My best-known hot take is probably that the Walt Disney Studios had the best record for live-action releases for most of the mid-twentieth century. Oh, it’s helped by the lower number of movies released by the studio. It’s easy to have a good record if you only release at most a half-dozen movies a year. The big-budget ones, in particular, are often quite good. People who are telling you about how bad these are tend to be thinking more Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar or at best The Ugly Dachshund than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Disney staple Hayley Mills made six movies for Disney in six years—and this is the only one I’d call seriously bad.
Here, she is Mary Grant. She and her brother, Robert (Keith Hamshere), are the children of the lost-at-sea Captain Grant (Jack Gwillim). He is presumed dead, but a French academic named Jacques Paganel (Maurice Chevalier) has found a bottle with a message in it giving the location where the ship went down. Sort of. It gives the latitude but not longitude. The owner of their father’s ship, Lord Glenarvan (Wilfred Hyde-White), scoffs, but Mary and the lord’s son, John (Michael Anderson, Jr.), convince him that the message is genuine. They set off.
In my Rotten Tomatoes review from many years back, I posited that somehow the characters had become victims of some sort of angry god. I stand by this assessment. They are crossing the Andes early in the picture and decided to stop the night at a cabin. Their native guides refuse and inform them, in some language or another, that they are in danger of earthquake. Which causes an avalanche. Robert is then captured by a giant condor, which is then shot by Chief Thalcave (Antonio Cifarellio of Naples). He is taking them to a village where three white captives are being held for ransom, but there’s a flood. He manages to ride for help, but Our Heroes end up in a very large tree. A jaguar joins them, but before it can get too hungry, lightning strikes the tree and sets it on fire. And this is maybe halfway through the movie.
And frankly, all the special effects of the disasters are terrible. Even something as simple as establishing shots of the ship are badly done—that’s a model, and it’s really obviously a model. It might as well have been filmed in someone’s bathtub. And when I tell you that, you will understand that the shots where Our Heroes are riding down the mountain on a giant slab of rock are just super bad. So badly done. Even the earthquake is badly done, and surely someone involved in this movie had experienced an earthquake before.
Mary Grant is a fine character. There’s nothing wrong with her, even if she’s not the most appealing character going, either. Her relationship with John is annoying. There’s a sequence wherein he basically You’re Not Like Other Girls her, though I will say she nicely shuts it down by repeatedly asking what he means by that. Robert’s something of a nonentity, and Lord Glenarvan mostly exists to be stuffy and annoyed by things. Also to, you know, have the money to take them places.
And then there’s Paganel. Now, I grant you I am not Maurice Chevalier’s biggest fan. Never have been; probably never will be. But my Gods he’s irritating here. He warbles a few lesser Sherman Brothers songs and is an incurable optimist. It’s because of him that they go to what they call Patagonia (to my surprise, the costuming is not entirely inaccurate for Tehuelche natives) before he realizes that in fact they’re on the wrong continent entirely. Wherein we get to go be racist about Maori for a while. He even gets a line about how they’re faster than the lava that Our . . . Heroes(?) have managed to send after them and Mary should enjoy it.
The movie was supposed to be a first onscreen kiss for Hayley Mills. The kiss was, it seems, cut. She would have to wait for my beloved Moon-Spinners for that. But in other of Walt’s odd shows of support for his stars, he let her cast the role of John so she’d have her choice of actors. Meanwhile her mother rejected the idea of having her actual brother cast as her screen brother. Apparently her mother felt there were enough film stars in the family.
In the end, is this as bad as The Castaway Cowboy? Frankly, I don’t know. I ended up watching it on the Internet Archive. It’s not on Disney+. If nothing else, it’s less racist than The Castaway Cowboy even though that’s not the same as not being racist. There are at least four people in this movie whom I’ve seen be better in other things (I haven’t even mentioned George Sanders or Wilfrid Brambell yet), but that’s probably true of The Castaway Cowboy, too. At least that was filmed on location in Hawaii, which even James Garner said was the best part of the movie. If it clears the bar, it’s not by much.
Is this even the worst Disney movie of 1962? I’m going to give that a solid “probably.” Moon Pilot is bad, goodness knows, but it’s bad in a boring way. This movie is in places actively grating. All right, few of the characters have much personality, but there’s so much possibility here. This is one of the Disney films that could be remade, and done better, with exceedingly little effort. But they’d rather remake Lilo and Stitch, apparently missing the entire point of the movie, instead. Maybe we should just all go watch the animated Lilo and Stitch and ignore all of this entirely.