1980 Week: Midnight Madness

          Much has been written about Walt Disney Pictures’ efforts to stretch beyond family-friendly fare during the late ’70s and early ’80s, issuing such projects as The Black Hole (1979) and Dragonslayer (1981). Yet perhaps more than grim fantasy films, the frenetic ensemble comedy Midnight Madness epitomizes this awkward transitional period. Borrowing tropes from the raunchy campus comedy Animal House (1978), Disney’s Midnight Madness includes a sight gag about a frat boy diving into a vat of beer, a scene in which characters must decipher a puzzle clue about melons by staring at a woman’s gigantic breasts, and another scene in which characters illicitly aim a telescope at a sexy girl’s window. Eventually, trying to satisfy coarsening audience tastes while preserving the valuable Disney brand led the company to introduce a second distribution arm, Touchstone Pictures. Midnight Madness represents a noteworthy step along that path.

          As for the movie itself, it’s a silly action/comedy hybrid in the mode of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), except for the collegiate set. A game designer challenges five teams to race through Los Angeles from midnight to dawn, tracking cryptic clues to see which team can arrive at the final destination first. Accidents, betrayals, cheating, greed, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings ensue.As for the major characters, protagonist Adam (David Naughton) is a likeable freshman counselor afraid to make the first move with Laura (Debra Clinger) and oblivious to the insecurities of his younger brother, Scott (Michael J. Fox). 

          It’s all quite pointless, so the narrative is merely a flimsy excuse for fast-moving vignettes of one-dimensional characters engaging in colorful antics. For instance, Harold (Stephen Furst) is a fat rich kid who constantly stuffs his face and uses a super-computer instead of his mind to solve clues. Similarly, Eddie Deezen plays yet another socially maladjusted weirdo. And while the picture has glimmers of wit, seeing as how game designer Leon (Alan Solomon) creates clever jumbles that teams (and viewers) must decipher, Midnight Madness is a bit of a slog, especially since it runs a full two hours. Still, the picture is executed well enough, and the actors give enthusiastic performances. What’s more, the filmmakers throw in a few complications to keep things from moving in a straight line.

Midnight Madness: FUNKY

Ride a Wild Pony (1975)

          Like the following year’s The Littlest Horse Thieves, gentle family picture Ride a Wild Pony is a live-action offering from Walt Disney Productions that’s completely bereft of American idiom. Whereas The Littlest Horse Thieves was made in the UK, Ride a Wild Pony was shot in Australia. Furthermore, the picture was based upon Australian literary material, and nearly all the actors are Aussies. So even though Ride a Wild Pony offers the same sort of animal-centric, feel-good story one normally associates with the Disney brand, the picture is in some respects a foreign film. It is also, unfortunately, not a very good film, although the story is compassionate and harmless and sensible. The problem is that there isn’t very much story, so the exact same set of narrative events could have been put across just as effectively, if not more so, in, say, a one-hour production made for one of Disney’s TV shows. Ride a Wild Pony spins a threadbare yarn about a poor boy’s bond with a willful pony, and the picture doesn’t embellish the core story with much in the way of action, comedy, or suspense.

          Scotty Pine (Robert Bettles) is the son of a poor farmer in New South Wales. He lives so far from the nearest school that his truancy becomes the subject of legal action. Kindhearted lawyer Charles Quayle (John Meillon) arranges a deal by which Scotty gains the use of a wild pony as transportation to and from school. Scotty falls in love with the animal, whom he names “Taffy,” and they share adventures until the day Taffy breaks free from his stall and runs away. Scotty is heartbroken. Meanwhile, a rich girl named Josie Ellison (Eva Griffith) suffers in different ways, because she lost the use of her legs following a bout of infant paralysis. She longs to ride horses, even though it’s unsafe for her to do so. Her father decides to build her a one-person carriage. To pull the cart, Josie selects a spirited pony from a local herd, unaware that it’s actually the long-lost “Taffy.” She renames the horse and revels in riding her new carriage. That is, until Scotty sees the horse and carriage one day and liberates “Taffy.” More legal action ensues.

          Ride a Wild Pony is fine as far as it goes. The child actors are neither especially cute nor especially whiny, the adult actors perform their roles well, and the abundant location photography creates a pleasant sense of place. To its credit, Ride a Wild Pony is a kiddie film that more or less unfolds in the real world of adult social structures, meaning that actions have believable repercussions, and that children aren’t allowed to run wild. That said, the ending is a foregone conclusion, and, in fact, everything that happens in Ride a Wild Pony is predictable.

Ride a Wild Pony: FUNKY

The Bears and I (1974)

          One of the better live-action dramas made by Walt Disney Productions in the ’70s, The Bears and I presents the familiar trope of a man who leaves civilization to find solace in nature, then builds emotional bonds with wild animals until he must resolve the inherent problem of living in two worlds at once. Although The Bears and I is a simplistic  homily compared to the best Disney movie of this type— the extraordinary Never Cry Wolf (1983)—it is nonetheless a humanistic film with a credible approach to ecology and race. The movie has some of the usual kid-cinema extremes, notably an excess of cute-animal antics, and leading man Patrick Wayne is hopelessly bland. However, young viewers could do much worse than exposure to a story about treating animals, land, and people with respect.
          The film’s source material is a nonfiction book by Robert Franklin Leslie, who ventured into the woods of British Columbia during the 1930s to work as a trapper, inadvertently becoming the guardian of three cubs after their mother died. In the modernized Disney version, Bob (Wayne) is a Vietnam vet who travels into the wilderness near the Canadian Rockies to find Chief Peter A-Tas-Ka-Nay (Chief Dan George). Bob served with Peter’s son, who died in combat, so Bob returns the son’s personal effects and seeks permission to camp near the small Indian settlement that Peter oversees. Hostile toward all whites, Peter and his tribesmen accept Bob’s money but not his companionship, and the friction increases once Bob adopts the cubs. Peter says his people are a “bear tribe,” so they view the domestication of the bears as sacreligious. Nonetheless, Bob teaches the bears basic survival skills, such as foraging for insects and hiding in trees when stalked by predators. This being a Disney picture, several subplots impact the action, notably the impending transformation of the Indian settlement into the hub of a national park and the one-dimensional villainy of Sam Eagle Speaker (Valentin de Vargas), a drunken troublemaker.

          Presented with dense narration during animal scenes, The Bears and I goes down smoothly. Shot at gorgeous outdoor locations, the picture comes complete with a John Denver theme song {“Sweet Surrender”), so it meshes well with the back-t0-nature ethos of the early ’70s. Is it cutesy and manipulative? Of course. But there’s a bittersweet emotional peak buried inside the movie’s tidy third act, ensuring that the picture ultimately endorses a realistic view of how people and wild animals can safely interact.

The Bears and I: GROOVY

The Boatniks (1970)

          Something of an aberration among ’70s live-action offerings from Walt Disney Productions, The Boatniks is a straightforward comedy with a romantic subplot. It doesn’t feature animals or children, and it doesn’t showcase special effects (excepting process shots of submarines) or supernatural elements. The Boatniks doesn’t even star one of Disney’s regular leading men, though it’s easy to picture Dean Jones in the starring role. The Boatniks could have been made by any studio, since it holds no special appeal for children beyond slapstick gags. After all, how interested is the average juvenile viewer in a love story, the exploits of jewel thieves, and the problems of a young Coast Guard officer trying not to botch his first command assignment?

          Onetime song-and-dance man Robert Morse, appearing in his last film role before a 17-year hiatus from the big screen, plays Ensign Tom Garland, a young junior officer assigned to supervise a patrol boat in the waters surrounding Los Angeles. A well-meaning klutz, Tom screws up his first few patrols, doing things like running a boat aground and spilling a can of paint on Kate (Stefanie Powers), the attractive proprietor of a sailing school. Tom’s misadventures cause friction with his exasperated supervisor, Commander Taylor (Don Ameche). Meanwhile, a group of jewel thieves led by fast-talking Harry Simmons (Phil Silvers) attempts aquatic getaway, which is impeded by the thieves’ lack of nautical knowhow. Clues eventually hip Tom to the presence of wanted criminals, so he strives to capture them and thereby refurbish his reputation. Naturally, he and Kate transition from frenemies to significant others amid the madcap antics.

          Notwithstanding its lack of standard-issue Disney plot elements, The Boatniks contains stylistic hallmarks of the studio’s live-action fare, notably dense plotting and mile-a-minute pacing. Some of what happens onscreen is amusing and charming, even though the overall tone of the piece is squaresville. (One exception: the randy running gag about a drunken playboy who keeps his boat stocked with bikini-clad babes.) Morse is personable in the leading role, though he’s outgunned by comedy pros Ameche and Silver, as well as supporting players Joe E. Brown, Wally Cox, and Norman Fell. Deserving special mention are writers Arthur Julian and Martin Roth, whose story is more of a juggling act than a proper narrative. Their deftness at keeping so many subplots running in tandem is impressive, even if The Boatniks never achieves the desired level of hilarity.

The Boatniks: FUNKY

The Littlest Horse Thieves (1976)

          Unusual among ’70s live-action pictures from Walt Disney Productions in that the film is British from top to bottom, devoid of physical comedy, and quite serious in tone, The Littlest Horse Thieves is a warm period drama about English youngsters who cross class-system lines in order to champion endangered ponies. Although the story has a certain inherently sentimental quality, it doesn’t play out in a cloying way. In fact, the picture occasionally recalls John Ford’s classic saga of Welsh miners, How Green Was My Valley (1941), even though The Littlest Horse Thieves occupies the familiar Disneyfied parallel universe in which good things always happen to good people, even if tragedy occasionally forces kids to learn valuable life lessons.

          Set in Yorkshire in the early 1900s, the story concerns a coalmine in which “pit ponies” are used to transport raw product from tunnels to an elevator. The ponies live underground permanently, and the preteen children of miners often sneak into the tunnels so they can help care for the animals. When a new manager is hired for the mine, he determines that using mechanized conveyances instead of ponies would increase productivity and profit. Naturally, when the kids learn their beloved ponies are likely be slaughtered after retirement, they contrive to kidnap the animals—but that’s only half the story. This being a Disney picture, the second half of the narrative involves adults rallying to the children’s cause, culminating in an overly convenient crisis that forces everyone involved to recognize what’s truly important.

          Even though it’s filmed in rich color, The Littlest Horse Thieves—which was released in the UK as Escape from the Dark—feels incredibly old-fashioned. The horn-driven score occasionally sounds as if it’s being channeled through rickety old speakers, and the presence of noted British actor Alistair Sim, best known for playing Scrooge in the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, connects the picture to an earlier era of cinema. Yet none of this is bad. Quite to the contrary, the musty feel of The Littlest Horse Thieves gives the picture a certain mythological quality, like it’s a tale from a storybook sprung to life. And because the real stars of the picture are not the wide-eyed child actors but rather the ponies who “portray” the long-suffering service animals, key scenes radiate simple honesty: Watching a pony relegated to life in lightless caverns is enough to tug at all but the most tightly wound heartstrings.

The Littlest Horse Thieves: FUNKY

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