Bon Voyage!

I’ve long been open about being a fan of Tommy Kirk. I think more people should be aware of Kevin Corcoran and his long and impressive career. Fred MacMurray and Deborah Walley are on my schedule. Jane Wyman, I will consider at some point; she’s definitely been in some movies I love. And there are aspects to this movie that are worthwhile; it handily passes the Castaway Cowboy test. Sure, the “Indian” character gets from what I’ve noticed no lines and is played by an actress who seems to be of Mexican descent, and she’s exoticized, but it’s still less racist. And there’s some heartwarming stuff here. It’s still a mostly forgettable movie, though.

The Willard family is on their way to Paris. Harry (MacMurray) is a plumbing supplier from Terre Haute, Indiana, who married Katie (Wyman), whom it is implied is from a wealthy Boston family. He’s been promising her for more than twenty years that they will go, and now they’re going. They’ve packed their kids—Elliott (Kirk), Amy (Walley), and Skipper (who but Corcoran?)—and they’re setting sail. On the ship across, Amy meets wealthy Nick O’Mara (Michael Callan), and there’s half the plot for the rest of the movie.

That plot is actually the charming story about how you have to trust your daughters sooner or later. Harry gets a lovely speech about how he’s raised a strong, intelligent daughter and needs to trust her to be that strong and intelligent. If he can’t let her make her own mistakes, does he trust her to make her own successes? No, he doesn’t like Nick. I don’t like Nick. I think Nick at best needs a ton of therapy. And I don’t think Amy should be committed to him as quickly as she is. But that’s up to Amy and Nick, not anyone else.

Meanwhile, Elliott is busy learning the lesson that he would be better off just being himself. He’s nineteen. Back in Terre Haute, he was hanging around with a girl his father didn’t much like and says he isn’t interested in looking at girls on the trip. (Write your own jokes here, kids.) By my count, he pursues at least five girls, and he tells a different story of himself to each of them. One of them is an unapologetic fortune hunter who initially went after Harry (Francoise Prévost), who warns her off by simply saying Elliott is his son. The final girl’s mother tries to blackmail him, and one hopes the lesson sticks.

Tommy Kirk was trying. By all accounts working on the film was miserable for him—by his account, working on the film was miserable for him. Jane Wyman hated him, he thinks because she knew he was gay. He also had conflict with director James Neilson. Fred MacMurray gave him a lecture for being unprofessional. And apparently the entire cast came down with dysentery and had to film anyway. Which makes the scenes in the Paris sewer a bit appropriate. Kirk was at this point midway through his Disney career, and I think this was his worst experience with the studio.

By ‘60s standards, the relationships are actually not terrible. Nick’s parents are divorced and have been for years, and his mother has a new “protege” every few months. He therefore doesn’t believe in marriage and seems to have a hard time even believing in love. But for all their issues, Harry and Katie obviously love one another. Are obviously in love with one another. Harry is disappointed when Katie makes plans without him, but it’s only because he wanted to spend time with her, not because he doesn’t want her to live her own life.

Further, Katie has clearly had an explicit conversation with Amy at least once about sex and sexuality. We never learn the details—they won’t even explain to us that what Skipper found in their bathroom in Paris is a bidet—but Katie tells Harry that it’s good and healthy that Katie is sexually aroused by Nick. Not in those words, but my Gods does she talk around it in a 1962 Disney movie fashion. Amy is eighteen, and her parents let her go gallivanting around Paris with a man she met the day they got on the boat.

Though admittedly it’s also partially a sign of the times. Skipper goes gallivanting around Paris without his parents more often than you’d let him today in his own town. Now, I think we overprotect our kids, and I’m glad they don’t helicopter parent him. But dear Gods. I also do like that one of Harry’s goals on the trip is getting to know Skipper better, even if they make it clear to him at the beginning of the movie that he was not exactly planned. After all, he’s eleven.

Not every family needs to be the Willards. It’s sweet that he thinks after twenty-plus years that she’s even more beautiful than she was the day he first met her. It sounds like Nick’s family would be even worse if his parents had stayed married. Love doesn’t need to be forever to be worth celebrating; marriage doesn’t need to last your whole life to be successful. But there are marriages like the Willards’. I have friends who have been together since high school and are still in love. It’s nice to see a happy couple in a movie, even if we do have to watch Katie being creeped on by Rudolph Hunschak (Ivan Desny) and Harry assuming she’s okay with it. There’s only so much you can blame drinking absinthe like water for that.