The Mouse and His Child (1977)

          The gulf between good and bad children’s entertainment is wide, but generally speaking, the bad stuff reflects cynicism (as if putting any old cutesy slop in front of kids is sufficient for making a buck) whereas the good stuff reflects the higher calling of exposing children to noble values. The preceding is a prosaic way of saying that even though animated feature The Mouse and His Child is not nearly as delightful as its makers presumably hoped it would be, the movie represents an attempt to do all the right things. It’s clever and fantastical and sweet, using the sugar of bright colors and lively music and wild characters to coat the pill of worthy themes. Whenever the picture falls short, it’s not for lack of trying.

          Based on a novel by Russell Hoban, the movie begins in a toy shop, where the conjoined wind-up toys of an adult mouse (voiced by Alan Barzman) and his offspring (voiced by Marcy Swenson) achieve consciousness for the first time. The idea seems to be that they were recently created by the store’s owner, thus becoming sentient. Through convoluted circumstances, the mice leave the store for the outside world, beginning a long adventure during which they’re exploited by a sewer-dwelling rodent crook, Manny the Rat (Peter Ustinov), and befriended by various other creatures. There’s an existential quality to the toys’ journey, since they seek to become “self-winding,” a concept pregnant with metaphorical implications. At its deepest/trippiest, The Mouse and His Child features a scene of the mice, underwater, becoming hypnotized by an infinity painting that adorns the label of a dog-food can. Similarly, the mice encounter a philosophical turtle whose dialogue is so rarified he mentions “works cited.”

          It’s all a bit formless and meandering, but none would ever accuse the folks behind this picture of condescending to youthful viewers. The animation is relatively detailed, not quite to the Disney standard but fairly lush, and the voice cast features several familiar names. (Besides Ustinov, participants include Neville Brand, John Carradine, Andy Devine, Sally Kellerman, and Cloris Leachman,) A handful of unmemorable songs decorate the soundtrack, as well. All things considered, it’s not difficult to imagine that The Mouse and His Child means something to people who saw it back in the day, and perhaps even to some who discovered it later. If not actually special, it is at the very least a respectable effort.

The Mouse and His Child: FUNKY

Winds of Change (1979)

          Technically, the following remarks pertain not just to the 1979 release Winds of Change, but also to the 1978 release Metamorphoses, as they are two different versions of the same film. An American/Japanese coproduction, this obscure animated picture was first issued, under the title Metamorphoses, as a rock & roll head trip featuring tunes by Joan Baez and Mick Jagger, plus limited narration by familiar Hollywood voice actor Paul Frees. Accompanying the music are dramatizations of myths extrapolated from the writings of Ovid. By all reports, the original version had long nonverbal passages with magical creatures doing sparkly things. Think Fantasia (1940) for the stoner crowd. Metamorphoses tanked, so the picture was recut and the soundtrack was replaced. Out went Frees and the rockers, in came narration by Peter Ustinov and disco tunes, plus the new moniker Winds of Change.

          In Winds of Change, every little detail is explained to death, and Ustinov provides silly character voices for moments with implied synchronized dialogue. To get a sense of the weird tone this creates, consider the moment when a young adventurer stumbles upon the goddess Diana, then ogles her shapely naked backside while she bathes in a waterfall with help from flittering faeries. Upon discovering her unwanted visitor, Diana turns toward the camera and scowls while Ustinov says, “Hell hath no fury like a goddess being peeked at!” And that’s one of the more coherent moments. Later in the same scene, Ustinov voices Diana while she issues the following command: “Restless vegetation, turn into dragons!” All to the accompaniment of sexy guitars, thumping drumbeats, and relentless hi-hat snaps.

          If you buy into the vibe during early scenes, Winds of Change is pleasant enough to watch. Director Takashi, who also contributed to the script, gives the animation a relatively lush look, so while the images aren’t nearly as resplendent as those in classic Disney features, they’re certainly richer than, say, the average Hanna-Barbera product of the same period. The score has dancefloor snap, and some of the songs get cosmic (sample title: “Wandering Starchild”). As for the underlying material, stories about Medusa and Perseus and the like have endured with good reason, even if this treatment falls somewhere between infantilized and respectful. It’s also worth noting that the narration was written by radio legend Norman Corwin, so the language is not without virtue. Does it all add up to anything special? Not really. Nonetheless, Winds of Change is harmless and, given its foundation in the classics, mildly edifying.

Winds of Change: FUNKY

One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975)

The hiring of Caucasian actors to play Asian roles was still commonplace in the Hollywood of the mid-’70s, so it would be wrong to single out Walt Disney Productions for special enmity while discussing the race problem plaguing the company’s kiddie comedy One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Still, watching Peter Ustinov mug his way through a stereotypical performance as a Chinese master criminal is painful, and his portrayal reflects the overall stupidity of the picture. Even though One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing benefits from Disney’s usual lavish production values, to say nothing of Helen Hayes’ appealing star turn as an intrepid nanny, the picture plucks so much low-hanging fruit, comedically speaking, that it’s hard to imagine anyone but very young children enjoying the experience. Much of the film comprises an absurd chase during which a truck bearing a dinosaur skeleton roams the streets of 1920s London, with every imaginable sight gag used to attenuate the sequence. Other would-be highlights include a scene of multiple nannies crawling and leaping around the skeleton while looking for a hidden object, the same set of nannies hiding inside the mouth of a life-sized whale sculpture, and a bizarre throwaway scene in which a King Kong-sized yeti helpfully carries a man across a snowy Tibetan field. As for the plot, it’s idiocy about Hnup Wan (Ustinov) seeking the formula for something called “Lotus X,” which British explorer Lord Southmere (Derek Nimmo) has stolen from China. Through convoluted circumstances, Lord Southmere tasks his childhood nanny, Hettie (Hayes), with protecting the formula. She recruits fellow caregivers to foil Hnup Wan’s scheme. Basically a cartoon rendered in live-action, this is pathetic stuff, too silly for adult viewers to enjoy, and too racially insensitive for modern parents to share with their kids.

One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing: LAME

Hammersmith Is Out (1972)

A misguided black comedy that bounces between crude farce and silly satire, Hammersmith Is Out loosely retells the legend of Faust, which concerns a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for success. As ineptly written by Stanford Whitmore and clumsily directed by Peter Ustinov, Hammersmith Is Out concerns an ignorant slob named Billy Breedlove (Beau Bridges), who works as an orderly in a mental hospital. Billy agrees to free a psychotic patient named Hammersmith (Richard Burton), who in turn agrees to kill people on Billy’s behalf, thereby imbuing Billy with the victims’ money and power. Along for the ride is greasy-spoon waitress Jimmie Jean Jackson (Elizabeth Taylor), whom Billy enjoys screwing until her vapidity becomes annoying. The narrative of Hammersmith Is Out moves at awkward rhythms, sometimes lingering on scenes as if they’re pieces of theater, and sometimes rushing through important ones by way of perfunctory voiceover. The tone of the picture is inconsistent, complementing sly verbal jokes with a crass gag about flatulence. Bridges gives an exaggerated turn playing an irredeemable scumbag, and Burton dubiously opts for icy restraint, which makes him seem bored. Taylor is awful—all cartoonish artifice—though in her defense, she’s grossly miscast as a salt-of-the-earth type. Given these wholly unsympathetic characters, it’s a drag to watch Hammersmith Is Out, because the flick is a would-be laugh riot about killing and maiming people for no reason other than greed. Furthermore, it’s hard to cut the movie slack as a spoof of 1972-era society, seeing as how Ustinov’s idea of a witty joke is showing an all-female rock band called “The Tits” performing topless. By the time the movie stops dead so La Liz can deliver an interminable monologue, gifting her character with previously unknown soulfulness, Hammersmith Is Out has degraded into pointless sludge.

Hammersmith Is Out: LAME

Treasure of Matecumbe (1976)

          An adventure saga that steals elements from the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and others—then shoots those elements through the simplistic prism of the Walt Disney Productions house style—Treasure of Matecumbe is as amiable as it is disposable. Even though costar Peter Ustinov gives a lively supporting performance as a kindly flimflam man, problems including dodgy racial portrayals and tiresome plot twists keep the movie mired in the muck of mediocrity.
          Based on a novel by Robert Lewis Taylor and directed by reliable Disney hand Vincent McEveety, the movie takes place in the pre-Civil War South. The action begins at a Kentucky estate owned by two spinsters. Ben (Robert DoQui), who used to work at the estate, arrives suddenly and delivers a treasure map to the estate’s youngest resident, the spinsters’ young nephew Davie (Johnny Doran). Ben tells Davie to seek out a long-lost uncle for help recovering the treasure. As per the Disney norm, Davie needs cash to rescue his estate from financial ruin. Soon after Ben’s arrival, thugs led by the dastardly Captain Spangler (Vic Morrow) arrive to seize the treasure map by force. The spinsters help Davie escape with his best friend, Thad (Billy “Pop” Atmore), but Ben is killed during the fight with Spangler and his men. Thus Davie and Thad are off on their adventure.

          As should be evident, the plot is absurdly overstuffed, allowing McEveety to fill the screen with noisy action (and trite comedic bits) rather than delving into anything heavy. Eventually, the story broadens to include Davie’s traveling companions—the aforementioned con artist (Ustinov), a runaway bride (Joan Hackett), and, of course, the long-lost uncle (Robert Foxworth). Seeing as how Treasure of Matecumbe is a G-rated romp, the story contains surprisingly rough material. Beyond the implied element of racism, Treasure of Matecubme includes murder, attempted gang rape, an attempted lynching by the Ku Klux Klan, the desecration of Native American burial grounds, and the transformation of white hostages into “squaws” by Native American captors. (Viewers are told that “squaws” means “slaves” in this context, but . . .)

          Treasure of Matecumbe never wants for stimulation, since the movie has riverboat intrigue, a deadly tropical storm, chases through forests, and so on. It’s all silly hokum reconstituted from silly hokum that came before, but at least whenever Ustinov is onscreen—spewing polysyllabic prevarications with characteristic panache—Treasure of Matecumbe becomes the sort of frothy escapism that, the rest of the time, it merely echoes.

Treasure of Matecumbe: FUNKY

Death on the Nile (1978)

          The all-star period mystery film Murder on the Orient Express (1974) was such a commercial and critical success that another big-budget Agatha Christie adaptation was sure to follow. And while Death on the Nile is far less posh than its predecessor, it’s still quite enjoyable—more so, perhaps, than the stolid Orient Express. Clever and intricate though they may be, Christine’s books are not high art, and the makers of Death on the Nile treat the source material as pulp, whereas director Sidney Lumet and his Orient Express collaborators took the dubious path of treating Christie as literature. In any event, Death on the Nile plays out like a quasi-sequel to the earlier film, since both pictures feature Christie’s beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Albert Finney played Poirot in Orient Express, but Peter Ustinov assumes the role in Death on the Nile, marking the first of six films in which he essayed the character.

          As per the usual Christie formula, the narrative follows a large number of interconnected characters, all of whom eventually land in the same place—a steamer churning down the Nile River in Egypt—for a long voyage filled with intrigue and murder. The picture begins in England, where penniless Jacqueline (Mia Farrow) begs her rich friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), to provide employment for Jacqueline’s fiancée, Simon (Simon MacCorkindale). Linnet steals Simon from her friend, marries him, and embarks on a honeymoon trip through Egypt. Yet Jacqueline chases after them, taunting the newlyweds with threats of revenge. Eventually, Linnet and Simon encounter the vacationing Poirot, requesting his assistance in dispatching the nettlesome Jacqueline. Various other characters enter the mix, and before long it becomes clear that everyone except Simon and the neutral Poirit has a grudge against Linnet.

          It’s giving nothing away to say that she dies about an hour into the 140-minute film—after all, the story can’t be called Death on the Nile without a corpse—so the fun stems from Poirot’s ensuing investigation. The pithy detective performs a thorough review of all the possible suspects, even as more people are killed, finally unraveling the true killer’s identity during a Christie staple—the final scene of Poirot gathering all the suspects in a room and then explaining, with the help of elaborate flashbacks, how he connected clues. It’s all quite far-fetched and formulaic, but there’s a good reason why Christie is considered the queen of the whodunit genre. It also helps that Anthony Shaffer, the playwright/screenwriter behind the intricate mystery film Sleuth (1972), did the script, and that director John Guillermin provides a brisk pace and a sleek look.

          As for the performances from the huge cast, they’re erratic. On the plus side, Ustinov is droll as Poirot, David Niven is urbane as his sidekick, and the best supporting players (Jane Birkin, Jon Finch, Olivia Hussey, I.S. Johar, Maggie Smith) provide the varied textures asked of them. However, some players are badly miscast (Jack Warden as a German?), and some deliver performances that are too clumsy for this sort of material (Chiles, Farrow, George Kennedy). That leaves Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury, both of whom treat their parts like high camp; neither tethers her characterization to human reality, but both fill the screen with palpable energy.

          By the end of the picture, one does feel the absence of Lumet’s sure hand, since he did a smoother job of unifying his Orient Express cast members than Guillermin does here. Nonetheless, in the most important respects, Death on the Nile delivers Christie as pure silly escapism, which seems about right.

Death on the Nile: GROOVY

Robin Hood (1973)

          The second animated feature that Walt Disney Productions made after Walt Disney’s death, Robin Hood commenced the decline into mediocrity that defined the company’s feature-length cartoons until 1989’s The Little Mermaid. Lacking the narrative focus of its predecessors, and woefully short of memorable songs, Robin Hood is so enervated it’s hard to believe the same company was regularly issuing classics like The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians just a decade prior. To be fair, Robin Hood isn’t awful, because the animation is lovingly crafted and there’s plenty of brisk action and slapstick comedy, often presented in tandem. The problems, however, are many.

          To begin with, the Robin Hood myth doesn’t really suit the Disney paradigm, because by the mid-’70s, endless cinematic treatments had defined the crusading archer of Sherwood Forest as a virile action hero—therefore, seeing him rendered as a cute little fox seems to diminish the character. Another issue is the completely random use of anthropomorphized animals for all of the characters.

          Well-conceived Disney cartoons, like The Jungle Book, create internal logic by showcasing animals that might reasonably exist alongside each other in nature. Robin Hood juxtaposes jungle and woodland critters willy-nilly, so rhinoceros soldiers chase ursine merry men while a leonine prince sneers and cuddly rabbit serfs watch in horror. Similarly, some characters speak in appropriate British accents (since the setting is explicitly defined as England), while others chatter in cornpone American patois.

          And then there’s the ineffectual storyline, which picks up years after the main action of the classic Robin Hood myth—when this picture begins, Robin and his lady love, Maid Marian, have been separated for years, and Robin courts her anew while mounting a fresh crusade against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham’s onerous taxation. Even more awkwardly, Robin Hood mostly eschews songs during the first 30 minutes of its brief running time, and then a slew of forgettable tunes get jammed into a directionless second act that feels like a cartoon concert.

          On the bright side, Robin Hood features several entertaining vocal performances. Peter Ustinov and Terry-Thomas are both wonderful as villains, with Ustinov playing a lion (royal usurper Prince John) and Terry-Thomas essaying a snake (John’s put-upon advisor, Hiss). Phil Harris is also enjoyable as the lumbering Little John, a bear with a Southern accent. As for the music, let’s just say that when ’80s Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg started hiring Broadway composers for cartoons, the saccharine tunes in Robin Hood were just the sort of hokey tripe he was wise to retire.

Robin Hood: FUNKY

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

          Best known in the U.S. for his hilarious performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein (1974), odd-looking Englishman Marty Feldman was an accomplished comedy writer before he started acting, so it’s not surprising he used his mid-’70s visibility to launch a career as a feature filmmaker. Unfortunately, his directorial debut, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, is a dreary compendium of painfully obvious jokes with only a few flashes of real wit. As the title suggests, the picture riffs on a manly-man tale that was adapted for the screen several times previously, P.C. Wren’s 1924 novel about the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. The story concerns a pair of orphaned brothers, Beau and Digby, who are raised in an aristocratic French home. Once they reach adulthood, the brothers become suspects in the theft of a precious jewel, so noble Beau withdraws honorably to join the Foreign Legion. In Feldman’s version of the story, inept Digby gets thrown into prison while Beau is away, then escapes and joins Beau in Morocco for adventures that lead to the recovery of the jewel.

          Feldman assembled a great cast, with Michael York as Beau, Ann-Margret as the brothers’ conniving mother-in-law, and Peter Ustinov as the brothers’ psychotic Foreign Legion commander. (Feldman, of course, plays Digby.) Actors essaying cameos and minor roles include Henry Gibson, Trevor Howard, James Earl Jones, Roy Kinnear, Ed McMahon (!), Spike Milligan, Avery Schreiber, and Terry-Thomas. On the bright side, the picture has a few imaginative gags like an elaborate scene during which Feldman magically travels into footage from a 1939 version of the same story, resulting in a dialogue scene between Feldman and Gary Cooper. These kicky sequences demonstrate that Feldman had a deep knowledge of cinema devices and a vivid comic imagination.  More typical, however, is the bit depicting a commercial for a used-camel salesman whose slogan is “Let Harik hump you.” Ustinov is the only actor who really shines here, since he has a field day with physical gags like interchangeable peg legs. As for Feldman, sporadic funny moments cannot disguise how ill-suited he was for playing leading roles. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

The Last Remake of Beau Geste: FUNKY