Swiss Family Robinson
Director: Ken Annakin
Year: 1960
Rating: 6.0
Here is another
one of the great adventure tales that I saw as a child. It is in some ways
a young boy's fantasy. An isolated island that feels like it is out of a
Dr. Doolittle book, a tree house and pirates. What more could you want.
It is based on the 1812 novel by Johann Wyss who didn't write it so much
as a commercial adventure story but as a set of lessons for his four sons
on how to be independent and self-reliant. In the book he teaches farming,
carpentry and nature. How to survive with a big dose of Christianity. But
the movies came along and of course turned it into an adventure. There are
no pirates in the book. When I watched In Search of the Castaways the other
day, it still seemed rather grand to me. Not as much with this one. At a
little over two hours, it felt long and none of the characters feel particularly
real and the youngest boy just reinforced my opinion that children should
not be in movies. He is so annoying, when the tiger shows up, I was definitely
rooting for the tiger.
The family - father (John Mills), mother
(Dorothy McGuire) and their three sons (James "Book Him Danno" MacArthur,
Tommy Kirk and the devil child Kevin Corcoran) are on a ship going to New
Guinea in order to escape the Napoleonic Wars and the boys having to enlist.
Draft dodgers. The ship is attacked by pirates and the entire crew skedaddles
locking the family in their state room. The ship lands on a rock near the
shore of a deserted island.
This is an industrious family. They build
a raft and over numerous trips take everything from the ship including cows,
mules, weapons, food, chickens, silverware and everything that a tree house
needs to live in comfort. They also tame the animals on the island - elephants,
zebras, ostriches, monkeys and the two dogs they brought off the ship. Home
sweet home.
But the pirates come back and after saving
a young boy who turns out to be a girl (Janet Munro), they prepare the defenses
for when the pirates come back. The leader of the pirates is played by the
great Japanese star who immigrated to Hollywood in the 1920s, Sessue Hayakawa.
He was a film idol in the silent days but when sound came his accent was
too strong and he faded but still got roles later on in House of Bamboo and
as the Japanese head of the concentration camp in Bridge on the River Kwai.
Their defenses are wonderful - that old tiger in a hidden pit trick, a rock
slide, logs rolling down on the pirates and good old-fashioned muskets. Somehow
Disney missed the opportunity to add a daughter to the family. With Hayley
Mills of course. Replace that little shit with her.
