William Snyder

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Million Dollar Duck

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Million Dollar Duck

There’s a reason there’s not a lot of movies based on Aesop’s Fables and you probably don’t have to be a film major to figure it out. The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs, the fable that provides the jumping off point for The Million Dollar Duck, is all of three paragraphs long. Four if you consider the moral to be its own thing. Not that it really matters in this case, since the folks behind Million Dollar Duck decided to cut the moral and just leave the eggs. As a result, this is a movie that literally has no point.

The Million Dollar Duck was written by Roswell Rogers from a story by Ted Key. Key started his career as a cartoonist, creating the single-panel gag cartoon Hazel for the Saturday Evening Post. He also worked for Jay Ward, creating the Mr. Peabody and Sherman segments for The Rocky And Bullwinkle Show. One of the other segments on that show was Aesop And Son, one of the few sustained adaptations of Aesop’s Fables in pop culture. As far as I know, Aesop And Son never tackled The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs. Did The Million Dollar Duck start off as an unused Rocky And Bullwinkle concept? I don’t know for sure but it would make sense.

Producer Bill Anderson gave the film to director Vincent McEveety. This was the first of a dozen movies McEveety would direct at Disney over the next decade. He’d started out as an assistant director, working on Westward Ho, The Wagons!, Zorro and other TV productions. Since then, he’d built an extensive TV resume, helming multiple episodes of Star Trek, Gunsmoke and many others. Practically the entire McEveety family worked at Disney at one point or another. Vincent’s brother, Joseph L. McEveety, was also an assistant director who turned to screenwriting with The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. His other brother, Bernard, will be in this column soon.

This was Dean Jones’s first movie back at Disney since the massive success of The Love Bug in 1968. In the meantime, he’d gone off to Italy to make the gimmick comedy knock-off Mr. Superinvisible. That movie was released in the States by K-Tel, who proved to be better at selling records and Veg-O-Matics than movies. It was an inauspicious attempt at kick starting his non-Disney career. You can see why Jones opted to return to Burbank.

Jones’s leading lady was a rising star named Sandy Duncan. Like a lot of Disney stars, Duncan had made a name for herself on Broadway, winning Tony nominations for her performances in the musicals Canterbury Tales and The Boy Friend. The Million Dollar Duck was only Duncan’s first movie but Hollywood really wanted to make her a big star. That same year, she also starred in the Neil Simon movie Star Spangled Girl and got her own sitcom, Funny Face (which would be retooled and retitled The Sandy Duncan Show for the 1972 season).

But Sandy Duncan also had to deal with her share of hardship in 1971. That fall, she had surgery to remove a brain tumor from behind her left eye. The procedure was successful but left her blind in that eye (contrary to urban legend, she does not have a glass eye). Fortunately, she recovered quickly and went on to more Tony nominations and TV appearances, including the epic “Return Of Bigfoot” crossover episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Well, epic to me in 1976, anyway. At any rate, Sandy Duncan will be back in this column.

Tony Roberts, the other actor making his film debut this week, also costarred with Sandy Duncan in Star Spangled Girl. But he won’t be back in this column. In 1972, he starred alongside Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam. He’d appear in several more films as Woody’s best friend, which probably saved him from spending the 1970s playing Dean Jones’s best friend.

One of the things I’ve consistently enjoyed about Disney’s gimmick comedies are the frequently playful and innovative opening title sequences. Movies like The Shaggy Dog and The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones not only kept the animation department busy, it allowed them to experiment with different styles like stop-motion. The Million Dollar Duck opens with hand-drawn opening credits by Ward Kimball and Ted Berman, which sounds great in theory. The fact that they’re so utterly pedestrian is the first sign that this is not going to be one of the studio’s best efforts.

Playing against a blue background, the titles show an animated duck crossing back and forth along the bottom of the screen, slowly building a row of six eggs. At the end, he adds a dollar sign, a 1 and a couple of commas, transforming the eggs into “$1,000,000”. That’s it. I mean, come on. This is Disney, for Pete’s sake! The best you could come up with was about five seconds of animation flipped and repeated six times? I get the feeling nobody is bringing their A-game to this project.

Jones stars as Albert Dooley, a professor and researcher in animal behavior at an unnamed university that might just as well be Medfield College. Dooley was once voted most likely to succeed by his graduating class but now he’s struggling to make ends meet. His finances are so bad that he has to deny his son Jimmy’s request to adopt a puppy. Lee Montgomery also makes his film debut as Jimmy. A year later, he’d be best friends with a rat in Ben, the sequel to Willard. And in a 1974 Easter Egg that probably meant very little to audiences at the time, he played a kid named Steve Spelberg in an episode of Colombo.

Dooley’s wife, Katie (Duncan), is doing her part to help out by making her own homemade applesauce. Katie’s too dim to realize that you shouldn’t put garlic, curry powder and mustard in applesauce and Albert’s too polite to mention it tastes like garbage, so he’s sent off to work with a tub full of the toxic sludge. This applesauce is actually a plot point later on, so I hope you’re paying attention.

Albert arrives at the lab, where a chimp tries to steal his lunch. Even the chimp won’t eat the applesauce, so he pawns it off on his neighbor, the duck. The duck happily scarfs it down, just before failing another battery of simple tests designed by Albert’s boss, Dr. Gottlieb (Jack Kruschen). Gottlieb’s had it up to here with this furshlugginer duck and orders it out of the lab for good. The duck wanders into the radiation lab across the hall where it’s bombarded with science rays. Albert retrieves the bird and decides to take the radioactive idiot duck home to his son.

Now a duck’s not the same as a puppy but Jimmy is so desperate for a pet of any kind that he names his new friend Charlie. (Like Clint Howard in The Wild Country, Jimmy’s one of those kids that give every animal the same name for whatever reason.) Albert’s not too thrilled about that. He had planned on giving the duck to a local farmer or something. But Katie cautions him against widening the “generation gap” on the whole pet issue. Gotta love it when Disney tries using zeitgeisty buzz words.

While Albert and Katie are hashing this out, Charlie gets into the next-door neighbor’s pool. Joe Flynn plays the neighbor, Finlay Hooper, adding uptight treasury agent to his repertoire of uptight deans and uptight network executives. Hooper’s dog barks repeatedly at the duck, causing Charlie to lay an egg every time. Katie’s ready to whip up an omelet but Albert, briefly remembering that the duck is radioactive, puts the kibosh on that idea. He tells her he’ll bury the eggs in the backyard under cover of darkness. As one does, I suppose.

That night, Albert accidentally cracks one of the eggs and discovers what appears to be a solid gold yolk. The next day, he has the yolk analyzed and sure enough, it is gold, albeit with some peculiar imperfections like pectin from apple peels. A quick consult with Dr. Gottlieb provides all the pseudo-science Albert needs to go into the golden egg business with his best friend, lawyer Fred Hines (Roberts).

Albert and Fred want to go about this the right way, setting up a corporation and making sure not to spend so much that they’d call attention to themselves. But a call from the bank about some bounced checks rattles Katie. When Charlie lays another egg, she takes it straight to the bank and tries to deposit it. The bank manager advises her to take it to a refinery instead. She cashes in the egg, squares her account at the bank, and buys herself a swell new hat as a reward.

At first, Albert’s mad that Katie just waltzed into a bank with a hunk of gold. But Fred thinks she may be on to something. Basically, Katie is such a guileless idiot that she can go anywhere with a pocketful of golden egg yolks and cash them in. Even if she’s questioned, she can just tell the truth and nobody’s going to believe her anyway. It’s the “don’t ask me, I’m just a girl” theory of scams, crimes and petty larcenies.

Fred’s plan doesn’t work quite as well as he’d hoped, however. Even though Katie spreads the gold around town, people do start wondering where all these egg-shaped gold nuggets are coming from. The Treasury Department, under pressure from President Nixon himself (or at least a guy who vaguely resembles him from behind), launches an investigation. Unfortunately, their only lead is the list of aliases Katie’s used at the different refineries. Except they’re not aliases. They’re all variations of her actual name. But that’s too tough a nut for the T-Men to crack. All except Hooper, of course, who lives right next door to the perpetrators. He decides to engage in a little old-fashioned snooping to figure out what’s going on.

But all is not well at the Dooley household. Albert’s been so obsessed with egg production that he’s failing as a father. Things are so bad that Jimmy and Charlie have started hanging out with dune buggy-driving slackers Arvin and Orlo (Jack Bender from The Barefoot Executive and Billy Bowles). The egg scheme isn’t going according to plan, either. So far, Albert has resisted the temptation to spend money but Fred has swooped in and picked up a sporty yellow convertible. The very car Albert had his eye on, of course.

Hooper finally tricks Jimmy into showing him how Charlie lays golden eggs. Even though Katie manages to snatch the egg away from him, Hooper still reports what he’s learned to his boss, Mr. Rutledge (James Gregory). Rutledge leads a raid on the Dooleys but Jimmy runs away with Charlie and we all know what that means, don’t we? Yep, it’s time for the Wacky Disney Car Chase of the Week (sponsored by Big Al’s Auto Body of Burbank). This one involves a garbage truck, the convertible, Arvin’s dune buggy, a cherry picker, a parking garage and, as always, wet paint. Albert saves Jimmy from falling to his death and realizes that his family is more important than mutant duck gold.

Albert is arrested for violating the Gold Reserve Act. But when Hooper tries to get Charlie to lay an egg on the stand, he’s unable to duplicate the trick. Albert volunteers to show the court how it’s done, even though he could have done nothing and let everyone believe Hooper was crazy. When Charlie lays a perfectly ordinary egg (evidently all the radiation and applesauce has worn off), the case is dismissed for lack of evidence. Hooper points out that the defendants have thousands and thousands of unexplained dollars in the bank but the judge says there’s no law against getting rich, as long as you pay your taxes.

Alternate poster for Million Dollar Duck

For the record, the moral of Aesop’s fable is, “Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have.” The moral of The Million Dollar Duck appears to be, “There’s no law against getting rich, as long as you pay your taxes.” Personally, I think the original is more universally applicable but there’s nothing like that here. Albert doesn’t lose the duck out of hubris or because he’s trying to get more than the duck can produce. It just stops working. Plus, he gets to keep everything he made up to that point and fix his relationship with his son. Sounds like Albert came out ahead all around on this deal.

Gene Siskel admitted to walking out on a screening of The Million Dollar Duck, one of only three movies he couldn’t make it through in his professional career. His future partner, Roger Ebert, presumably made it to the end but referred to it as “one of the most profoundly stupid movies I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t wrong but let’s face it. A lot of these Disney gimmick comedies are pretty dumb. That can be forgiven if they’re also funny. This one ain’t.

Throughout his Disney career, Dean Jones was frequently stuck with animal costars. Cats, dogs, monkeys, horses, you name it. He could be a lot of fun in these movies but it seems as though the stars had to align perfectly for them to work. If he’s just a little too arrogant or too dense, you get something like The Ugly Dachshund or Monkeys, Go Home! or this movie. Albert doesn’t seem smart enough to be a scientist and his rocky relationship with his wife and son makes him tough to root for on a personal level. You know a character is unlikable when you hope that he’ll lose his battle with the IRS.

As for Sandy Duncan, she’s saddled with the unenviable task of playing a character so pathologically stupid that it’s a wonder she’s able to make it through the day. It would be one thing if she was simply ditzy or scatterbrained but Katie appears to be a genuine moron. She’s really difficult to take but I can’t entirely blame Duncan for that. I’m hard-pressed to think of any actress who would have fared better with this material.

The Million Dollar Duck came out June 30, 1971, and most critics seemed to agree with Siskel and Ebert. The movie was not well-loved and it did so-so business at the box office. It did somehow manage to snag a couple of Golden Globe nominations. Sandy Duncan was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer – Female, which kind of makes sense if you take the rest of her work that year into consideration. Ironically, she lost to Twiggy in Ken Russell’s film of The Boy Friend, one of the shows that brought Sandy to prominence in the first place. (Incidentally, the other nominees were Cybill Shepherd for The Last Picture Show, Janet Suzman for Nicholas And Alexandra, and Delores Taylor for Billy Jack. What a weird year.)

Dean Jones, on the other hand, was nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. He was up against Bud Cort in Harold And Maude, Walter Matthau in Kotch, Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, and the eventual winner, Topol in Fiddler On The Roof. In a career full of silly Disney comedies, this was the one Dean Jones performance singled out by the Hollywood Foreign Press as worthy of a Golden Globe nomination. I don’t know, maybe there just weren’t a lot of comedies and musicals in 1971.

In any event, Dean Jones’s return to Disney gave him a little bit more freedom to pursue outside projects. Later in 1971, he produced and starred in a Prohibition-era sitcom called The Chicago Teddy Bears. It only ran three months before CBS yanked the low-rated show off the air. Naturally, Jones bounced back from that by heading back to the House of Mouse. Dean Jones will return.  

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Boatniks

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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: Rascal

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Rascal

Animals had been a huge part of Walt Disney’s aesthetic even before he’d started making live-action films. The studio temporarily became a veritable zoo during the production of films like Dumbo and Bambi as real elephants and deer were brought in for the animators to study. And if there was anything Walt liked more than animal pictures, it was the honey-glazed, Norman Rockwell-style nostalgia for smalltown America in the early years of the twentieth century.

Even though Walt had been dead for a few years, the studio that bore his name was still very much guided by the interests and tastes of its founder. So while a movie like Rascal feels out of step with the prevailing trends of late 1969, it makes perfect sense as a Disney movie. The problem is that it doesn’t exactly feel like a Walt Disney movie. Instead, it feels like a faded carbon copy of earlier successes.

Walt surely would have related to the subtitle of the book that provided Rascal’s source material. Sterling North’s Rascal: A Memoir Of A Better Era was published in 1963 and it went on to win a shelf-load of children’s book awards including the prestigious Newbery Honor. Walt may well have been familiar with the book himself. He’d based his 1948 live-action/animation combo So Dear To My Heart on an earlier North book. Everything about Rascal fell directly into Walt’s wheelhouse.

Former animator and True-Life Adventures veteran James Algar produced Rascal. Norman Tokar, most recently responsible for The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit, handled the directing duties. The screenplay was written by Harold Swanton, whose only other Disney credit was on the Wonderful World Of Color two-parter Willie And The Yank (released theatrically overseas as Mosby’s Marauders).

Like so many other live-action Disney features, Rascal takes place in the bucolic American Midwest (Wisconsin this time) in a 1918 seemingly untouched by outside forces like World War I. That’s not the case with the book. The movie cuts out an absent older brother, away fighting in the Great War, as well as a sequence where young Sterling contracts the Spanish flu. The presence of a Stanley Steamer is just about the only thing left that gives the setting any specificity.

Former Lost In Space star and future Dr. Demento mainstay (thanks to Barnes & Barnes’ all-time great novelty song “Fish Heads”) Bill Mumy stars as young Sterling North. Walter Pidgeon, who had previously appeared in Tokar’s boy-and-his-dog drama Big Red, narrates as the older Sterling. It’s the beginning of summer vacation and the North family is still recovering from the recent death of Sterling’s mother. His older sister, Theo (Pamela Toll), has been taking care of things for their frequently absent father (Steve Forrest), whose work takes him on the road from state to state.

On the last day of school, Mr. North picks up his son and takes him out into the country for a surprise. A lynx has wandered down from Canada and made its home in the Wisconsin woods. The lynx surprises a family of raccoons, who manage to get away but leave the youngest behind. The young raccoon wouldn’t last a day with a lynx on the hunt, so Sterling brings the little fella home, naming him Rascal.

The Norths’ neighbors are less than thrilled by the new pet. Garth Shadwick is afraid Rascal will spook his prize horse, while Cy Jenkins warns that his old coonhound will chase him off the second he looks at his corn patch sidewise. But all the animals seem to get along just fine and Sterling vows he’ll “de-varmint” Rascal to ensure Cy’s corn remains untouched.

By the way, the great character actors Henry Jones and John Fiedler made their live-action Disney debuts here as Garth and Cy. Fiedler had joined the Disney family earlier, providing the voice of Piglet in Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day, a role he’d stick with right up until his death in 2005. Both Jones and Fiedler will be back in this column.

Theo has to return to her own job in Chicago, so she lines up interviews for a potential live-in housekeeper. Mr. North agrees to meet with Theo’s favorite, the no-nonsense Mrs. Slatterfield (Elsa Lanchester, making her fourth and final appearance in this column, although she’d go on to appear in the Wonderful World Of Disney two-parter My Dog, The Thief). But after realizing that both he and Sterling crave a bit of nonsense, Mr. North dismisses her and decides they can take care of themselves.

Mr. North soon returns to his life on the road, leaving Sterling on his own to have the best summer of his life with Rascal and his dog, Wowzer. He builds a canoe in the middle of the living room. His concerned schoolteacher, Miss Whalen (Bettye Ackerman), stops by with Reverend Thurman (Jonathan Daly) to see how he’s getting along. Fortunately, Mr. North makes it home himself, just in time to get everybody drunk on homemade cider. Most of all, Sterling writes copious letters to his sister, assuring her that Rascal’s just fine and pretending that Mrs. Slatterfield actually got the job.

Of course, the summer isn’t all cider and canoes. Rascal gets loose in the general store and trashes the place, turning everyone in town against Sterling and his raccoon. The local constable (Robert Emhardt) issues a citation for keeping an unlicensed varmint or something and threatens to hold Sterling responsible for damages unless he keeps Rascal caged up.

Sterling is just about to set Rascal free when Mr. North butts in. Turns out that Garth has made a not-entirely-friendly wager with local auto enthusiast Walt Dabbett (Richard Erdman) that his horse-and-buggy can beat Walt’s Stanley Steamer in a fair race. A lot of folks, including the constable, have bet good money on Garth to win. But things aren’t looking too promising until the Norths arrive with Rascal. Garth takes the raccoon as a passenger and that’s somehow enough to spur the horse on to victory. Now everybody loves Rascal again. Well, everybody that matters, anyway.

Everything goes back to normal until Theo comes home for Thanksgiving with her new beau, Norman (Steve Carlson). She hasn’t even made it to the house when she learns that Mrs. Slatterfield hasn’t been working for the family at all. Enraged, Theo abandons Norman and heads home. She’s appalled by the mess and finally has it out with her irresponsible father, reminding him in no uncertain terms that he still has a son to raise and no one to help.

That same night, Rascal hears the mating call of a female raccoon through the window. He predictably goes nuts and tries to escape through Theo’s room, waking her and everyone else. When Sterling goes to grab him, Rascal bites his finger. Sterling’s more sad and surprised than seriously hurt and realizes that now it really is time to let Rascal go be the varmint he always was. At the same time, Theo’s heart-to-heart has the desired effect and Mr. North decides it’s time to grow up and be a real father for a change.

Sterling sets out in his homemade canoe to return Rascal to his old stomping grounds. (By the way, Wisconsin experienced then-record snowfall during the Thanksgiving of 1918, not the balmy Indian summer weather Sterling paddles through here.) Rascal quickly locates his lady racoon (or a lady racoon, anyway) and they go off to make little Rascals. But before Sterling leaves, that lynx spots the happy couple and attacks! Sterling starts back to help but Rascal and Mrs. Rascal don’t need it. They outwit the lynx, sending him tumbling into the water. Looks like they’re gonna be just fine.

Rascal quad poster

It’s interesting that Rascal was Disney’s very next movie after Smith! Both films are quiet, low-key affairs that amble along at their own pace, seemingly unconcerned with sending the audience to sleep. They also both have acoustic, folksy theme songs by Bobby Russell. Unfortunately, while Russell’s “Summer Sweet” does indeed include the lyric “You Rascal You”, it only makes you wish you were listening to the Louis Armstrong song of that name instead.

Of the two, Rascal is certainly the superior film, although, considering what a waste Smith! ended up being, that is the faintest of praise. Sterling North’s book sounds pretty good and I think an interesting movie could be made from it. Steve Forrest’s character remains frustratingly two-dimensional until the end. But after Theo lets him have it, you can see the complexities that a richer film could dig into. A suddenly single parent mourning the loss of his wife in his own way, who very much loves his son but has never really been there for him? That’s an interesting character.

Forrest does the best he can with what he has to work with, although he’s more comfortable as the glad-handing dreamer than the wounded, irresponsible father. This would be Forrest’s only Disney feature, although he did make a couple of Disney TV appearances. Television became Forrest’s bread and butter in the 1970s, starring on the show S.W.A.T. and appearing in loads of guest shots, TV-movies and miniseries. He’s a charismatic screen presence. I’m sorry we won’t be seeing him back in this column.

Bill Mumy turns in a nicely restrained performance as Sterling, probably more nuanced than someone like Tommy Kirk would have given had this been made a decade or so earlier. But to my eyes anyway, he seems a little old for the part. In the book, Sterling would have been around 11 or 12. Mumy was 15 when Rascal was released, maybe 14 when the movie was shot. Not necessarily a huge difference. But to this Gen-Xer, when Sterling is left alone, my first thought was, “What’s the big deal? I was left on my own all the time at that age.”

Mumy seems like the sort of kid who would have been right at home on the Disney lot, especially in earlier movies like Old Yeller and Big Red. But this will also be Bill Mumy’s only appearance in this column. He’d earlier appeared in a couple of TV projects, Sammy, The Way-Out Seal and For The Love Of Willadean. But by 1969, I guess the studio was going all in on Kurt Russell as their resident juvenile lead and didn’t want to split their attention. Besides, Mumy was already fairly established thanks to growing up on TV in shows like The Twilight Zone and Lost In Space. Disney always preferred their young stars home-grown.

My biggest problem with Rascal is that there just isn’t much to it. For some folks, this might not be a deal-breaker. It’s pleasant and unchallenging and, at a brisk 85 minutes, is never in danger of overstaying its welcome. But it’s never a good sign when you have to really think to remind yourself what happened in a movie you just finished watching. When I sat down to write this column, all I could remember was the canoe in the living room, Rascal wreaking havoc on the general store and something about a horse racing a car. And I wasn’t too sure about that last one. For all I knew, my brain was mashing up The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit and The Love Bug. The perils of watching too many Disney movies, I guess.

Rascal was released on June 11, 1969, making this the last movie in this column to come out before I was born. Ouch. It didn’t have a huge impact, although it was the first movie ever reviewed by Gene Siskel in the pages of the Chicago Tribune (he didn’t like it). But a later adaptation of Sterling North’s novel would have a major effect on Japan, of all places.

In 1977, an anime adaptation of North’s book, Araiguma Rasukaru, began airing in Japan. The series was wildly popular. As a result, Japanese kids began begging their parents for racoons, an animal indigenous to North America. But just like Sterling, these kids eventually realized that racoons make terrible pets and they released them into the wild. So many racoons were imported that they eventually became a real nuisance, destroying crops and cultural landmarks. The government moved to ban the import of racoons but it was too late. Japan had been infested with an army of Rascals.

Back home, Rascal has its champions but it remains fairly obscure. It isn’t currently available on Disney+ and the studio has never done much with it on disc. Unless someone decides to remake it, I don’t foresee a huge resurgence of interest in Rascal any time soon. There are just way too many other places to get your coming-of-age-with-a-cute-animal fix these days.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit

By 1968, Dean Jones was firmly established as Walt Disney’s go-to leading man. At the same time, Kurt Russell was climbing his way up to become the studio’s favorite juvenile lead. It was inevitable that their paths would cross eventually. It’s perhaps a little surprising that it only happened once, in the now mostly forgotten comedy The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit.

Producer Winston Hibler and director Norman Tokar took the reins on this one (pun very much intended, thank you very much), reuniting the team from Russell’s Disney debut, Follow Me, Boys! Screenwriter Louis Pelletier, another Follow Me, Boys! alum, based his script on the 1965 novel The Year Of The Horse by Eric Hatch. Hatch himself had some early Hollywood success. He was nominated for an Oscar for the classic My Man Godfrey, also based on one of his books.

Jones stars as Fred Bolton, an overworked creative director at a big Madison Avenue advertising agency. Bolton’s team has prepared a huge presentation for the firm’s biggest client, a pain reliever called Aspercel. But Aspercel’s president, Mr. Dugan (Fred Clark), is unimpressed by the work, even the mechanical pill-swallowing man whipped up by Charlie Blake (Dick Van Dyke Show costar Morey Amsterdam in what is surprisingly his only Disney appearance). Dugan wants a fresh, innovative, sophisticated campaign that appeals to the jet set and he gives Fred just 24 hours to come up with one.

In addition to his trouble at work, Fred is also a single parent trying to raise his daughter, Helen (Ellen Janov), with help from his Aunt Martha (Lurene Tuttle). Helen has been taking horseback riding lessons from S.J. “Suzie” Clemens (Diane Baker) and shows real promise but worries that she won’t reach her full potential unless she has a horse of her own. Fred can barely afford to pay for her lessons, much less buy a horse. But once he hears about the high-class world of competitive equestrianism, he has a brainstorm. Get the client to buy a horse under his daughter’s name, name it Aspercel and bask in all the free publicity once Helen and her horse start collecting medals.

It takes awhile for Helen and Aspy to start winning and for Fred’s subliminal advertising gimmick to start bearing fruit. A little too long for Dugan’s taste, who soon gets frustrated by the miniscule notices the junior equestrian trials merit in the paper. But Fred guarantees that Helen and Aspy will make it to the nationals in Washington, where the real publicity is. Dugan agrees to be patient a little longer but warns that Fred’s job is on the line if he fails to deliver. Helen overhears the whole conversation from inside Aspy’s trailer and finally understands why her dad was so insistent on her competing.

Later on, Fred returns home after a business trip to find the house deserted and Aspercel out of his stable. The horse runs off and Fred chases after it across country. Aspy allows himself to be caught after Fred collapses in exhaustion. Realizing they’ve run miles, Fred decides to try and ride the horse back home, easier said than done for a novice horseman. Meanwhile, Helen and Aunt Martha have returned home and reported the horse stolen to the police. When the cops roll up with the siren blaring, the spooked horse takes off like a shot, jumping fences and walls and eventually destroying a greenhouse after sending Fred through its front door.

Aspy returns home on his own and Fred ends up behind bars. He calls Charlie to come vouch for his identity to prove he didn’t steal his own horse. But Charlie’s only interested in milking the story for headlines, so he lets Fred cool his heels for a bit. Back at home, Helen is feeling the pressure of having to compete to save her father’s job. She’s also caught the eye of Ronnie Gardner (Kurt Russell), the brother of one of her fellow equestrians. When Ronnie shows up at the house to take her on a date, Helen confides that she doesn’t even like competing in horse shows any more and is only doing it because of her dad.

When Fred gets back, Ronnie confronts him, angry that he’d force Helen to do something against her will. Fred hadn’t realized she felt that way and agrees that her happiness is the most important thing, so he decides to take her off the competition circuit. But when Suzie hears about Fred’s wild ride and Aspy clearing a seven-foot-one wall, she has an idea. Instead of the junior leagues, she’ll ride Aspy herself at the International Horse Show in the open jumping division. The only trouble is that she’ll need to bring in a trainer to get her and Aspy in shape and the most qualified one she knows just happens to be her ex-fiancé, Archer Madison (Lloyd Bochner). And just when Fred was mustering up the nerve to tell Suzie that he’s falling for her.

Suzie qualifies for the show and the whole crew heads down to Washington. I’m assuming most of the footage used in the competition montage is from the actual event itself. Eventually, the playing field is leveled down to Suzie and her closest competition, the debonair Lieutenant Mario Lorendo (Federico Piñero). You’ll get no points for guessing which horse triumphs but Tokar manages to wring a surprising amount of suspense out of the final showdown. When the dust settles, Suzie assures Fred that there’s nothing between her and Archer and Helen immediately starts planning their wedding.

The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit is no classic but it’s more enjoyable than its somewhat strained Mad Men Meets National Velvet premise might suggest. The title, of course, is a play on the 1955 novel (and 1956 Gregory Peck movie) The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit about a discontented public relations man. I’m sure that reference meant a whole lot of nothing to kids in 1968 and it’ll mean even less to kids today.

The movie works best when Tokar and company keep things light. The opening scenes in the ad agency are fast-paced and funny. There’s a recurring bit where Dean Jones keeps accidentally snagging things on the saddle he’s toting through the office and it made me laugh every time. The advertising satire isn’t quite as sharp as the marketing gags in Son Of Flubber but it’s amusing enough. Fred’s horseback ride arrives about midway through the film and it injects some needed energy at a crucial moment. Jones also gets an opportunity to spotlight his talent for physical comedy when he tries to figure out how to mount a horse.

But there’s also an overall sense that the movie just wasn’t thought all the way through before they started to roll cameras. We get zero indication of why Fred’s a single dad. It’s clear that the father-daughter relationship is meant to be the heart of the movie but it isn’t really explored after Fred realizes he’s been pushing her too hard. It’s sweet that it’s resolved happily and quickly but there’s still almost half an hour of movie left. The tentative teenage romance between Helen and Ronnie never really goes anywhere. And Fred’s attraction to Suzie never feels like more than a narrative requirement. The chemistry between them is non-existent. Even something as innocuous as Fred’s horse allergy (a gag already lifted from That Darn Cat!) is forgotten about after a while.

The movie’s biggest flaw is that it’s just too long. You could easily lose about 20 minutes and still have a fun, entertaining picture that tells the exact same story. Whenever the pacing starts to sag, the movie’s shortcomings become more obvious. Still, the movie has just enough going for it to make it worth watching.

Apart from Dean Jones and Kurt Russell, most of the main roles were filled with actors with limited Disney experience. (A few vets turn up in smaller roles, including Alan Hewitt, last seen in The Monkey’s Uncle, and Norm Grabowski, who pops up as a truck driver.) Diane Baker made her screen debut as Anne Frank’s sister, Margot, in George Stevens’ The Diary Of Anne Frank. Since then, she’d appeared in such films as Marnie and Mirage. She’s really more of a dramatic actress and never seems fully comfortable with the featherweight Disney style. The movie might have worked better with Suzanne Pleshette in the role. Baker hasn’t made another Disney movie since and she seems to have slowed down in recent years but she kept extremely busy. In 1991, she appeared in The Silence Of The Lambs as the senator whose daughter is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. Hannibal Lecter loved her suit.

Fred Clark is one of those actors who seem like they appeared in a ton of Disney movies but really didn’t. He appeared in supporting roles, often comedic, throughout the 1950s, including The Caddy and How To Marry A Millionaire. His cigar-chomping, slow-burn comedic style is ideally suited to Disney work but The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit would be his first and last Disney movie. He died a few weeks before the movie was even released at the age of 54.

This was also the first and last film for young Ellen Janov who played Helen. She was the daughter of Arthur Janov, a psychologist whose book The Primal Scream became a 1970s fad thanks to celebrity followers like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Ellen, who was also a singer and cut a respectable cover of Cat Stevens’ “Portobello Road”, soon decided to leave show business and follow in her father’s footsteps as a practitioner of primal therapy. But her practice didn’t last long. On January 7, 1976, she died in a house fire at the tragically young age of 22.

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day

When The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit was released on December 3, 1968, it brought an old friend along with it. Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day, Disney’s second Winnie The Pooh short, appeared as the co-feature. The short earned Walt Disney a posthumous Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the last of his astonishing 22 Oscar wins. They say records are made to be broken but I don’t think anybody’s even close to knocking Walt off that particular perch.

Even with an assist from Pooh Bear, The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit failed to impress critics or audiences. Today, the studio hasn’t exactly buried the movie but they aren’t going out of their way to make it accessible. It’s on DVD but it isn’t currently on Disney+ or even available to buy or rent digitally. Frankly, it deserves a little better. Sure, it’s low-key to a fault but it’s not without its charms. There are certainly a lot worse movies with the Disney name on them out there.

VERDICT: A minor Disney Plus but, just like a horse is a horse, a plus is a plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Never A Dull Moment

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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!

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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.

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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: A Tiger Walks

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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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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Summer Magic

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Summer Magic

One of Hayley Mills’ greatest strengths as a young actor was her earnestness. There was no artifice to her performance. What you saw was what you got. When she delivered a line, you felt like she truly believed it. Only someone like Hayley Mills could have taken the reheated corn of Pollyanna and turned it into something palatable, if not exactly fresh.

Her English accent was a key element in that image. Summer Magic marks her fourth appearance in this column and so far, we’ve seen her play a bona fide British citizen exactly once, in the Jules Verne adventure In Search Of The Castaways. Every other character she’s played has been born and bred right here in the good old U S of A. But she never once attempts to hide her accent. The movies themselves make no effort at explaining or justifying it. It just is what it is. She’s not trying to pretend to be something she’s not. And even when playing characters as deeply American as the twins in The Parent Trap, nobody in the audience ever seems to mind.

Summer Magic is the first time that accent sounds out of place. At first glance, there’s no reason it should. The movie finds us squarely back in one of Walt’s favorite genres, the early 20th century nostalgia piece, just like Pollyanna. But this time she’s got a family: widowed mother Margaret (played by Dorothy McGuire, Disney matriarch of Old Yeller and Swiss Family Robinson), brothers Gilly (Eddie Hodges) and Peter (Jimmy Mathers, younger brother of Leave It To Beaver star Jerry Mathers), and cousin Julia (Deborah Walley). Not a one of these people seems like they could be related to the others.

This disconnect starts to make sense when you realize that Summer Magic was never intended to star Hayley Mills in the first place. The movie was based on the 1911 novel Mother Carey’s Chickens (you can see why they changed the name) by Mary Douglas Wiggin and adapted for the screen by Sally Benson, whose semiautobiographical stories had formed the basis of the similarly nostalgic 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St. Louis.

Walt began developing the project as a starring vehicle for his star Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello. But Annette had grown tired of waiting around the Disney lot. She was a huge TV and recording star but Walt had only cast her in two features: a small supporting role in The Shaggy Dog and the big-budget musical boondoggle Babes In Toyland. Sick of waiting for her Disney ship to come in, Annette took a role opposite Frankie Avalon in the American International Pictures teen comedy Beach Party. Miffed that his star had taken another gig, Walt scratched her from Summer Magic and brought in Hayley Mills.

Beach Party came out about a month after Summer Magic and was a surprise hit, so AIP quickly signed Annette up for more. Eventually, she would be joined at AIP by her once and future Disney costar, Tommy Kirk. But for now, both Annette and Tommy were still under contract to Walt, so they’ll be back in this column.

Summer Magic might have worked a little bit better with Annette since it is essentially a musical with seven original songs by the Sherman brothers. It’s not that Hayley Mills couldn’t sing. She certainly proved she could carry a tune in her previous films. But Annette was a more natural musical performer who had already had some success with songs written for her by the Shermans. The movie feels tailor-made to Annette’s strengths a lot more than Hayley’s.

Comic book adaptation of Summer Magic

Personality is important here because there isn’t a whole lot of plot driving this story. The movie opens in Boston as the Carey family prepares to move out of their longtime home after the death of the patriarch. But Nancy Carey (Mills) remembers an idyllic vacation the family once spent in the small town of Beulah, Maine, particularly a vacant yellow house that her father loved. Nancy writes to Beulah’s postmaster, exaggerating the direness of their situation, and finds that the owner of the yellow house, Tom Hamilton, has been away in China for years, leaving the local postmaster/chief constable in charge of his affairs. He’s willing to rent the Careys the house for just $60 a year.

Upon arriving in Beulah, the postmaster, Osh Popham (Burl Ives, returning to the Disney fold for the first time since the 1948 nostalgia-fest So Dear To My Heart) immediately discovers that he’s rented the house under false pretenses. But rather than being annoyed, he’s charmed and delighted by the new arrivals and bends over backward to help out. Osh also runs the general store and he sells the Careys whatever supplies they need to fix up the house below cost. He provides free labor just so he can have some folks to chat with. Osh’s son, Digby (amusingly played by Michael J. Pollard, of all people), is getting ready to leave for the Big City, so Osh offers Digby’s job as delivery driver to Gilly. He even volunteers his daughter, Lallie Joy (Wendy Turner), to generally make herself available to help the Careys with whatever they may need. Osh Popham is more generous than Santa Claus.

The only voice of reason in all this is Osh’s disapproving wife (Una Merkel, last seen as Brian Keith’s housekeeper in The Parent Trap). She’s pretty sure that Osh hasn’t bothered to ask for Mr. Hamilton’s permission to rent the house and knows full well that he hasn’t told the Careys about it. But whenever she tries to tell them the truth, old Osh comes up with some distraction to prevent it.

When Osh discovers that the Careys are essentially broke, he claims that Mr. Hamilton is so happy with all the improvements being done that he’s refused to accept any more rent. The only stipulation is that the Careys hang a portrait of Mr. Hamilton’s “mother” in a place of honor. Of course, there is no such picture. Osh rummages around in a storage room and finally finds a portrait of a stern temperance leader to pass off as Mrs. Hamilton.

The Careys plan a big open house/unveiling ceremony for Halloween. But who should arrive back in town the day of the party but Tom Hamilton (Peter Brown), who turns out to be a lot younger and handsomer than we’d thought. Osh confesses everything, telling Tom that both he and Nancy have been writing but Osh never bothered to send the letters, assuming that Tom would never get them anyway. Tom’s not entirely happy about the situation but thinks Nancy is a charming, sweet girl, so at the very least, he won’t ruin her party.

The movie ends with Tom and Nancy dancing and most of the family still in the dark about his real identity. Osh reminds his wife that he knew everything would turn out all right in the end and, in a way, he’s right. I guess every story has a happy ending if you stop telling it before you get to the part where people are forced to deal with the consequences of their actions.

That isn’t quite all there is to Summer Magic but it’s pretty close. The arrival of Nancy’s spoiled cousin, Julia, upsets the family dynamic for a little bit but she eventually comes around and the two girls grow close. That sisterly bond is tested when they’re both smitten by the handsome new schoolteacher, played by James Stacy. Fortunately, the teacher only has eyes for the older Julia and the movie sidesteps any messy hints of romance between him and Nancy.

Even so, Stacy’s own troubled history makes any scenes between he and the girls a little cringey. In 1995, the actor was sentenced to a six-year prison term for molesting an 11-year-old girl. This is not the kind of guy you want to see hanging around our sweet, innocent Hayley Mills. Stacy will actually be back in this column eventually but he’ll look a lot different when he does. A 1973 motorcycle accident cost him an arm and a leg, literally. He made a bit of a comeback after his recovery until his arrest and conviction put an end to his acting career for good. He died in 2016 and later turned up as a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, played by Timothy Olyphant.

Compared to James Stacy, the other members of the cast had far less turbulent post-Summer Magic careers. Deborah Walley made her Disney debut in Bon Voyage! (also directed by Summer Magic‘s James Neilson). She would soon join Annette Funicello in defecting to the AIP camp, appearing alongside Frankie and Annette in Beach Blanket Bingo. While Summer Magic would be her last appearance in a Disney feature, she would later do some voice work for Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers.

Eddie Hodges, who plays aspiring musician Gilly, became a star on Broadway, originating the role of Winthrop in The Music Man. His first film, A Hole In The Head, saw him perform the song “High Hopes” with Frank Sinatra. He continued to act in movies like The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn and sing, landing a hit record in 1961 with “I’m Gonna Knock On Your Door” when he was 14. Considering Hodges’ musical background, it’s a little surprising that he isn’t given his own song in Summer Magic instead of being relegated to Mills’ duet partner. Hodges’ show-business career was essentially over by the end of the decade but he’ll be back in this column before he retires.

Summer Magic soundtrack LP

As for the songs themselves, they aren’t exactly peak Sherman Brothers. Some of them, like “Pink of Perfection” and “Femininity”, are kind of fun and they all have that same trademark lilting bounce that the Shermans did so well. But with very few exceptions, they don’t grow organically out of the story. They’re just a bunch of random songs that the movie occasionally stops in its tracks to accommodate.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in “The Ugly Bug Ball”. Burl Ives sings this nonsense ditty to young Jimmy Mathers, accompanied by what appears to be stock footage of insects left over from the True-Life Adventures series. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything and overstays its welcome by a solid minute-and-a-half.

Summer Magic was released in July 1963 to mixed revies and indifferent audiences. Its box office take was a fraction of what Mills’ previous Disney vehicles had brought in. Hayley Mills herself would later say it was the worst of her six Disney films. And yeah, it’s not great. But it’s such a harmless, innocuous little trifle that it’s hard to call it a bad movie. I could certainly understand if some people have a soft spot in their heart for it. On the other hand, I would find it very hard to believe that Summer Magic is anybody’s favorite Disney movie.

VERDICT: Who am I to argue with Hayley Mills? It’s a Disney Minus.  

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Bon Voyage!

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Bon Voyage!

If it had come from any other producer or studio, Bon Voyage! would be just another innocuous, overlong, not entirely successful comedy. In fact, it bears some surface resemblance to another innocuous family comedy from 1962, Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation starring James Stewart. (Jimmy Stewart, somewhat surprisingly, will not be appearing in this column.) But coming from Walt Disney, Bon Voyage! is a bit of an odd duck, a movie that doesn’t seem to know exactly who its audience is meant to be. Quite simply, it doesn’t feel like a Disney movie.

Oh, it looks like a Disney movie. It reunites Fred MacMurray, Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcoran, again playing father and sons after The Shaggy Dog. Kirk had also appeared with MacMurray in The Absent-Minded Professor and Kirk and Corcoran had played brothers so often that they probably had false memories of holidays spent together. TV director James Neilson, who had just made his Disney feature debut with Moon Pilot, provides that signature live-action Disney visual style (which is to say essentially none). And the Sherman Brothers churned out another title song that falls somewhere between catchy and grating (this one is weighed heavily toward the latter end of that scale).

The Bon Voyage! project had actually been kicking around Hollywood for a few years before Disney became involved. It was based on a novel written by Joseph Hayes (the author of The Desperate Hours) and his wife, Marrijane, after they’d returned from a European cruise. The film rights were immediately picked up by Universal, who planned to make it with James Cagney. Later on, Bing Crosby became attached to the role. Eventually Universal let its option lapse and Disney picked it up.

Walt gave the property to Bill Walsh, the go-to live-action writer-producer who’d had a couple of big hits with The Shaggy Dog and The Absent-Minded Professor. The other credited producer on the project was Ron Miller, who had also recently worked on Moon Pilot. Miller was married to Walt’s daughter, Diane. He played professional football for the Los Angeles Rams for a little while before Walt, concerned that he’d get seriously hurt, offered him a job. He started out in TV before moving into features with Moon Pilot. Miller would eventually become President of Walt Disney Productions, so he’ll continue to be a big presence in this column.

Our story follows the Willard family of Terre Haute, Indiana: father Harry (MacMurray), mother Katie (Jane Wyman, last seen as Aunt Polly in Pollyanna), daughter Amy (Deborah Walley, hot off her film debut in Gidget Goes Hawaiian), and sons Elliott and Skipper (Kirk and Corcoran). We first meet the Willards in New York City, rushing to catch the ship that will carry them to France for a long-planned European vacation. They haven’t even boarded the ship before Amy has caught the eye of Nick O’Mara (played by Walley’s Gidget costar Michael Callan), a budding architect traveling to visit his mother in Paris.

Meanwhile, broody teen Elliott is peeved at being dragged along on this trip at all. He’d just as soon board the next train back to Terre Haute. Young Skipper, as personified by Moochie Corcoran on another of his signature permanent sugar-highs, tears around the dock looking for mischief. For his part, Harry is just looking forward to some peace and quiet, hopes that are immediately dashed when he discovers that Katie has invited their entire extended family on board for a bon voyage party.

Things don’t calm down much at sea. Amy and Nick continue their courtship, much to Harry’s consternation. Elliott pursues a romance with an Indian girl, their every move watched by her mysterious chaperone. I kept expecting something more to come of this but nothing does. The girl simply dumps Elliott the second they put into port and they’re never referred to again. With the rest of the family pursuing their own agendas, Harry decides to spend some quality time with Skipper, who predictably runs him ragged from dawn to dusk.

Once they arrive in Paris, things more or less continue along this episodic trajectory. Harry and Skipper take a tour of the city’s historic sewer system, resulting in Harry getting hopelessly lost beneath the streets. Elliott bounces from one girl to the next, attempting to appear more continental by outfitting himself with ascots and a pipe. And Skipper essentially runs loose, unsupervised and carefree. I’m no fan of helicopter parenting but allowing your 12-year-old son to come and go as he pleases in a foreign country almost borders on neglect.

Something resembling a plot finally kicks in when Nick invites Harry and Katie to meet his mother, La Contessa DuFresne (Jessie Royce Landis), at a fancy party. Here, Katie catches the eye of Rudolph Hunschak (Ivan Desny), a notorious gigolo well-known for seducing married women. Seething with jealousy, Harry knocks back glass after glass of absinthe. Meanwhile, Amy’s hot-and-cold running romance with Nick hits another rough patch when he starts whining about his overbearing mother. Both Katie and Amy ask Harry to take them back to the hotel but he’s too busy getting petulantly drunk on absinthe. Eventually he passes out, leaving his daughter to drag him back to the hotel.

Not knowing what’s become of her drunken husband, Katie ends up spending the night bar-hopping with Rudolph trying to track him down. Rudolph’s advances are firmly rebuffed but Katie’s still mad that Harry abandoned her at the party. Harry indulges in some classic victim-blaming. He actually says, “It’s very difficult to kiss a girl when she doesn’t want to be kissed.” Katie understandably kicks him out, ending the Paris leg of their trip on a sour note.

Finally, it’s off to the French Riviera. Amy arrives at the beach decked out in a skimpy (not really but, by Disney standards, sure) bikini. All the guys on the beach turn into Tex Avery cartoon wolves at the sight of her, sending Nick (still dogging her every move, for some reason) into a jealous fit. Amy swims out into the ocean to get away from this jerk but Nick can’t take a hint. He steals a boat, goes after her and physically drags her out of the water. To her credit, Amy tells Nick to take a hike before taking some paternal comfort in Harry.

Harry is still trying to smooth things over with Katie. On their last night in France, he arranges for a big night of dinner, dancing and casino gaming in Monaco. But who should they find sleazing up the casino but Rudolph Hunschak? Harry immediately hauls off and decks him, setting off a chain reaction that practically destroys the entire casino with one punch. Harry gets kicked out of the joint, hustled back across the border to France where Nick is waiting to have a heart-to-heart. Nick apologizes, while Harry empathizes with the fact that love can make you do some crazy things. They don’t quite get to the point of Nick asking Harry’s permission to marry his daughter but the door’s left open. Reunited at last, the family celebrates their last night in Europe with an outdoor Bastille Day celebration.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned two of the weirdest sequences in the movie, both involving Tommy Kirk’s Elliott. In the first, Harry orders breakfast at a café where he catches the eye of a young French girl (Françoise Prévost) on the make for rich American tourists. Harry assures the unnamed girl that he’s flattered but completely devoted to his wife and kids. The girl seems moved by this and hopes he enjoys the rest of his trip. A little later, Harry’s on his way to the Louvre when he sees Elliott being charmed by this same girl. Harry seems amused by the fact that she’s trying to con his kid, rather than upset or angry or anything resembling a normal parental response. He bids the sexy con artist a fond farewell and drags an embarrassed Elliott back to the hotel.

Later on at the Riviera, Harry and Elliott are paid a call by Elliott’s latest paramour and her mother. It seems Elliott is responsible for taking the young lady’s “virtue” and mother demands compensation from the rich Americans. Harry gets rid of them by immediately agreeing that the two lovebirds should get married. He paints a horrific picture of rural life in Indiana, up at dawn to milk the cows and what-not, and insists they celebrate the union by smashing a bottle of champagne against the wall. The two Frenchwomen beat a hasty retreat and Elliott presumably gets a stern lecture about premarital sex that we mercifully don’t hear.

If it seems like the Disney folks were working way too hard to present Tommy Kirk as a womanizing horndog, that’s because they probably were. By this point, Tommy Kirk knew he was gay and had known for several years. Back in 1962, this was not exactly a subject that was discussed openly, especially at a conservative studio like Disney. Still, there were undoubtedly those at the studio who either knew or suspected. According to Kirk, one of those people was Jane Wyman. Kirk apparently had a miserable time filming Bon Voyage!, butting heads with both Wyman and MacMurray (although in MacMurray’s case, Tommy admits he was at least partially to blame for causing friction between them). Undoubtedly the strain of pretending to be someone he wasn’t played a part in his unhappiness. Tommy Kirk will make a few more appearances in this column but eventually, his hidden homosexuality will unfortunately result in his dismissal.

At any rate, in addition to being a family romp through Europe, Bon Voyage! turns out to be Disney’s first sex comedy and it’s every bit as awkward and uncomfortable as that description makes it sound. Given the cast and Disney’s recent successes with gimmick comedies, I kept expecting the Willards to run into spies or jewel thieves or a wacky inventor with a talking car or a chimpanzee or some combination of these. But no, Neilson and Walsh try to keep things relatively grounded.

That would be great if they also gave us characters we could care about or funnier situations for them to stumble into. But the Willards are, by and large, not a particularly likable family. Harry earns some dad points here and there but he’s not a great husband. Katie remains a blank slate through most of the film, disappearing for long stretches. Her primary function is to be calm about things that worry Harry and worry about things Harry’s calm about. The relationship between Amy and Nick is on-again off-again so frequently that you quickly decide it’s not worth the emotional investment. There’s the germ of a funny idea in Elliott’s transformation into a suave sophisticate but it remains underdeveloped and Elliott himself doesn’t appear to learn anything from the experience. As for Skipper…please stop.

Despite its confused tone, lack of momentum and overall sleepiness, Bon Voyage! did reasonably well, becoming the 9th highest-grossing film of the year in the U.S., tied with the hospital drama The Interns. Interestingly enough, The Interns also starred Michael Callan. It was directed by David Swift, who had previously directed Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, and costarred former Disney contract players James MacArthur and Buddy Ebsen. Box office records round both films to $5 million but given the number of Disney connections in The Interns, I’ll bet you Walt knew exactly which one made more to the penny.

Bon Voyage! even managed to snag a couple Oscar nominations. Robert O. Cook received a nod for Best Sound, his second nomination after The Parent Trap (the award went to Lawrence Of Arabia instead). In addition, Bill Thomas was nominated for his costume design, his second Disney nomination after Babes In Toyland and not his last (he had already won an Oscar for his work on Spartacus). Thomas lost to Mary Wills for the George Pal production The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm, a lavish fantasy that in some ways out-Disneys anything Disney himself was producing at the time.

After its initial release, Bon Voyage! faded away pretty quickly. The film has never been released on Blu-ray and, as of this writing, isn’t available to stream on Disney+. I wouldn’t expect that to change anytime soon. This is unquestionably one of the studio’s weaker efforts, too grown-up for the kids (I believe this is the first Disney film to use profanity, even if it is just a couple of mild “damnations”) and too juvenile for the grown-ups. Some vacations are better left forgotten. And as we’ll see in the weeks ahead, the next time the studio tries its hand at comedy, it’ll quite literally go back to a tried-and-true formula.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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