The Double McGuffin (1979)

          After scoring a major success with the independently produced canine caper Benji (1974), writer-director Joe Camp made two attempts at expanding his film career beyond Benji sequels and spinoffs. First came Hawmps! (1976), a silly lark about cavalrymen using camels instead of horses, and next came this youth-oriented Hitchcock homage. As any good student of the Master of Suspense knows, a “McGuffin” is a plot device that triggers action, such as the key in Notorious (1946) or the microfilm in North by Northwest (1959). Therefore the gimmick behind this movie, as Orson Welles explains during brief narration toward the beginning, is that the plot involves two separate McGuffins. Specifically, a mischievous boy discovers a suitcase filled with money near a sewer pipe, then brings his friends back to the area, where they discover the suitcase has been replaced with a dead body. Thereafter, the lads embark on a mystery-solving adventure that becomes a race against time once clues reveal a plan to murder someone at their school’s homecoming game. Echoing the classic Hitch tradition, the scenario grows more convoluted with each new development, so the kids discover international intrigue as well as hitmen and payoffs. Dogging the youthful investigators is a kindhearted local cop.

          On the plus side, The Double McGuffin is slickly produced, with peppy work by the young leading actors and proficient supporting turns by Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, and Elke Sommer. On the minus side, Camp’s writing is not as strong as his filmmaking. Too often, he slips into mawkishness and triviality, and several long scenes of interplay among the schoolchildren are boring. Worse, the film’s pacing is so unhurried and the narrative events are so inconsequential that the film nearly evaporates at regular intervals. One gets the sense of Camp being way too nice behind the camera, since much focus is given to the performance of newcomer Dion Pride, son of country singer Charley Pride. Papa Pride, of course, crooned the theme song for Benji, and Pride the Younger does the honors here. Doing a solid for a pal is lovely, but it doesn’t make for engrossing cinema. And let’s be honest: There’s only so high a juvenile Hitchcock riff can rise when the leading lady is Lisa Whelchel, later to achieve fame as “Blair” on The Facts of Life. One of the great screen sirens she is not.

The Double McGuffin: FUNKY

1980 Week: Oh! Heavenly Dog

          Slick but wrongheaded, this unlikely collaboration between family-friendly filmmaker Joe Camp and sarcastic Saturday Night Live alum Chevy Chase derailed the popular Benji franchise. Turns out moviegoers weren’t eager to see scruffy little mutt Benji associated with sex jokes and swearing. Shamelessly lifting concepts from Heaven Can Wait (1978), which was itself a remake of a remake, Oh! Heavenly Dog takes place in London, where American B.J. Browning (Chase) works as a private investigator. One day, shortly after a meet-cute with pretty Englishwoman Jackie (Jane Seymour), B.J. is hired by a mystery man (Omar Sharif) to protect a wealthy woman. When he reaches the lady’s flat, B.J. discovers that she’s dead—and then B.J. gets killed with a butcher knife. Upon arriving in the afterlife, B.J. learns that this admission to heaven is conditional on doing one more good deed: solving his own murder. Since no human vessels are available, B.J.’s soul is put inside a cute little dog, also named B.J. (Benji).

          That’s when Oh! Heavenly Dog starts to lose what little appeal it possessed beforehand. As in prior Benji movies, producer-director Camp and his animal trainers lead their four-legged star through elaborate tricks, simulating a “performance.” The twist this time is that Chase, in voiceover, provides the dog’s inner thoughts—or, more accurately, B.J. the human’s inner thoughts. As if to tell the audience right away that their beloved canine star has left G-rated territory, the first line Chase speaks in dog mode is, “Oh, shit, that was close!” Later, once Seymour’s character reenters the story, the movie features a pair of scenes in which Benji and Seymour bathe together, complete with bedroom eyes across the suds. These scenes are exactly as icky as they sound.

          The voiceover gimmick works for a while, and Chase lands a number of lines well, but eventually viewer fatigue takes hold in a big way. The last 40 minutes or so, during which Benji and the lovely but vapid Seymour conduct the murder investigation together, are utterly lifeless. The presence of dynamic costar Robert Morley only helps so much, and Sharif’s disdain for the movie is plainly evident. While not an outright stinker (though it comes close), Oh! Heavenly Dog is too crude for children and too insipid for adults, but it’s interesting to see how hard Camp tries to make the whole contrived enterprise take flight. Someone even wrangled songs by Elton John and Paul McCartney for the soundtrack.

Oh! Heavenly Dog: FUNKY

Hawmps! (1976)

          After scoring a surprise box-office hit with the independently made canine adventure Benji (1974), director Joe Camp was in a position to try something different—so for his second feature, he used a little-known historical episode from the pre-Civil War era as the basis for a gentle comedic romp. Hawmps! depicts the misadventures of a U.S. Army squad tasked with testing camels as possible replacements for horses in desert outposts. Given the nature of Camp’s previous film, it’s surprising that very little of the picture is devoted to the specifics of animal behavior—in fact, only two of the camels are given memorable names and “personalities.” Instead of focusing on critters, Camp builds jokes around the broadly sketched—and unapologetically clichéd—characters populating the Army squad, including a drunken Irishman, an inexperienced lieutenant, and a stalwart drill sergeant. The only surprising character is an Arabian camel trainer named H. Jolly, played by Gino Conforti, because the character is a British-schooled dandy with a monocle.

          Hawmps! is shallow and silly, but it basically works in an undemanding sort of way. Whether Camp is staging elaborate slapstick sequences of barroom brawls or vignettes of dehydrated soldiers trudging through the desert, the director keeps things amiable and lively. Plus, the picture is billed right in the opening credits as “a family film by Joe Camp,” so the mandate clearly was to make lighthearted entertainment suitable for very young viewers. And if Hawmps! is ultimately little more than a Disney knock-off made without the glossy cinematography and lavish production values one normally associates with Disney’s live-action fare, the movie has the benefit of an offbeat historical basis, and Camp resists the sentimental excesses that make similar Disney movies (such as the Apple Dumpling Gang pictures) unnecessarily saccharine.

          James Hampton, a pleasant comic actor who costarred in the ’60s series F Troop, which was something of a stylistic precedent for this movie, plays Lt. Clemmons, a Washington, D.C., gofer who gets assigned the thankless task of supervising the camel experiment. Upon arriving at an outpost in the West, Clemmons takes command of a squad led by Sgt. Tibbs (Christopher Connelly), even though Tibbs’ men all misunderstood their orders and thought they were getting Arabian horses instead of Arabian camels. High jinks ensue as the camel-riding soldiers clash with the cantankerous sergeant (Slim Pickens) of a rival squad, and with an outlaw (Jack Elam) who commands a town filled with criminals. The movie features lots of chaotic physical comedy—people falling off camels or tripping into mud, and so on—and the dialogue is occasionally cartoonish. Still, most of the actors in Hawmps! are stone-cold pros, including those previously mentioned plus Denver Pyle, and the sight of bluecoated U.S. soldiers chasing after crooks or Indians while riding on camels is reliably amusing.

Hawmps!: FUNKY

Benji (1974) & For the Love of Benji (1977)

          One of the most successful independent movies of the ’70s, the gentle family film Benji depicts the adventures of a resourceful stray dog that scams regular meals from a pair of upper-middle-class children in a small Texas town, then wins a permanent place in their home by rescuing the children from kidnappers. The centerpiece of the movie is Higgins, a scruffy mixed-breed shelter dog furnished and trained by Frank Inn. “Playing” the title role, Higgins executes a seemingly endless variety of complicated maneuvers, interacting with actors, props, stunts, and vehicles in such a natural way that the illusion of a deliberate performance is persuasive.

          Putting Higgins through his paces is writer-director Joe Camp, the creator of the Benji franchise, who keeps the focus just where it belongs—literally, since the bulk of the movie is shot at Benji’s eye level, with the camera hovering close to the ground. There’s no denying the appeal of an amiable dog scampering around the sidewalks of a small town, charming everyone he meets, and Camp endeavors to give the movie narrative shape with the kidnapping melodrama. Nonetheless, Benji is pure feel-good fluff.

          Setting aside the main contrivance of Benji as a crime-fighting mastermind, the movie is so unrelentingly sunny that the worst moment involves a bad guy kicking Benji’s puppy girlfriend, causing no permanent injury; furthermore, even the townspeople who consider Benji a nuisance secretly love him. Other saccharine excesses include a slow-motion romantic montage featuring Benji and his girlfriend, and the recurring use of “I Feel Love,” a bouncy tune crooned by cheeseball country singer Charlie Rich.

          Still, Benji is notable-ish for featuring the last film performances by ’60s TV favorites Frances Bavier (“Aunt Bea” from The Andy Griffith Show) and Edgar Buchanan (who played “Uncle Joe Carson” in three series: The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction). Furthermore, it’s impressive that Camp got the movie onscreen for a frugal $500,000, especially since Benji earned $40 million at the U.S. box office.

          Given that success, sequels were inevitable. The first, For the Love of Benji, is set in Greece. Reprising their roles are the mediocre actors playing Benji’s juvenile owners (Allen Fiuzat and Cynthia Smith) and their housekeeper (Patsy Garrett). Their characters get mixed up with a criminal who sedates Benji with chloroform and hides valuable information on the dog’s paw. When Benji escapes from the crook, a Disney-style romp ensues during which the bad guy chases the dog and his “family” worries about his welfare. Typical high jinks involve the four-legged star disrupting a marketplace by stealing a rope of sausage links—in other words, yawn. The second movie looks better than the first, since Camp clearly had a bigger budget, but the story is dull and insipid.

          After For the Love of Benji, the canine star headlined a pair of TV specials before returning to the big screen in Oh! Heavenly Dog, a 1980 dud costarring Chevy Chase. Joe Camp has periodically resuscitated the franchise since then, but has yet to recapture the public’s imagination the way he first did in 1974. And in case you’re curious, Higgins’ pups eventually took over the role their papa originated.

Benji: FUNKY

For the Love of Benji: LAME