie-cutter sameness that dulls the senses. But those same qualities can be tremendously comforting to kids and nostalgic adults. The comfort of the familiar goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of Snowball Express.

There has been no shortage of familiar faces in this column. In fact, it’s rare for a Disney movie released between, say, 1960 and 1980 to feature a completely fresh cast of newcomers. Snowball Express is probably the biggest showcase for the Disney Repertory Players so far. Practically every single person on screen has appeared in this column before, many of them on multiple occasions. And since Disney actors were never really required to stretch or challenge themselves, you can rest assured that everyone slides into their roles as easily as a favorite pair of slippers. There’s no confusion or ambiguity in Disney. Dean Jones is always the slightly befuddled good guy. Keenan Wynn is always the corrupt bad guy. So it was written, so it shall be.

Snowball Express is based on a book called Chateau Bon Vivant by Frankie and Johnny O’Rear. The book is actually a memoir about a couple with no experience in the hospitality industry trying to run a Canadian ski lodge. Screenwriters Don Tait, Jim Parker and Arnold Margolin seemingly ignored everything about the book except the most basic premise. More than anything, the movie resembles Monkeys, Go Home!, another movie where Dean Jones inherits a dilapidated property from a relative he never knew and upends his life to pursue a difficult career he’s never attempted before.

By the way, all three of those screenwriters were essentially TV guys. Jim Parker and Arnold Margolin had worked together on such sitcoms as The Andy Griffith Show and they’d adapted Neil Simon’s play Star Spangled Girl into a movie starring Disney alum Sandy Duncan. Don Tait had written a lot of westerns, including Maverick and The Virginian. Tait stayed at Disney through the end of the 1970s. We’ll see his name again soon. Parker and Margolin didn’t continue at Disney or even as a writing team much longer but they both remained active, mostly in television, for years.

Producer Ron Miller brought back director Norman Tokar, who hadn’t made a movie at the studio since The Boatniks in 1970. In the interim, he’d directed a few episodes of The Doris Day Show and Dean Jones’ failed sitcom, The Chicago Teddy Bears, as well as several unsold pilots. Tokar would briefly leave Disney again after Snowball Express to direct the movie version of Wilson Rawls’ Where The Red Fern Grows. But he’d be back at his old stomping grounds soon enough.

In Monkeys, Go Home!, Jones played a bachelor attempting to run his great uncle’s olive grove in France. Here, Jones plays Johnny Baxter, a happily married father of two attempting to run his great uncle’s hotel in Silver Hill, Colorado. Nancy Olson appears as Johnny’s wife, Sue, in the last of her five Disney features (not counting her uncredited cameo in 1997’s Flubber, a nod to her role in the original Flubber pictures). Olson got saddled with a lot of thankless girlfriend/wife/mother roles at Disney and Snowball Express is no exception. She’s around to be a supportive helpmate and her character tends to vanish whenever anything fun is happening.

The Baxter kids, Richard and Chris, are played by red-headed scamp Johnny Whitaker and Kathleen Cody. This was Cody’s first Disney movie, coming off a stint on the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, but she’ll be back in this column soon. Whitaker, on the other hand, will not. After his three Disney features, he appeared in one more TV production, The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle. His next non-Disney project was the title role in Tom Sawyer, a big-screen musical with songs by the Sherman brothers and featuring his Napoleon And Samantha costar, Jodie Foster. He went back to TV after that, starring on Sid and Marty Krofft’s mind-warping Sigmund And The Sea Monsters. Whitaker left acting behind in the 1980s to attend college, perform missionary work overseas, and overcome addictions to drugs and alcohol. He’s still around and occasionally pops up on screen, as in Amazon Prime’s 2017 reboot of Sigmund.

Johnny (Baxter, not Whitaker) learns he’s inherited the Grand Imperial Hotel and immediately quits his job at a high-tech New York insurance company. (His boss, Mr. Carruthers, is played by Dick Van Patten in the first of many Disney appearances.) Nobody else in the family seems to think this is such a hot idea but since Johnny has left them no alternative, they begrudgingly pack up and move to Colorado.

Once they’ve arrived, none of the local yokels (led by George Lindsey, the voice of Lafayette in The AristoCats) have any idea where this so-called luxury hotel would be. Eventually they figure out Johnny must mean old Crazy Jake’s place and give him directions out toward the boondocks. The locals’ confusion seems a little disingenuous. Sure, the location is off the beaten path and the building is a bit run down but it’s still recognizably a hotel with its name in stained glass.

Despite the fact that the hotel isn’t the turn-key operation he’d hoped for, Johnny resolves to get rid of the bats and raccoons, clean the place up and open for business. That night, his first “guest” turns up in his kitchen. Jesse McCord (Harry Morgan, having a lot more fun than in either The Barefoot Executive or Scandalous John) is an old coot who was friends with Johnny’s uncle. Crazy Jake would let Jesse stay at the hotel free of charge if it wasn’t busy (and it rarely was). Johnny’s ready to kick Jesse out into the cold but his family asks him to think twice before sending an old man to freeze to death in a blizzard. Since Johnny is all heart, Jesse’s allowed to stay under the condition that he help get the hotel up and running.

In need of a small business loan to cover expenses, Johnny goes to visit local banker Martin Ridgeway (Keenan Wynn, naturally). The hotel is too great a risk for Ridgeway to approve a loan but he is willing to buy the place outright. Ridgeway claims he wants to turn the hotel into a home for orphans, but the eye-rolling of his secretary, Miss Wigginton (Disney veteran and professional eye-roller Mary Wickes, last seen in Napoleon And Samantha), suggests he has a less benevolent purpose in mind.

Johnny and Sue stroll around the property and run into Wally Perkins (played by Dexter Riley’s buddy Schuyler, Michael McGreevey), a young man nursing a crush on the Baxters’ daughter, Chris. Johnny, who apparently doesn’t understand how real estate works, is stunned to learn that not only does he own the hotel, his property extends as far as the eye can see. After thinking about it for way too long, Johnny has the revolutionary idea to open a ski lodge in Colorado. Of course, Johnny doesn’t know the first thing about skiing but figures he can pick it up as he goes along.

To avoid dealing with Ridgeway, he sets a meeting with a banker from the next town over. The banker loves Johnny’s idea but pulls out after Johnny lies about his skiing prowess and makes a disastrous run down Nightmare Alley, one of the area’s most dangerous slopes. When the incident makes the papers, Ridgeway has a change of heart. Claiming that the free publicity might give the Grand Imperial a fighting chance, he agrees to loan Johnny $3,000 to get started.

Johnny has big plans for that money but is forced to cut back when Wally and Jesse blow up the ancient water heater and destroy the kitchen. Instead of installing a new ski lift, Jesse fixes up an old steam engine to rig up a rope-tow. Working together, the crew manages to get the hotel ready for opening night. But despite their efforts, the debut looks like a disaster until an avalanche (inadvertently triggered by Wally) traps a train full of tourists bound for the more established ski resort. Riding to the rescue, the Baxters soon have a full house.

Things go well for awhile until, in time-honored Disney comedy fashion, they go spectacularly wrong. Wally, the newly anointed ski instructor, tumbles off a cliff and ends up hanging to a tree for dear life. Johnny is able to use the rope-tow to save him but a hot log burns through one of the support ropes, sending Jesse, Johnny and several tons of active steam engine careening down the mountain and through the hotel. Somehow nobody gets hurt, except for Wally who broke an arm when he fell off the cliff. Even so, the tourists all decide to spend the rest of their vacation in a hotel with intact walls.

Naturally this leaves Johnny unable to keep up with his payments to Ridgeway. Rather than sell, Johnny pins all his hopes on winning Silver Hill’s annual snowmobile race. The third place prize alone would cover what he owes, so Johnny figures he doesn’t even have to win to save the hotel. That would be a great plan if there were only three entrants. But considering that Johnny has no more experience on a snowmobile than he does in any other winter sport and the fact that he and Jesse are driving a beat-up old machine Wally Frankensteined together from past losers AND the fact that Ridgeway always wins, the odds are not stacked in his favor.

Sure enough, after a lengthy, Love Bug-esque race over, under and through the mountains, Johnny comes in dead last. He’s ready to admit defeat and sell to Ridgeway when Miss Wigginton finally reveals the reason for all her furious eye-rolling. Years ago, Johnny’s great uncle donated hundreds of acres of prime timberland to the local Indians for as long as they occupied the land. Since the last of them either died out or moved on years ago, all that land has reverted to the estate and Ridgeway intends to clearcut the whole thing.

Jesse adds another bit of local history, pointing out that the entire town sits on land donated by Uncle Jacob with a provision in the town charter that the founders would build a church, two hospitals (one for people and one for critters) and a library. Richard points out that, just as there’s no basement at the Alamo, there’s no library in Silver Hill. And while nobody’s 100% sure if that means Johnny now owns the entire town, the mere possibility is enough to get Ridgeway to change his tune. He extends Johnny’s line of credit and vows to do whatever it takes to get the Grand Imperial up and running again.

Needless to say, Snowball Express is not one of Disney’s most intricately plotted narratives. Neither is it a penetrating character examination of a marriage tested by the husband’s impulsive decisions, although what I wouldn’t give to see the Ingmar Bergman version of Snowball Express. No, this is just a silly movie about silly adventures in the snow. Sometimes that’s enough. Here, it’s almost enough.

First the good news. Unlike Monkeys, Go Home!, which took place in France but was shot in Burbank, Tokar actually took his cast and crew to Colorado. The movie was shot in Crested Butte and the Rocky Mountain scenery adds a lot of flavor. It’s the kind of setting you can’t replicate on a backlot, no matter how much fake snow you pump in.

The movie is really built around three main slapstick setpieces: Dean Jones’ out-of-control run down Nightmare Alley, the runaway steam engine, and the snowmobile race. They’re undeniably the highlights of the film and Tokar pulls them off nicely. The winter setting and cold weather gear also helps mask the stunt doubles for Jones, Harry Morgan, Keenan Wynn and George Lindsey, making the action sequences feel a lot more seamless than usual.

But whenever the movie isn’t hurtling down a mountain at breakneck speed, things begin falling apart. The opening scene at Johnny’s office is interminable, taking far too long to introduce a two-sentence premise. Once they get to Colorado, the hotel really doesn’t seem to be in that bad a condition but it still takes a lot of steps to get to opening night. And the less said about estate law, small business loans and town charters the better, right? Not according to Snowball Express, which brings these riveting topics up again and again.

Despite its flaws, Snowball Express was fun and charming enough to receive fairly positive reviews from critics upon its release on December 22, 1972. This was the same day Disney re-released The Sword In The Stone to theatres for the first time since 1963. I’m not sure if they were released together as a double feature or if they were competing against each other. Considering that the original campaign manual for Snowball Express makes no mention of Sword In The Stone, I’m guessing they played separately. The film made over $6 million at the box office. Not a blockbuster but pretty good for a live-action Disney movie at the time.

Snowball Express is a minor entry in the Disney catalog. I don’t think it’s a favorite of many people but it’s likable. It’s the sort of movie you don’t think about unless something actively reminds you of it and you say, “Oh, yeah. I kind of liked that when I was a kid.” Then you go find it on Disney+ and forget all about it again until the next time you need a nostalgic little jolt from your childhood. To borrow a phrase from another Disney movie, it’s the streaming circle of life.

VERDICT: It’s just enough fun to end up on the Disney Plus side but don’t push it. It is what it is.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

Now You See Him, Now You Don't one-sheet

Walt Disney was not a fan of sequels. He considered them cheap and lazy. When he did approve them, as in Son Of Flubber, it was only because there were leftover gags and ideas from the original film and Walt hated to waste a good joke. After Walt’s death in 1966, Walt Disney Productions tried to abide by the wishes of its founder. But by 1972, the studio needed a hit and that no-sequels rule seemed a little shortsighted. And I think it’s fair to say that Now You See Him, Now You Don’t was not born out of a surplus of ideas from the original Dexter Riley film.

To be fair, Disney had tried to capitalize on the success of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes without making an outright sequel. The Barefoot Executive reunited stars Kurt Russell and Joe Flynn with director Robert Butler and screenwriter Joseph L. McEveety. That movie didn’t lose money but it hadn’t done as well as its predecessor. So in the grand tradition of such collegiate comedies as The Absent-Minded Professor and The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones, producer Ron Miller decided to send Dexter Riley back to Medfield College.

Just about everyone from The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes returned for the sequel. In addition to Russell’s Dexter Riley and Flynn as the beleaguered Dean Higgins, Butler brought back Cesar Romero as evil businessman A.J. Arno, Richard Bakalyan as his chauffeur/henchman Cookie (he was called Chillie last time but continuity has never been Disney’s strong suit), Alan Hewitt as Higgins’ rival Dean Collingsgood, and Michael McGreevey as Dexter’s sidekick, Schuyler. Ed Begley Jr., who made his uncredited film debut in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, got a promotion, receiving both screen credit and a character name as science nerd Druffle.

There were a few new faces. Jim Backus makes his Disney debut as philanthropist and golf aficionado Timothy Forsythe. William Windom takes over the all-purpose science professor role from William Schallert. Dexter’s new girlfriend, Debbie, is played by Joyce Menges, who previously popped up as one of the gnome maidens in The Gnome-Mobile but then left the industry completely after this film. Jack Bender, who made an impression in The Barefoot Executive and The Million Dollar Duck, enrolls at Medfield as the magnificently named Slither Roth.

Two other Medfield students have seemingly switched identities. In The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, legendary voice actor Frank Welker played Henry Fathington and Alexander Clarke played Myles Miller. In Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, Welker plays Myles and Mike Evans is Henry. Evans had already guest-starred on All In The Family as Lionel Jefferson, the son of the Bunkers’ neighbors George and Louise Jefferson. In 1974, Evans co-created the sitcom Good Times and the year after that, the Jeffersons moved on up to their own show. You can see why Evans won’t be back in this column. He was a little busy.

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t isn’t exactly a carbon copy of the first Dexter Riley adventure but Butler, Miller and McEveety don’t stray too far from the template they’d created three years earlier. Dexter and his classmates are still bugging Dean Higgins’ office and eavesdropping on budget meetings for increasingly vague reasons. Higgins still holds most of Medfield’s student body in complete contempt, certain they’re all as dumb as a bag of hammers. And new science professor Lufkin is just as desperate for expensive new equipment as his predecessor.

Also, A.J. Arno is back on the streets, his arrest for operating a network of illegal gambling joints dismissed as a mere misunderstanding. Arno has assumed control of Medfield’s mortgage and doesn’t appear to be remotely concerned about when or if Higgins can make payments. Dexter and his pals are understandably suspicious of Arno but the Dean is happy to let bygones be bygones as long as it doesn’t cost anything.

Anyway, Higgins has bigger worries than a known felon taking control of his college under mysterious circumstances. Medfield’s getting ready to compete for the Forsythe Prize, an annual science fair. Higgins and Professor Lufkin have high hopes for Druffle’s groundbreaking bumblebee study and zero hopes for Dexter’s attempt to recreate a Russian experiment in invisibility. But a freak electrical storm not unlike the one that turned Dexter into a human computer zaps Dexter’s gizmo. Before you know it, Dexter’s got a bowlful of invisibility juice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it invisible paint, since anything that gets dipped in it or sprayed with it turns invisible and the stuff washes off with water.

Dexter and Schuyler make themselves invisible to sneak into Arno’s office and figure out what he’s up to. Not surprisingly, the guy who gave away his super-computer loaded with incriminating evidence has an enormous floor model of his top-secret plan. Thanks to a loophole in some old zoning laws, gambling is still completely legal on the land Medfield is built on. Once Higgins fails to make a payment, Arno will foreclose and build a gamblers’ paradise. Bad guys are always wanting to build casinos in Disney movies.

Higgins is not thrilled to hear this, especially since he’s also just learned that Medfield isn’t even going to be allowed to compete for the Forsythe Prize this year. Desperate for the $50,000 prize, Higgins calls up Mr. Forsythe himself and pleads his case. Forsythe agrees to meet with him and Dean Collingsgood over a round of golf. Since Higgins doesn’t know the first thing about golf, Schuyler serves as his caddy and Dexter gives him an invisible hand. With Dexter’s help, Higgins plays an astonishing game, sinking repeated holes-in-one and drawing a lot of attention to himself.

Now, I’m no golfer and I’ve never been invisible but I’m not quite sure how Dexter is able to pull this off. It seems to me that he’d have to jump up, catch the golf ball in midair, run with it all the way down the course and slip it into the hole. Even visible, that strikes me as a remarkable feat of athleticism. Sure, it might be considered “cheating” according to your precious “rules” but it would sure make golf a lot more fun to watch.

Higgins’ miracle golf game scores him an invitation to play in a professional tournament against real pro golfers Billy Casper and Dave Hill (and if you don’t recognize their names or faces, that just tells you how few golfers ever become legitimate household names). Unfortunately, Dexter hears about it too late to accompany them on the flight. Forced to rely on his own non-existent skills, Higgins ends up humiliated on national TV with a triple-digit score.

While Higgins and Schuyler are off playing golf (a surprisingly large amount of the movie is just about golf), a couple of other things are going on. Arno spotted Dexter showering off the invisibility serum in the clubhouse and tasks Cookie with figuring out what’s up. And poor Druffle has learned the hard way that he’s allergic to bee stings. Puffed up and wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, he won’t be able to compete for the Forsythe Prize, leaving Medfield’s hopes in Dexter’s hands.

Incidentally, that image of Ed Begley Jr. covered in bandages was featured prominently in promotional materials for Now You See Him, Now You Don’t. Makes sense, since he looks like the classic Universal Monsters version of the Invisible Man. Only trouble is he’s not invisible and it isn’t Kurt Russell, despite how the still is sometimes captioned and tagged. It’s just Ed Begley Jr., hideously swollen up by bees. Years later, Begley would get wrapped up in bandages again for the funniest segment in Amazon Women On The Moon. I guess there’s just something about Begley in bandages that’s inherently funny.

At any rate, Cookie finally discovers what the kids have cooked up in the lab and Arno wants it. Cookie pulls a switcheroo, leaving Dexter and a very visible Schuyler looking like idiots when they try to demonstrate their formula for Forsythe and crew. Dexter is convinced that Arno stole his invention, so the gang pulls the old walkie-talkie-in-a-flower-arrangement gag again to bug Arno’s office.

Meanwhile, Arno’s plans for the spray are a bit more criminal than just cheating at golf. He’s going to turn himself and Cookie invisible, walk into a local bank while they’re making a big transfer, turn the money invisible and stroll out under everyone’s noses. The plan seems a bit hands-on for a white-collar criminal like Arno but otherwise, it’s fairly foolproof. But Arno forgot to reckon with those meddling kids!

Dexter tries to warn the bank president (Edward Andrews, who’s played harried, ineffectual authority figures in everything from The Absent-Minded Professor to The Million Dollar Duck). Surprise surprise, nobody at the bank (including Ted the guard, played by the voice of George Jetson, George O’Hanlon) believes they’re in danger of invisible robbers. So the kids stake out the bank and resolve to stop Arno and Cookie themselves, no matter how long a car chase it takes.

The fact that Now You See Him, Now You Don’t concludes with an epic car chase should come as no surprise at this point. This one feels longer than most but at least this time there’s a seemingly driverless car involved. There’s also a familiar Volkswagen Beetle. Schuyler’s car is our old pal Herbie from The Love Bug, sporting a green paint job and distressed to appear like a college kid’s junker.

Ultimately Arno has the bright idea to turn the car itself invisible. Driving an invisible car in a high-speed chase on crowded city streets turns out to be just as dangerous as it sounds. Arno and Cookie end up crashing into a swimming pool, turning the car, themselves and the money visible again. This seems like a slightly more difficult spot for Arno to talk his way out of but something tells me he won’t be spending much time behind bars.

In some ways, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t feels like a step down for the Dexter Riley saga. On the technical side, it doesn’t feel like anybody cared to put much effort into this one. Most of Disney’s gimmick comedies start with a pop song and/or an animated title sequence. Not this time. The movie starts like a TV show with Dexter joining a scene already in progress. The titles play out over Dean Higgins tearing his office apart to find the kids’ listening device. It’s kind of a funny scene but the credits occasionally get in the way of the action, obscuring Flynn’s performance. We don’t even get a song this time, just Robert F. Brunner’s instrumental score.

Even the movie’s visual effects, usually one of Disney’s strong suits, come across as more than a little half-assed. The optical trickery used whenever Dexter or Schuyler become partially invisible is particularly wobbly. It’s no wonder that Butler decides to take the easy way out in the climactic chase and just completely disappear the car. It’s a whole lot easier to have actors pretend they’re reacting to a car than to show part of the car itself.

But in at least one important regard, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t improves on the Riley formula by simply being a funnier movie. All that golf nonsense seems superfluous and it very much is from a storytelling perspective. But it gives Joe Flynn a chance to take the spotlight, especially in the second game. Flynn’s a genuinely funny actor but being stuck in second banana roles limited his screen time. Here, Butler makes better use of Flynn than any other Disney movie so far.

Kurt Russell is also back in top form after being saddled with a genuinely unlikable character in The Barefoot Executive. Dexter seems slightly more ambitious this time. His abilities in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes were totally the result of a freak accident. He stumbles upon invisibility accidentally as well, but at least this time he was actively trying to learn something. I also wonder if Medfield would have been allowed to keep the prize money, since Dexter really doesn’t know how the invisibility serum works and couldn’t recreate the experiment if he tried. That seems like an important rule for winning an award in science.

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t was released on July 12, 1972, just one week after Napoleon And Samantha hit theatres. It received some surprisingly decent reviews and did fairly well at the box office, falling just a bit short of its predecessor. That was good enough for Disney. The studio wasn’t through with either Kurt Russell or Dexter Riley yet. And it wouldn’t be long before another Disney property got a sequel of its own.

VERDICT: I wouldn’t plan your day around it but it’s kind of fun so sure, it’s a Disney Plus.

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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

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Boatniks

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Boatniks

If you ask me (and since you’re reading this, you kind of did), Ron Miller doesn’t get enough credit for his contributions to Disney history. He was related to Walt by marriage, having married Walt’s daughter Diane Disney in 1954. A former pro football player for the Los Angeles Rams, Walt offered him a job at the studio because he didn’t want the father of his grandkids getting hurt on the field. Miller could have gone into acting but Walt wanted him to learn the production side of the business. He worked his way up from second assistant to first assistant director to associate producer.

In 1980, he became president of Walt Disney Productions and CEO three years later. During his tenure at the top, Miller dragged the studio kicking and screaming into the late twentieth century. He shepherded such innovative and non-Disney-like films as TRON and The Black Hole through production. In 1984, he established Touchstone Pictures to produce the kind of adult-oriented films the studio never would have touched before. Not all of his decisions paid off right away and shareholders voted to replace him later in ’84. But at least he was willing to try something new, just like his father-in-law before him.

You can see Miller trying to gently nudge the company toward more grownup fare even in his early films as a producer. Both The Boatniks and his previous feature, Never A Dull Moment, were comedic crime movies with nary a cute animal or precocious child in sight. Sure, neither one was all that successful, either artistically or financially. But it’s still kind of a weird kick to see a G-rated Disney take on a traditionally PG-or-higher genre.

The Boatniks was written by Arthur Julian from a story by Marty Roth. Both Julian and Roth spent the vast majority of their careers in television. Roth had written several McHale’s Navy episodes among many other shows and would go on to co-create the cult Saturday morning sci-fi show Ark II. Julian was a writer, producer and sometime actor who’d worked on F Troop and Hogan’s Heroes, again among many others. He’d later become head writer on The Carol Burnett Show and would write for such sitcoms as Maude, Amen and Gimme A Break!

The prolific Norman Tokar, who has been in this column a bunch of times, most recently on the boy-and-his-racoon picture Rascal, is once again in the director’s chair. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the tenth of Tokar’s fifteen Disney pictures. Hopefully he got a free sandwich at the Disney commissary for filling out his punch-card. Tokar started his Disney career with animal adventures like Big Red and Savage Sam. But Miller must have noticed that he’d shown a knack for wacky comedies in movies like The Ugly Dachshund. From here on out, Tokar would specialize in that genre.

Today, star Robert Morse is probably best known as Bert Cooper on Mad Men. But in 1970, he was famous as the Tony Award winning star of the Broadway musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. He reprised that role in the 1967 movie version, starring alongside Michele Lee from The Love Bug. He’d also starred in one of my favorite movies, the 1965 black comedy The Loved One. The Boatniks would be his last leading role in a movie but he would continue to be a major stage star and make TV appearances throughout the 70s and 80s.

Morse’s leading lady, Stefanie Powers, had been on screen since the early 60s. In 1966, she starred in the short-lived spy spin-off The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. The show didn’t last but it was enough to put her on the map and today it has a cult following. We’ll be seeing Powers in this column again.

Miller surrounded his stars with an impressive array of comedic talent, including the great Phil Silvers. Silvers became a major star in the 1950s as Sgt. Bilko on the self-titled The Phil Silvers Show. He’d also appeared in such comedy classics as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. The Boatniks was Silvers’ first Disney movie but it won’t be his last.

Also appearing in the film were such familiar faces as Norman Fell, Wally Cox (seen previously in The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band), and in cameos, Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis and Silvers’ old costar Joe E. Ross (also seen in The Love Bug) as “Nutty Sailor”. Miller even got Don Ameche, who hadn’t done much film work since the 1940s ended, to appear as the eternally frustrated Commander Taylor. By Disney standards, this was a fairly star-studded cast.

UK Quad poster for The Boatniks

The movie is set in and around Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula and, except for some interiors, was shot there, as well. That makes for a nice change from Disney’s usual practice of filming as much as possible within walking distance of the studio. Granted, you can drive from Burbank to Balboa in less than two hours on a good day but the change in scenery helps open things up.

Morse stars as Ensign Tom Garland, an accident-prone sailor taking over command of the Balboa Coast Guard from Lt. Jordan (Joey Forman, another Borscht Belt comic). Jordan is burnt out from dealing with the drunks and amateur sailors who descend on Balboa every weekend. Commander Taylor served with Garland’s war hero father during WW2, so at first he’s thrilled to welcome the young man. But when Garland falls off the boat mere minutes after his arrival, Taylor begins to suspect that the apple has fallen quite a ways from the tree.

Garland also meets cute with Kate Fairchild (Powers), a sailing instructor and owner of a boat rental company, by accidentally dousing her with a can of yellow paint. She gets her revenge later on when Garland’s boat runs aground during a routine rescue operation. Kate tows the stranded Coast Guardsmen back to the pier, humiliating Garland in front of the entire marina and Commander Taylor. But they fall in love later that night when they’re forced to share a table at a crowded restaurant. Hey, these things happen, right?

Amidst all this, the police are searching for three jewel thieves (Silvers, Fell and Mickey Shaughnessy, returning from Never A Dull Moment). With the roads blocked, they’re unable to drive to Mexico. So they buy a picnic basket, hide the jewels in the bread, pickles, chicken and what-not, and charter a boat from Kate with the intention of sailing south of the border. Of course, none of them has ever sailed before, so they have a hard time just getting out of the harbor.

It isn’t long before the thieves get lost in the fog and Garland accidentally sinks their ship. Garland continues to encounter them as they attempt to retrieve the picnic basket from the bottom of the ocean, growing increasingly suspicious as their schemes become more outlandish. When all else fails, the thieves contact an acquaintance in Japan to bring in a pearl diver (played by the beautiful Midori). Once she retrieves the basket, she drops the can’t-understand-English act and helps herself to a portion of the loot.

The bad guys are now free to hightail it down to Mexico and they charter a seaplane (piloted by Vito Scotti in the first of his all-purpose ethnic roles for Disney) to pick them up. But by now, Garland and Kate are convinced that these are the jewel thieves everyone’s been looking for. Their attempt to confront them in front of Commander Taylor goes badly when their opened picnic basket appears to spill out nothing more than a well-stocked (and surprisingly well-preserved, considering it spent several days underwater) lunch.

Taylor is ready to relieve Garland of his command when a pelican grabs a stray pickle and Kate discovers some of the jewels hidden inside. Garland pursues them across the crowded harbor. After a series of mishaps, the thieves end up inside a yellow submarine. The chase continues out to the seaplane. The thieves make it to the plane but it’s too heavy to take off, so they start frantically dumping whatever excess weight they can find. This ends up including the picnic basket. The thieves escape empty-handed, Garland is declared a hero and Kate gets a stolen engagement ring when she can’t pry it off her finger.

Alternate theatrical poster for The Boatniks

The plot of The Boatniks is inconsequential even by the standards of a live-action Disney comedy and that’s really saying something. It’s really just a framework upon which to hang gags about giant fish, sharks, pickles, poor seamanship and, most surprisingly, sex and booze. In Walt’s day, Annette Funicello wasn’t even allowed to wear a two-piece bathing suit. Here, Wally Cox plays an eccentric millionaire named Jason whose yacht hosts a neverending party attended by dozens of bikini-clad babes. The times, they were a’changin’.

As for the drinking, Disney movies have never been havens of teetotaling. The pleasures of a good stiff drink have played a part in everything from The Love Bug to Rascal. Even Dumbo famously gets liquored up. But there’s a lot more of it on display in The Boatniks. One of the very first gags has Lt. Jordan responding to a distress call by asking if they have any beer on board. The lost ship replies, “Oh yeah, we’re loaded!” Turns out the boat got lost because they set a beer can next to their magnetic compass and everybody was too drunk to figure that out.

The Boatniks is most enjoyable when it diverts from Garland’s investigation to focus on these random side characters. In addition to Cox and Joe E. Ross, whose Nutty Sailor keeps crashing into things, there’s Gil Lamb (who has appeared in small parts in everything from The Ugly Dachshund to The Love Bug) as Mr. Mitchell. He’s attempting to sail solo around the world, evidently to get away from his wife and gaggle of kids. He doesn’t get far before the Nutty Sailor wrecks his boat. Pretty nutty!

Unfortunately, The Boatniks never quite finds its sea legs. For one thing, it could use more of the live-action-cartoon energy that Robert Stevenson brought to The Love Bug. Whether it’s due to budget constraints or inexperience, Tokar shies away from showing much action. We repeatedly see boats disappearing out of frame or behind an obstacle, followed by the sounds of a crash. Sometimes we don’t even get to see the aftermath of these mishaps. Maybe it’s just me but I’ve always found visual gags are a lot funnier when you actually get to see something.

The other big problem is Robert Morse, who can be terrifically entertaining but never cuts loose here. Morse was a good dancer, so you’d think physical comedy should be right in his wheelhouse. But he seems reluctant to appear too foolish, which is a huge handicap if you’re playing a clumsy sailor. Jerry Lewis would have made a nine-course meal out of this role but if you didn’t want to go quite that big, Dick Van Dyke or even Dean Jones would have been more fun.

The Boatniks was Disney’s big summer release for 1970, coming out on July 1. It did pretty well, earning about $5 million that year, although critics weren’t terribly impressed. A few years later, the studio re-released it on a double bill with Song Of The South. Considering all the sexist gags and Japanese and Mexican stereotypes in this picture, that would be a wildly uncomfortable and inappropriate afternoon at the movies these days.

It would be almost a decade before another Ron Miller production would receive Disney’s first PG rating. Until then, the studio kept on making movies like this one. Too wholesome for most adults and older kids but not exactly wholesome enough for the younger crowd. It’s most likely these “problematic” elements that have kept The Boatniks off Disney+, at least for the time being. And while the movie could be a lot worse, it’s far from being a buried treasure in the Disney catalog.

VERDICT: I got a few laughs but overall it’s a Disney Meh.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Never A Dull Moment

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Never A Dull Moment

The Dick Van Dyke Show aired its final episode on June 1, 1966, just about one month before Van Dyke’s second Disney movie, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., hit theatres. Since then, Van Dyke had made two more movies at other studios: Divorce American Style, which had done OK and earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and Fitzwilly, which had not. Considering that both of Van Dyke’s Disney movies had been hits, despite the vast disparity in the quality of the two films, it’s little wonder that he decided to return to the studio one more time for Never A Dull Moment.

Never A Dull Moment was produced by Ron Miller, the former football player who was married to Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney. Since going to work for his father-in-law, Miller had specialized in broad comedies like the Merlin Jones pictures. He’d worked with Dick Van Dyke on Lt. Robin Crusoe. There’s not a lot of behind-the-scenes information about this movie out there (shocking, I know) so I’m not entirely sure where the idea to make this film came from. But my assumption is that Miller found the original novel and felt it would make a good vehicle for Dick Van Dyke.

About that novel…it was published in 1967 as an Inner Sanctum Mystery called A Thrill A Minute With Jack Albany by John Godey. Godey, the pen name of Morton Freedgood, wrote a number of crime novels including The Three Worlds Of Johnny Handsome (later filmed by Walter Hill) and The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three, the basis for the classic 1974 thriller starring Walter Matthau. So I’m assuming (doing a lot of that this week) that Godey’s novel is a bit more adult-oriented than the movie.

A.J. Carothers wrote the screenplay, his last work for Disney after such films as The Happiest Millionaire and Emil And The Detectives. Carothers went on to create the TV show Nanny And The Professor. He also wrote quite a few made-for-TV movies and the feature films Hero At Large and The Secret Of My Success. Carothers seems to have retired after that last film and he passed away in 2007 at the age of 75.

As with Lt. Robin Crusoe, Van Dyke appears to have used some of his clout to bring aboard a director he was familiar with but new to Disney. Jerry Paris had been Van Dyke’s costar on The Dick Van Dyke Show, appearing as the Petries’ neighbor, Jerry Helper. He started directing the show in 1963, winning an Emmy in the process. He eventually phased acting out to focus entirely on directing. Never A Dull Moment would be his only Disney gig. He continued to direct a lot of TV, including the majority of Happy Days episodes, and the occasional feature like Police Academy 2 and 3. Like Carothers, he also made a lot of made-for-TV movies including one of my favorites, the cult classic Evil Roy Slade.

Theatrical release poster for Never A Dull Moment

At first glance, Never A Dull Moment looks promising. Van Dyke is well cast as Jack Albany, an egotistical C-list actor still waiting for his big break. He’s the kind of actor who quotes reviews of his triumphant performance in Twelfth Night whenever he gets the chance. After appearing as a gangster on a TV show, Jack heads home, still in costume. But when he suspects he’s being followed, he ducks into a warehouse and runs into a low-level mob flunky named Florian (Tony Bill, who would win an Oscar a few years later for co-producing The Sting). Florian has been sent to collect a hired killer named Ace Williams and naturally assumes that Jack is Ace. Jack tries to explain the misunderstanding but once he realizes that Florian will kill him if he isn’t Ace, he decides to play along.

Florian brings Jack/Ace to the country house of powerful gangster Leo Joseph Smooth (Edward G. Robinson in one of his last gangster roles). Smooth may be a high-ranking mafioso but he’s neither famous nor infamous. In an attempt to secure his place in history, he’s planned an art heist. His crew will steal the 40-foot-long painting “Field of Sunflowers” after a museum benefit. He then intends to give the masterpiece back to the museum in his will, along with a sizable donation if they agree to name the museum after him.

To pull the job, Smooth has assembled a crack team of professional criminals, including communications expert Bobby Macoon (Richard Bakalyan, who had an uncredited appearance as an umpire in Follow Me, Boys! and is about to become a very familiar face in this column), Cowboy Schaeffer (Slim Pickens, making his first Disney appearance since Savage Sam), and stone-faced killer Frank Boley (the awesome Henry Silva who unfortunately did not become a Disney regular). Frank’s the only one who doesn’t believe Jack is the real Ace Williams, which automatically makes him the sharpest tool in a dull shed.

To make sure nothing goes wrong, Smooth informs everyone that they’ll all be staying at the house until it’s time for the benefit the next day. This ends up including Smooth’s art instructor, a civilian named Sally Inwood (Dorothy Provine, returning to the Disney fold for the first time since That Darn Cat!). Jack thinks he and Sally might be able to help each other out of this mess but has a hard time getting alone with her. Part of the problem is Jack is continually waylaid by Smooth’s wife, Melanie (Joanna Moore, last seen in Son Of Flubber), a lonely ex-burlesque dancer eager to share memories of the stage with Jack.

Eventually, the real Ace Williams (played by the wonderful Jack Elam and he’ll be back in this column, too) turns up at the house. Turns out that Ace was mugged on his way to the meet-up, so he doesn’t have anything to prove he’s the real McCoy. Neither does Jack, so the crew decides that the only way to find the real Ace Williams is to lock them both in a room and have it out. Two men enter, one man leaves and that man must be the real killer. Fortunately for Jack, Sally just happens to be hiding out in the room chosen for the fight. She knocks Ace unconscious and agrees to work with Jack to figure a way out of this mess. Ace is locked in the basement and Jack has no choice but to go along with the heist.

The next day, Jack heads out with the crew to infiltrate the museum disguised as caterers. Meanwhile, Sally is left alone with Ace in the basement and Joe Smooth’s tough-guy valet, Francis (Mickey Shaughnessy), guarding her. As Sally tries to outwit the bad guys, Jack is forced to go into action and play his part. He tries explaining to the guard what’s going on in a whisper but, for reasons that are literally never explained, the guard suddenly collapses in a heap, dead as a doornail.

The rest of the crew is very impressed by this but Jack suddenly decides he’s had enough. He refuses to steal the painting and leads the crew on a chase through the museum. Along the way, Jack finds the second guard, who ALSO dies the second Jack touches him. The chase doesn’t climax so much as peter out when the police suddenly turn up. Seems that Sally was able to escape and call the cops after all. They all go round up Smooth at the rendezvous point and Jack and Sally, who think they’ve fallen in love for some reason, live happily ever after.

Theatrical re-release poster for Never A Dull Moment

So, there are a whole lot of problems with Never A Dull Moment but my biggest question when I was finished with all this was, “How did the author of The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three come up with such a boring heist?” It turns out he didn’t. In the book, the bad guys are planning to kidnap the mayor of New York City. That certainly sounds a whole lot more interesting than stealing one painting from a museum, no matter how oversized the canvas.

The title Never A Dull Moment is clearly a suggestion, not a guarantee. The movie is often shockingly, staggeringly dull. Over half of the movie takes place in that house. While we’re there, Dick Van Dyke spends a lot of time pretending to be drunk (which is one of those gags that’s funny the first time but gets old quick), Edward G. Robinson goes on and on about art and legacy and overexplains the logistics of this very basic heist, Dorothy Provine behaves as though this threat against her life is a mid-level inconvenience, and Slim Pickens mangles the pronunciation of “horse doovers”.

Things don’t improve much at the museum. The climactic chase goes through various wings of the museum, which seems ripe for comedy. But for the most part, those opportunities are squandered. Even potentially dated and problematic humor is largely absent. I was ready to cringe when they entered the “Primitive Art” wing but, apart from referring to it as “primitive”, the sequence mostly avoids outdated stereotypes.

The “Pop Art” wing primarily just goes for the low-hanging fruit of “isn’t modern art weird?” At one point, the chase passes an oversized Roy Lichtenstein-like mural that was actually done by longtime Mickey Mouse cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson. You don’t get to see much of it in the movie but I thought it was cool. However, I don’t want you to have to sit through this whole movie just to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Gottfredson piece, so here it is:

Floyd Gottfredson's Astro Pooch comic strip as seen in Never A Dull Moment

Whatever else you might say about Never A Dull Moment, the cast really isn’t to blame. Dick Van Dyke has a plum role here, it just needed to be drastically rewritten. He does the best he can with what he’s got to work with. The same goes for Robinson, Provine, Moore and that murderers’ row of killer character actors. But you can’t make something from nothing and Never A Dull Moment surrounds its cast with a whole lot of nothing.

The movie was released on June 26, 1968. Reviews were middling to negative and it ended up earning considerably less money than Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. Dick Van Dyke’s next feature would be more successful. Released in December of 1968, it was a family-fantasy-musical set in England, not unlike Mary Poppins, that reunited him with the Sherman Brothers. But Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was not a Disney movie, although trailers sure tried to make it look like one. Within a few years, Dick Van Dyke would decide he was through with movies for awhile and return to television for most of the 1970s and 80s. It’ll be quite some time before he returns to this column.

Even though Never A Dull Moment wasn’t a home run by any definition, it still served its purpose. It helped establish the heist comedy as another go-to genre for Disney. The studio played on the fringes of this sandbox in earlier films like That Darn Cat! and Emil And The Detectives. But this time, there were no kids, no animals and no gimmicks. Just a relatively straight-forward case of mistaken identity and some crooks doing a job. It wouldn’t be long before Disney found its way back to this well.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Monkeys, Go Home!

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Monkeys, Go Home!

Monkeys, Go Home! was released on February 2, 1967, not quite two months after the death of Walt Disney. Walt probably didn’t have a whole lot to do with the movie. It’s a project of little importance, just another live-action comedy shot on the Burbank backlot, and Walt would have been focused on EPCOT and the Florida project at the time. But he definitely would have been aware of it, so you have to wonder just what exactly the appeal was. Maybe Walt just needed something to keep his new star, Dean Jones, busy.

The movie is based on the novel The Monkeys by G.K. Wilkinson. I can’t find much information about either the book or its author. Wilkinson’s only other book appears to be something called Nick The Click. The British paperback of Nick The Click comes with the tagline, “He’s Soho’s top porn-broker.” Needless to say, Disney didn’t option that one.

Screenwriter Maurice Tombragel had written a LOT of Disney TV productions, including Texas John Slaughter, Elfego Baca, and The Adventures Of Gallegher, as well as the 1962 feature Moon Pilot. Monkeys, Go Home! would be his only other theatrical project at the studio but he’d continue working on the television side for another year or two.

Director Andrew V. McLaglen was new to Disney but he’d built up an impressive resume elsewhere. The son of the great character actor Victor McLaglen, Andrew worked his way up through the ranks as an assistant director. As a director, he’d helmed a lot of television, including a massive number of Gunsmoke and Have Gun – Will Travel episodes. On the big screen, he’d directed John Wayne in McLintock! and James Stewart in Shenandoah, both of which had been extremely popular. This would be McLaglen’s only Disney movie although he’d return to the studio for some TV work in the 1970s.

Dean Jones makes his third Disney appearance as Hank Dussard, an American who inherits his uncle’s olive grove in Provence, France. The local priest, Father Sylvain (Maurice Chevalier), is welcoming but cautions Hank against trying to operate the place on his own. Most of the olive groves in the region are run by families with lots of kids, whose small hands are ideally suited for picking olives. As a bachelor, Hank would have to either hire laborers, which isn’t cost-effective for such a small grove, or hurry up, get married and start having kids.

Hank has a different idea. Before coming to France, Hank had been an animal trainer in the Air Force, training chimpanzees for space travel. Now that the space program has started sending humans into space, the astrochimps are retired. So Hank pulls a few strings to get four of the chimps sent to France, where he gives them all French names and sets to work training them to pick olives. By the way, for those of you keeping score this is at least the third Disney movie to somehow revolve around astrochimps, following Moon Pilot and Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. I guess somebody at Disney read an article in Life magazine and really loved the idea of space chimps.

Hank wants to keep the monkeys a secret but news travels fast in a small town. First, his neighbor Maria (Yvette Mimieux) pops by. She’s delighted by the little migrant workers but thinks the all-girl team needs a boy monkey for a little r and r. Hank doesn’t want the chimps distracted but does allow Maria to dress them in her sisters’ hand-me-down dresses and nightgowns (“To a girl, appearance is most important, especially chimpanzee!” I’m not sure I follow Maria’s logic there but sure).

Next, Emile, the local lawyer (Clément Harari), drives by to spy on Hank’s progress. He wants the land and is hopeful that Hank will quickly give up, sell out and go home. When he sees the monkeys, he enlists the aid of Marcel the butcher (Bernard Woringer). Marcel also wants Hank gone before any seeds of romance can blossom between he and Maria. The butcher and the lawyer hold a town meeting where Marcel warns that Hank’s capitalist scheme will inevitably lead to chimps taking over every sector of the workforce.

The next day, Marcel has blanketed the entire village with anti-monkey slogans. Hank visits the mayor (Marcel Hillaire) who advises him to fight fire with fire. The next morning, Hank and Father Sylvain ring the church bell and the townsfolk wake up to see the monkeys parading around with little picket signs and painting their own pro-monkey slogans on storefronts. The villagers are so delighted by the sight of seeing monkeys in people clothes and doing people things that the anti-monkey hysteria evaporates.

But Emile still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Hank returns home after a town festival to find a redhead named Yolande (Yvonne Constant) who claims to be his cousin. Emile tracked her down to inform her that half the property and all its profits belong to her. Hank doesn’t see a solution to this problem but Maria decides to use the chimps to scare Yolande away. She leaves the farm and runs straight to Father Sylvain, where she confesses that she’s not really Hank’s cousin.

Hank tells Marcel that Emile’s been playing him for a sap. Emile doesn’t care about workers’ rights or who Maria ends up with. All he wants is the land. This apparently was not obvious to Marcel from the get-go and he confronts Emile in the street. This leads to an all-out brawl/food fight in the town square that only ends when the winds begin to blow, signaling it’s time to harvest the olives.

The whole town gathers to see the chimps in action. Unfortunately, Maria picks this exact moment to reveal her big surprise. She’s finally managed to track down a boy chimp for the girls. Hank’s prediction comes true and the distracted monkeys abandon their olive-picking duties. Everybody laughs at Hank’s failure but Father Sylvain chastises them, shaming the townsfolk into picking the olives themselves. That’s right. In the end, this movie about monkeys learning to pick olives includes almost no footage of monkeys picking olives.

Monkeys Go Home quad poster

Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible to make an entertaining movie about monkeys learning to pick olives. Actually, I take that back. I am saying that. Why on earth would anybody look at this script and think, “Now there’s a crackerjack idea! Monkeys AND olives? Where do I sign?” Maybe everybody thought they’d at least be getting a trip to France out of the deal but nope! This was shot right at home in the good old U S of A. The town square was just the old Zorro set with French signage in place of the old Spanish ones. The olive trees were planted right next to the Animation Building. Everybody was probably back home by 6 every night.

Dean Jones eventually became one of Disney’s most reliable stars but he hadn’t quite hit his stride in Monkeys, Go Home! He seems faintly embarrassed at having to play second fiddle to a bunch of chimps. Because of that, he isn’t remotely believable as a professional animal trainer. Yvette Mimieux seems a lot more comfortable around the animals than he does.

As a side note, the actual animal trainer on Monkeys, Go Home! was Stewart Raffill. Raffill’s had an interesting career, starting out as an animal supervisor on movies like this and Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. Eventually he moved into writing and directing. He’s done a lot of animal-centric projects like The Adventures Of The Wilderness Family but he’s also directed movies like The Ice Pirates, The Philadelphia Experiment and the bizarro E.T. ripoff/McDonald’s commercial Mac And Me. We’ll see Raffill’s work in this column again.

We’ll also see Yvette Mimieux again but not for awhile. By 1967, Mimieux had been in the business nearly a decade. She’d appeared in such films as The Time Machine, Where The Boys Are and Toys In The Attic. Monkeys, Go Home! isn’t much of a showcase for her talents. It isn’t even much of a showcase for the monkeys, to be honest. But she gets through it like a trouper. She’ll have a much better role the next time we see her.

Maurice Chevalier previously appeared in In Search Of The Castaways alongside Hayley Mills. He doesn’t get to have nearly as much fun this time. He’s mostly around to be a comforting presence and lead a children’s choir in a boring new Sherman Brothers song, “Joie De Vivre”. I get it. If you’ve got Maurice Chevalier in your movie, you want him to sing. But this song feels like leftovers from the Castaways sessions. The Shermans were brilliant songwriters but they were more than capable of phoning it in when they felt like it.

Monkeys, Go Home! ended up being Chevalier’s final film performance. He retired in 1968 following a farewell tour. In 1971, Chevalier, who had suffered from depression all his life, attempted suicide. He pulled through but the overdose took its toll on his liver and kidneys. Later in the year, he stopped responding to dialysis treatments. Doctors attempted surgery but Chevalier went into cardiac arrest shortly after the procedure. He died on January 1, 1972, at the age of 83. But even though this was his last film, this column still isn’t quite through with Maurice Chevalier. He’ll be back one last time.

Most of the rest of the cast was one-and-done with Disney. Marcel Hillaire, the mayor, previously appeared as the tour guide who loses track of Fred MacMurray in the Parisian sewers in Bon Voyage! Alan Carney, the grocer, was a referee in the two Flubber movies and he’ll be back again. So will Maurice Marsac, who later cornered the market on playing snooty French waiters and maître d’s in movies like The Jerk. And Darleen Carr, who duets with Chevalier on “Joie De Vivre”, will lend her voice to an upcoming animated feature.

Monkeys, Go Home! is nobody’s favorite Disney movie. Today, it’s another live-action footnote that you probably didn’t even realize isn’t available on Disney+ (although it is a Disney Movie Club exclusive Blu-ray, for the Dean Jones completists out there). Even at the time, reviews tended to be dismissive, and audiences had a similar reaction. It wasn’t exactly a box office flop but it sure wasn’t a hit. Disney still hadn’t exactly figured out what to do with Dean Jones yet. But they were getting close.  

VERDICT: Oh, it’s every inch a Disney Minus, all right.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Almost nobody got away with making just one movie for Walt Disney. Whether you were a newcomer like Hayley Mills or an established star like Fred MacMurray, if Walt liked you and you brought money into the studio, Walt was going to try to get you to stick around. So after Mary Poppins became Disney’s biggest hit in years, it must have irked him that Julie Andrews was suddenly too busy to make a return engagement. Her first musical after Poppins, The Sound Of Music, exploded at the box office and earned her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination. Ms. Andrews’ dance card was going to be full for the foreseeable future.

Dick Van Dyke, on the other hand, was ready, willing and able to work for Walt. Post-Poppins, he returned to his eponymous sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show. But his follow-up feature, The Art Of Love co-starring James Garner (who will eventually appear in this column), failed to bring in Mary Poppins-size (or even Merlin Jones-size) numbers. So when Walt pitched him on a contemporary comic retelling of Robinson Crusoe, it’s easy to understand why Van Dyke was eager to sign up. After all, a good portion of Crusoe is essentially a one-man show.

I say Walt pitched the project to Dick Van Dyke because Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. was Walt’s idea in the first place. In fact, for the first and only time in his long career, Walt took a writing credit on a feature film. Sort of. For a guy who served as the face of his company, whose name was always first in the credits and most prominently featured on posters, and had already named one theme park after himself, Walt was surprisingly modest about taking specific credits. So the story for Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is credited to “Retlaw Yensid”. You don’t exactly need an Enigma machine to crack that code.

Walt had Don DaGradi and Bill Walsh, the now Oscar-nominated screenwriters of Mary Poppins, flesh out his general idea into a screenplay. Odds are nobody involved spent too much time reviewing Daniel Defoe’s original novel. Apart from the name and the general premise of a castaway on a deserted island, any similarity between the book and the movie is purely coincidental.

Since this was shaping up to be a Mary Poppins reunion, you might expect director Robert Stevenson or the Sherman Brothers to be involved. But Dick Van Dyke wielded some influence of his own to get Byron Paul to direct. Paul and Van Dyke were old friends who first met in the Air Force back in the ‘40s. Since then, Paul had become Van Dyke’s manager. He’d also produced and directed a number of television productions including For The Love Of Willadean, The Tenderfoot and The Adventures Of Gallegher for Disney. Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. would be Paul’s only feature credit but he and Dick Van Dyke continued to work together in television through the 1970s.

As for the Shermans, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. has no original songs. The film’s score was written by Robert F. Brunner, a composer who Disney hired in 1964. His first full credit as composer had been That Darn Cat! Brunner will stick around this column for quite some time. It’s interesting that Robin Crusoe went songless since Van Dyke had acquitted himself quite well musically in Mary Poppins. I’m not sure if the plan was to make this a non-musical all along and therefore the Shermans’ services weren’t required or if the Shermans were busy and that’s why they decided to go the non-musical route.

Theatrical release poster for Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had been a young man who becomes a sea merchant against the wishes of his family, who wanted him to be a lawyer. Disney’s Crusoe (who is referred to as “Robin” exactly once…usually it’s “Rob”, probably to remind audiences of Rob Petrie, Van Dyke’s character on TV) is a pilot in the U.S. Navy. He’s on a routine mission when his plane malfunctions, forcing him to bail out somewhere over the Pacific.

With his life raft inflated, Rob takes stock of his situation by consulting the official naval guidebook Survival At Sea And Like It. In another nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show, the survival manual is read in voiceover by Richard Deacon, the manager of the drive-in in That Darn Cat! and Van Dyke’s TV costar. Rob seems to be in relatively good shape until an aggressive shark comes along and causes him to lose most of his supplies.

Days later, Rob finally washes ashore on a seemingly uninhabited island. After tending to his basic survival needs, he explores the island and discovers the wreck of a Japanese submarine. On board, he meets a fellow Navy officer and castaway: Astrochimp Floyd (played by Dinky the Chimp), whose space capsule washed ashore years earlier. Either this island is in the Bermuda Triangle or the Navy is really lax about tracking down missing personnel.

Rob and Floyd salvage a bunch of material from the sub and construct an island estate that would make the Swiss Family Robinson envious. One day while out golfing, Rob spots another set of footprints. He tracks them to a large native idol where he discovers a native girl (Nancy Kwan) praying. At first, she seems dead set on killing Rob but eventually calms down enough to explain, mostly in charades although she soon reveals that she speaks English, why she’s there. Her father, Chief Tanamashu, has sent her to be sacrificed to Kaboona, the big idol, because she refuses to submit to an arranged marriage. Rob agrees that women should have the right to marry whomever they please. He apparently does not believe that women have the right to keep their given names because he decides to call her Wednesday. Of course.

Before long, Wednesday’s sisters and cousins turn up, more potential sacrifices to Kaboona. Wednesday wants to fight back and she convinces Rob to train them into a giggly military unit. When Rob finds out that Tanamashu claims that only he can hear the voice of Kaboona, he comes up with a plan to outwit the primitive natives by booby trapping parts of the island and rigging up the idol with lights and a sound system off the submarine.

Tanamashu and his men arrive and while the plan doesn’t go off without a hitch, Rob and the girls still manage to win the day. At the celebratory feast, Wednesday asks Rob to dance. Tanamashu thinks this is hilarious because she’s tricked him into performing a ceremonial wedding dance. (“Tanamashu not lose daughter! Tanamashu gain wise guy son!”) Rob runs for his life and spots a passing Navy helicopter just in the nick of time. They airlift Rob and Floyd off the island to safety and a gala reception on an aircraft carrier. For Floyd. It seems that nobody even noticed Rob was missing.

Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. movie tie-in book

So yeah, Cast Away this ain’t. In fact, it frequently struggles to rise to the level of Gilligan’s Island. Dick Van Dyke is a very gifted and funny performer but this is not the showcase he was hoping it would be. Rather than traditional voice-over narration, the story is told through Rob’s letters back to his fiancée. Which is fine, except that…Van Dyke…reads them…very…slowly…so we…can…understand…that…he is…writing. Honestly, if he just read the letters in a normal cadence, it would probably shave five minutes off this unnecessarily long movie.

Van Dyke has a real gift for physical comedy and you’d think that’s where this movie would shine. But for the first 20 or 30 minutes, he’s either trapped in the cockpit of a plane or stuck splashing around on a rubber life raft. There’s only so much you can do under those conditions. Things don’t improve much on land. The slapstick is either too restrained or too unimaginative. DaGradi and Walsh call on their animation background a bit in the grand finale but not enough.

Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. was Nancy Kwan’s first and only Disney movie. Kwan shot to stardom as the title character in The World Of Suzie Wong. That role got her a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer, an award she shared with Hayley Mills for Pollyanna. She followed that up with the even more popular Flower Drum Song. But by the time Disney came along, she’d already begun having a hard time finding roles in American movies. As the years went on, she’d make more and more films in the UK, Europe and Hong Kong.

If Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is indicative of the kinds of roles Kwan was being offered, no wonder she went abroad. This is one of those only-in-the-60s movies that thinks it’s making a stand for equal rights by arguing against arranged marriage while accepting marriage as a woman’s natural, inevitable fate. Wednesday and the rest of her sister cousins don’t really want any other rights. They ask to be trained but spend most of their time giggling and serving fruit to Rob (or, as they call him, “Admiral Honey”). As soon as Rob rejects her, Wednesday is out for blood, leading an angry mob of women and throwing spears. It’s dispiriting to see someone as vibrant as Nancy Kwan stuck in a movie like this. She’s a fascinating person and a genuine trailblazer for Asian performers in Hollywood’s modern era. She deserves better.

Wednesday’s father, Chief Tanamashu, is played by Akim Tamiroff, an actor who is decidedly not Asian. Tamiroff was an Armenian actor who emigrated to America from Russia in 1927. He’d worked steadily in Hollywood since the 1930s, earning two Oscar nominations and working with such greats as Preston Sturges and Orson Welles. This would be Tamiroff’s only Disney appearance and he goes waaaaay over the top with it. His performance could almost be considered offensive if it was more specific. As it is, there’s no real way of telling what exactly he thinks he’s doing. He’s certainly not trying to do an impression of a stereotypical Chinese or Japanese or even Polynesian accent. It’s just his own goofy voice delivering a lot of pidgin English gobbledygook. Some of it’s a little amusing but a little goes a long way.

Even though nothing about this movie seems particularly special, Walt Disney had a lot of confidence in Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. It was positioned as the studio’s big summer release of 1966, opening just a few weeks after The Dick Van Dyke Show aired its final episode on June 1. The studio held a gala premiere on board the USS Kitty Hawk in San Diego, the same aircraft carrier featured in the film, attended by such Disney all-stars as Fred MacMurray, Annette Funicello, Dean Jones and, of course, Dick Van Dyke. Most critics rolled their eyes at the movie but audiences turned it into a decent-sized hit. It was no Mary Poppins. Few movies were. But it did well enough to get a theatrical re-release in 1974.

Today, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. is a footnote in Disney history, a fate it more than deserves. This is just not a good movie. At nearly two hours, it’s a real drag that quickly overstays its welcome. It borrows less from Robinson Crusoe than from Swiss Family Robinson but with less excitement and fewer laughs. Even Dick Van Dyke’s drunk scene falls flat. If you can’t milk a couple of chuckles out of a drunk Dick Van Dyke and a chimpanzee, you’ve got serious problems. Nevertheless, Dick Van Dyke will be back in this column. As will the chimpanzee, for that matter.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: That Darn Cat!

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's That Darn Cat!

Over the years, Walt Disney signed plenty of actors to multi-picture contracts. But he wasn’t always great at maintaining relationships with his talent. Bobby Driscoll, Fess Parker and Tommy Kirk all left the studio under less than cordial circumstances. That wasn’t the case with his number one star, Hayley Mills. Over the course of six pictures, Walt and Hayley enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. Walt made Hayley a huge star, showcasing her talents for comedy, music and drama. In return, Hayley made Walt a whole lot of money.

That Darn Cat! would be Hayley Mills’ final Disney feature and, like most of her other movies for the studio, it was a big hit. It was the 6th highest-grossing film of 1965, behind The Sound Of Music, Doctor Zhivago, Thunderball, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines and The Great Race, on a budget that was a fraction of those epics. The role is comfortably within Hayley’s wheelhouse, stirring up trouble and innocently deflecting responsibility when it threatens to come back on her. After a couple of underwhelming efforts like The Moon-Spinners and Summer Magic, it’s nice that Hayley was able to leave Disney on a high note.

The movie is based on the novel Undercover Cat by the Gordons. Gordon and Mildred Gordon were a husband-and-wife writing team who specialized in crime fiction like FBI Story. They’d already enjoyed some success adapting their work for movies and TV, notably with the 1962 thriller Experiment In Terror directed by Blake Edwards. Undercover Cat was a bit lighter than the Gordons’ usual work, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch when Disney optioned the rights. However, the studio did necessitate changing the cat’s name, D.C., from “Damn Cat” to “Darn Cat”.

Bill Walsh, still flying high after Mary Poppins’ runaway success, co-produced with Ron Miller and took a pass at the Gordons’ script, probably adding more slapstick gags. Prolific director Robert Stevenson had taken an unfortunate detour back to Midvale College with The Monkey’s Uncle but shows a steadier hand guiding That Darn Cat! Old Yeller demonstrated that Stevenson could get convincing performances from his animal actors. But it’s one thing to make a sentimental drama about a dog. It’s quite another to turn a Siamese cat into a comedic lead.

D.C. was played by multiple feline actors, including an established Disney star. Syn Cat had appeared a couple years earlier in The Incredible Journey. The cat (or cats, as the case may be) is very much the star of the show, appearing in most scenes and even getting a smooth Sherman Brothers theme song crooned by Bobby Darin. While some of D.C.’s performance is attributable to the skillful editing of Cotton Warburton (who had just won an Oscar for his work on Mary Poppins), there’s also no denying that these are some remarkably well-trained cats.

Theatrical release poster for That Darn Cat

As the movie opens, we follow D.C. as he makes his nightly rounds through the Anytown U.S.A. section of the Disney backlot, stealing food from neighborhood dogs and begging for handouts. At the local deli, he catches the scent of salmon as its bought by Iggy (Frank Gorshin, about a year away from scoring his iconic role as the Riddler on TV’s Batman). D.C. follows Iggy back to his flophouse apartment where he’s hiding out with Dan (Neville Brand) after the pair robbed a bank and kidnapped a teller (Grayson Hall, about two years away from her most famous role as Dr. Julia Hoffman on TV’s Dark Shadows). The hostage sees an opportunity and replaces D.C.’s collar with her wristwatch, scratching an incomplete “HELP” on the back and sending the cat on his way.

D.C. heads home where he finds Patti Randall (Hayley) just getting in from a date with pipe-smoking surfer Canoe (Tom Lowell in the first of his three Disney features). A little later, Patti’s older sister, Ingrid (Dorothy Provine…we’ll see her again, too), arrives with their fussbudget neighbor, Gregory Benson (Roddy McDowall…you’d better believe we’ll be seeing a lot more of him). Greg and Ingrid share a carpool but Greg’s trying to take their relationship to the next level by inviting her over for a duck dinner with his mother. As soon as D.C. hears about the duck, he hightails it over to the Benson house and steals the bird off their front porch.

While trying to pry the duck out of D.C.’s paws, Patti finally notices the watch around his neck. She leaps to the conclusion that it must belong to the kidnapped bank teller in the news. The next morning, she brings her suspicions to FBI Agent Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones…we’ll get to him in a moment). Both Kelso and his supervisor (Richard Eastham, last seen here as the circus owner in Toby Tyler) agree it’s a longshot but that Patti might be on to something. So Kelso is assigned surveillance duty on D.C. (now dubbed Informant X-14), despite having an allergy so severe he can’t even say the word “cat” without sneezing.

Now if the rest of the movie was nothing more than the slapstick shenanigans of a team of FBI agents attempting to tail a cat, it’d probably be fine. But Walsh and the Gordons pile on all manner of other complications. The Randall sisters live next door to a nosy neighbor (Elsa Lanchester, last seen fleeing the Banks house in Mary Poppins) whose suspicions are raised every time a man sets foot on the premises. Kelso asks to keep the FBI’s presence on the down-low, so both Gregory and Canoe start snooping around trying to figure out what’s what. When the FBI threatens to pull Kelso off the cat detail, Patti convinces local jeweler Mr. Hofstedder (Ed Wynn) to backup a phony tip that confirms the watch belonged to the bank teller.

Eventually D.C. does lead Kelso and Patti to the bank robbers, just as they’re about to get rid of their hostage. Part of what makes That Darn Cat! stand out from other Disney comedies is the scenes with the bad guys. Gorshin, Brand and particularly Grayson Hall play these scenes straight. Gorshin’s a funny guy, so he can’t help but score a few laughs, especially opposite a scene-stealer like Iris Adrian as the gossipy landlady. But Brand is a menacing heavy and he brings a sense of legitimate danger when Kelso and Patti turn up. As for Grayson Hall, she apparently didn’t get the memo that she was appearing in a slapstick comedy for Walt Disney. She projects legitimate fear and proves herself to be braver and more resourceful than your typical damsel in distress, even without many lines. Hall sells the idea that this really is a life-and-death situation.

The really broad comedy is wisely kept separate from the hostage situation. Stevenson stages a funny and elaborate sequence in a drive-in movie theatre, with Richard Deacon of The Dick Van Dyke Show fame as the beleaguered manager. This was the first of many Disney features for Deacon, although he had already appeared as Uncle Archie on the Mickey Mouse Club serial Annette. The drive-in sequence also allows Walt to take a few jabs at the surfing movies Canoe is such a big fan of (and that Annette Funicello herself was now churning out by the score over at AIP).

That Darn Cat! finds everyone involved firing on all cylinders, from outgoing marquee star Hayley Mills, delightful as usual, to incoming marquee star Dean Jones. Jones had been working his way up through small parts on stage, in movies and on TV for a few years. In 1962, he got a big break starring as the title character on the military sitcom Ensign O’Toole. Ensign O’Toole aired Sunday nights at 7 on NBC, right before Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color. Naturally, Walt wanted to know who the network had leading in to his show. Walt checked out Ensign O’Toole and Jones’ latest feature, Under The Yum Yum Tree, and liked what he saw. We’re going to be seeing a whole lot more of Dean Jones in this column.

That Darn Cat paper dolls featuring Hayley Mills and D.C.

Unfortunately, this is the last we’ll be seeing of Hayley Mills. For a number of years, Hayley had a hard time shaking her Disney image. She appeared as a rebellious teen in a Catholic girls’ school in The Trouble With Angels and made a number of films back home in England, often with her father, John Mills. Hayley and John costarred with another former Disney star, James MacArthur, in The Truth About Spring. John directed Hayley (opposite future Deadwood star Ian McShane!) in Sky West And Crooked, from a story written by Hayley’s mother, Mary Hayley Bell.

In 1966, Hayley took her most adult role to date as a young newlywed opposite Hywell Bennett in The Family Way. The movie got a lot of press, partly because it featured an original score by Paul McCartney but mostly because Hayley Mills did a tasteful nude scene and became romantically involved with and eventually married the film’s director, Roy Boulting. Boulting and Mills made a couple more movies together, including Twisted Nerve (which is probably more famous since Quentin Tarantino appropriated its Bernard Herrmann music for Kill Bill), before divorcing in 1977.

After that, Hayley Mills took a few years off to raise her kids. When she returned to acting, it was mostly on television. In 1986, she finally returned to the Disney studio with The Parent Trap II for the Disney Channel. That movie was popular enough to earn two more sequels in 1989. Between Parent Traps, she also starred in her own Disney Channel sitcom, Good Morning, Miss Bliss. Hayley starred as a junior high school teacher in charge of such students as Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), Lisa (Lark Voorhies) and Screech (Dustin Diamond).

The Disney Channel pulled the plug on Good Morning, Miss Bliss after 13 episodes and Mills walked away from the show. NBC then decided to give it one more chance, giving it a complete makeover and renaming it Saved By The Bell. That version did pretty well for itself. Hayley Mills has also continued to do pretty well for herself, appearing mostly on stage and TV, being inducted as a Disney Legend in 1998 and winning a battle with breast cancer back in 2012. She’s currently 75 years old and her memoir, Forever Young, will be published on September 7 of this year. She seems to be going strong, so I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she may yet make another appearance in this column.

Hayley Mills was unquestionably one of Disney’s most significant stars. She excelled in period melodramas like Pollyanna, contemporary comedies like The Parent Trap and That Darn Cat!, and adventures and thrillers like In Search Of The Castaways and The Moon-Spinners. As much as anyone, her winning screen presence helped set the tone for the studio in the 1960s. We’ll see a lot of other young stars in this column in the weeks and months ahead. In some ways, all of them will be aspiring to be the next Hayley Mills.

The audiences who flocked to see That Darn Cat! at Christmas of 1965 probably didn’t realize they were watching Hayley’s last Disney movie. Back then, the specifics of actors’ contracts with studios weren’t front-page news the way they can be today. As far as they were concerned, this was just a return to form for Hayley Mills and Disney. The movie became a huge hit and, in 1997, the studio took a shot at a remake that I suppose we’ll have to deal with in this column eventually. But let’s not worry about that for now. Today, let’s just take a moment and bask in the sunshine of Hayley Mills. This column would have been a lot less fun without her.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Monkey’s Uncle

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Monkey's Uncle

It’s fair to assume that nobody at Disney ever thought they’d see Merlin Jones again, even after Walt rolled the dice and gave The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones a theatrical release. For one thing, expectations for the project were low. More importantly, Walt had fired Tommy Kirk, Merlin Jones himself, after a scandal threatened to out Kirk’s homosexuality. But money talks and when Merlin Jones blew up at the box office, Walt brought Tommy, Annette and pretty much everybody else from the first film back to try and make lightning strike twice.

Merlin Jones’ original misadventure was clearly a television product inelegantly stitched together for theatrical presentation. So you’d think that the first thing returning screenwriters Helen and Alfred Lewis Levitt and director Robert Stevenson would do would be to concoct an actual storyline that would carry through the entire picture. Nope! Even though The Monkey’s Uncle was made with cinemas in mind, this still feels like two unrelated episodes of a sitcom. Both halves revolve vaguely around the threat of football being abolished at Midvale College but that’s about as far as the intricate plot machinations get.

While 99.9% of The Monkey’s Uncle is Disney business as usual, the movie shows that Stevenson and Walt had been paying attention to the outside world in at least one big way. Annette began appearing in American International Pictures’ cycle of beach movies starting with Beach Party in 1963. AIP’s movies regularly featured musical interludes performed on-camera by such artists as Dick Dale, “Little” Stevie Wonder and The Hondells. Never one to be outdone, Walt recruited the most popular surf rock band of all time, The Beach Boys, to be Annette’s backup band.

At the time of The Monkey’s Uncle’s release in August 1965, the band had already scored two number-one hits. Brian Wilson was operating near the peak of his creative powers, less than a year away from the release of Pet Sounds. But Disney being Disney, you won’t hear any Beach Boys classics like “I Get Around” or “California Girls” here. Instead, the band accompanies Annette on an original title track by the Sherman Brothers, then disappears after the opening credits. The song, which includes such lyrics as “I love the monkey’s uncle and I wish I were the monkey’s aunt”, is very catchy and very dumb. But at least the Beach Boys appear to be enjoying themselves. Well, most of them do. Mike Love gets stuck singing backup and busts out some exceptionally awkward bent-knees and swinging-arms not-quite-dance-moves. He looks like he’d rather be someplace else.

Theatrical release poster for The Monkey's Uncle

A movie like this doesn’t really need to justify its title but Stevenson and the Levitts do just that as soon as the Beach Boys have left the building. It seems that Merlin Jones, the scrambled egghead of Midvale College, has filed a petition to formally adopt Stanley, the chimpanzee from the first film. Judge Holmsby (once again played by Leon Ames) isn’t comfortable with a human caring for a chimp like a child, so he does the next best thing by making Stanley Merlin’s nephew. The Supreme Court could use more judges like Holmsby who make decisions based solely on puns and goofy jokes.

Merlin uses Stanley in his experiments with sleep-learning. Once the chimp falls asleep, a record plays instructions for Stanley to follow when he wakes up. Meanwhile, Judge Holmsby is fighting his own battles with his fellow Midvale board members. Football-hating regent Mr. Dearborne (Frank Faylen, probably best known as Ernie the cab driver in It’s A Wonderful Life but not seen in this column since his appearance all the way back in The Reluctant Dragon) wants to cancel the big game unless the jocks can pass their exams honestly. Judge Holmsby loves football but admits that the team is likely doomed if they can’t cheat. So he recruits Merlin to come up with an honest method of cheating, which turns out to be sleep-learning. If it worked on a chimp, surely it’ll work on a couple of apes like Norm Grabowski (reprising his role from the first movie) and Leon Tyler (last seen assisting Tommy Kirk in Son Of Flubber).

The scheme more or less works but in the movie’s second half, Merlin faces a more formidable challenge. Mr. Dearborne has found a potential donor to solve Midvale’s perpetual financial woes. He’s prepared to make a substantial donation if the college permanently bans football. Things look bleak until Holmsby meets eccentric millionaire Darius Green III (Arthur O’Connell). He promises an even more substantial donation if Midvale’s top scientific minds can fulfill his ancestor’s dream of inventing a human-propelled flying machine. Once again, Holmsby turns to Merlin for help.

Merlin’s flying machine works, up to a point. The problem is that people just aren’t strong enough to keep the thing aloft and land safely. So Merlin develops a strength elixir from pure adrenaline and takes over as pilot himself. The flight goes smoothly right up until some men in white coats turn up to bring “Darius Green III” back home to the funny farm. It looks like Mr. Dearborne’s dream of a football-free Midvale will come true. But it turns out that his mysterious benefactor was also the same escaped lunatic using another alias. Wocka wocka wocka!

Gold Key comic book adaptation of The Monkey's Uncle

OK, nobody expected The Monkey’s Uncle to dig deep into the tortured backstory of Merlin Jones or to see his relationship with girlfriend Jennifer blossom into a rich tapestry of complex emotion. But even by the relaxed standards of a gimmick comedy sequel, this is one lazy, pedestrian effort from all involved. Nobody brought their A-game to the set this time.

Robert Stevenson, a reliable director who had just been nominated for an Oscar thanks to Mary Poppins, could not have been less invested in this material. Stevenson was a sure-hand when it came to visual effects, whether it was Mary Poppins, the Flubber films or Darby O’Gill And The Little People. The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones had largely avoided pricy effects. With a slightly higher budget to play with, Stevenson does include some fun flying effects this time out. But they’re nothing special and by the time they show up, the movie is already inching toward the finish line.

The Monkey’s Uncle is a particular waste of Annette Funicello’s time, although she later said performing with the Beach Boys was a high point of her music career. She already didn’t have much to do in the first movie. Here, she’s given two notes to play: supportive lab assistant and jealous girlfriend. First, she’s jealous of Stanley after Merlin devotes all his time to the chimp. When she finally arranges for a chimp-sitter so they can go out on a date, Merlin inexplicably forgets all about his girlfriend and starts mooning over the blonde co-ed (Cheryl Miller, who would continue to costar with animals in the film Clarence, The Cross-Eyed Lion and its TV spin-off Daktari).

Walt hadn’t known what to do with Annette for some time now. He’d made her a huge TV and recording star but after Babes In Toyland flopped, he seemed to give up on her movie career. After The Monkey’s Uncle, she left Disney for good. She made some more beach movies and stockcar movies for AIP, then focused on raising a family for a few years. By the time I learned who she was in the mid-1970s, it was as the face of Skippy peanut butter. In 1985, she returned to the studio for the Disney Channel movie Lots Of Luck about a regular family that wins the lottery. Martin Mull and Fred Willard are also in this, so I kind of want to see it now.

Two years after Lots Of Luck, Annette reunited with Frankie Avalon for Back To The Beach. While she was promoting the film, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She went public with her condition in 1992, the same year she was inducted as a Disney Legend. A couple years later, Annette published her memoir, A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes. That book was turned into a 1995 TV-movie (featuring Len Cariou as Walt) that brought in huge ratings for CBS. It also turned out to be Annette’s last movie. She passed away from complications from multiple sclerosis in 2013.

This would also be Tommy Kirk’s last Disney movie, although I’m happy to say he’s still with us. This is Tommy’s 11th appearance in this column since we first saw him back in Old Yeller. After leaving Disney, he followed Annette to AIP where he starred in Pajama Party. But late in 1964, he was arrested for suspicion of possession of marijuana and possession of barbiturates. The charges were soon dropped when it was shown that he had a prescription for the pills but the arrest still cost him several high-profile roles.

Tommy kept working throughout the 1960s, appearing in such non-classics as Village Of The Giants and Mars Needs Women. His drug and alcohol use worsened as he continued to appear in bottom-of-the-barrel dreck. By the mid-70s, he had decided to get sober and quit acting. He eventually opened a carpet cleaning business and lived a quiet, normal life for many years, allowing himself to be coaxed onscreen occasionally in movies like Attack Of The 60 Foot Centerfolds and Little Miss Magic for prolific B-movie auteur Fred Olen Ray. He has yet to appear in another Disney production but was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2006, alongside his Hardy Boys costar Tim Considine and frequent on-screen brother Kevin Corcoran.

Under normal circumstances, The Monkey’s Uncle wouldn’t seem all that unusual or disappointing. It’s a subpar sequel to a surprisingly successful but undeniably goofy movie. And if everybody had still been under contract, this would be a logical (if underwhelming) follow-up. But they weren’t. Walt had very explicitly fired Tommy Kirk and Annette was enjoying more success with Frankie Avalon over at AIP. So Walt had to go out of his way to make The Monkey’s Uncle.

Instead of making the extra effort worthwhile, it’s almost like he was trying to sabotage the Merlin Jones franchise by making something so forgettable that nobody would ever bother asking for another one. Whether he intended it or not, he ended up making a good example of why Walt had never liked sequels in the first place. And even though the studio would eventually return to cranking out part twos and threes, Walt would not personally oversee another sequel in his lifetime.

VERDICT: Disney Minus.  

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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.

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