So as my son gets older I find myself wanting to
introduce him to the films I found to be magical experiences when I was a boy.
And so he’s seen the Star Wars
trilogy and E.T.
and The Wizard of Oz. But there’s one
that I loved that was perhaps less well-known, certainly less popular compared
to those blockbuster classics. Disney’s live action adventure Swiss Family Robinson won’t be making
anyone’s list of the greatest films, but boy is it fun!
This movie has everything: a shipwreck; exotic locations;
a menagerie of incredible animals; pirates; guns; coconut bombs; and the
coolest fucking treehouse you’ve ever seen. That treehouse is so awesome, so
wondrous that it became a beloved attraction at both Disneyland and The Magic
Kingdom theme parks.
Walt Disney was sort of masterful at identifying
little-known works that contained the right elements of magic or adventure to
translate to the screen and capture imaginations. He was right to hit upon the novel
by Johann David Wyss about shipwrecked family on their way to a new life in New
Guinea. Mother and Father are played by Dorothy McGuire and John Mills, two
established and respected actors with successful careers already behind them.
Landing two big names speaks to the power the Disney studio had at the time. Their
three boys are Fritz (James MacArthur), Ernst (Tommy Kirk), and Francis (Kevin
Corcoran. Fritz is the eldest, maybe eighteen or twenty. Ernst is a teenager
and Francis is still a boy under the protection of his mother while the older
boys have the freedom to explore and to work.
Like great classical storytelling, the family gets
through the story having to overcome different adversities and elements at
every turn. They manage to escape the foundering ship and get ashore past the
reef. They survive the first night under a makeshift tent in spite of a violent
storm. They begin to conquer the animals (although I’m not sure there’s any
single place in the world that is home to elephants, tigers, monkeys, and
ostriches). Finally, they conquer their environment – as man has done
throughout history when he’s found new land to settle – by building shelter in
the trees, installing a method to bring fresh water into their home and even
refrigeration. But even as man has successfully overcome the challenges of the
living environment, he has continued to be besieged by attacks from fellow man.
And so the story (screenplay by Lowell S. Hawley) sends
in the pirates after all seems well and good for the Robinsons. They’ve been
avoiding the pirates and hoping to simply go undetected by them from the moment
of their arrival. The screenplay is at least good enough to give them time to
settle first. The older boys go exploring to find out how big the island is and
encounter the pirates, who are holding a ship’s captain and his granddaughter
(disguised as a boy to keep the pirates from violating her, a fact never made
explicit in this family-friendly movie, but you can read between the lines)
captive. The boys are able to free the girl, but they are pursued all the way
to the other side of the island by the pirate tormenters, led by a chief played
by Sessue Hayakawa.
The director, Ken Annakin, had already worked on a series
of adventure films for Disney prior to this. His skill set includes focusing on
relationships and character in the midst of high adventure. When you think
about all the set pieces and all the things that happen in this movie, but then
realize that we know so much about how all the family members relate to one another,
whether it’s Mother’s protection of young Francis, the sibling rivalry between
Fritz and Ernst, or the respect as men relationship between Father and Fritz,
you begin to understand why Annakin was a sought-after director by studios for
most of his career. There’s nothing flashy about his work and you won’t find
him in the film books as an auteur or one of the greats, but he was a great
hired hand who understood his role and his craft.
Annakin’s best work on this film is the final act, which
involves the family fortifying their home and buttressing up their lines of
defense for the inevitable attack we know is coming and that serves as the film’s
climax. The whole battle that ensues is sort of hilarious from the perspective
of being fifty years removed from the movie’s production. It being a Disney
family film, there is no blood and, to be honest, I didn’t see anything that
could be construed as on-screen death. When three or four pirates fall into a
pit containing a hungry tiger, they comically leap out immediately,
cartoon-like, and run off screeching. Several more pirates run back to the
shore after the footbridge they’re crossing collapses. A dozen tree trunks are
made to come rolling down the hill, crushing several pirates, but it appears
nothing more than their egos are bruised. And they go away defeated. Coconut
bombs exploding nearby make them hightail downhill. It’s all so comically
bloodless. What’s so fascinating about the tone of it is not just that it’s
bloodless, but that the whole tone and look of the film doesn’t seem any
different than, for example, a contemporaneous war movie. But family friendly
action-adventure movies today are made to look less realistic, more like
cartoonish or heightened reality to reinforce the idea that it’s all
make-believe. But Swiss Family Robinson
is all natural colors and settings, so the effect is this weird cartoonish
danger where we sort of know nothing bad is going to happen even though
everything about the environment suggests otherwise.
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