Back to Nature

In the third of 20th Century-Fox's JONES FAMILY series, the family get a trailer and head off to Crystal Lake for a holiday.

It hadn't taken long for producer to set the pattern for series. Father Jed Prouty is pompous and loving, wife Spring Byington keeps things organized, eldest son Kenneth Howell has a date with Dixie Dunbar, hampered by his lack of money, daughter Shirley Dean is entranced by charming Tony Martin, and so forth and so forth. There is location shooting up by Mammoth Lake to make things look nice, and a chase sequence to round things off.

With James Tinling directing, it must have been a speedy and economical shoot. This must have pleased producer Max Golden, who came in from the financial office, and started producing with the first movie in the series. He would give up that role in the industry and become a production manager on some major projects. He died in 1976 at the age of 80.

At around the same time MGM was making its very successful Hardy family series, Twentieth Century-Fox made their own series about the Jones family. Of the two, I much prefer the Hardy films, as they relied less on comedy and more on characters. Too often, the Jones films were about laughs and not about the characters. Because of that, audiences tended to LIKE the Hardys and care about them much more than the Jones clan.

This installment of the Jones family, "Back to Nature", is one which features the family on a vacation. Mr. Jones needs to be at some convention and the family insists they tag along...and to afford such an undertaking, he gets a trailer and takes them to various camping locations. Along the way, they meet a 'nice young man' (Tony Martin) and a couple of the Jones kids end up being total jerks. In particular, the boating scene shows one of the Jones girls is a sociopath...something which doesn't fit in with the rest of the movie. Also, the middle boy is a jerk as well...using his camera for a blackmail business!

I didn't particularly like this film because I didn't like the Jones family. A couple of the kids were jerks, the dad a know-it-all idiot and the oldest daughter a lousy judge of men. Overall, a film which really disappointed...mostly because of the pedestrian writing.