Davy Crockett et les pirates de la rivière

Wow.

Sometimes a film is powerful because it WAS powerful.

This is an amazingly dumb movie but perhaps no dumber in extremes than today's. The reason it might be on your radar is because of how influential it was.

It was the first movie with multimedia tie-ins. You could buy Davey Crockett hats and weapons. And lunchboxes — stuff like that. That wasn't all that extraordinary then. But this was also the first movie that was also a theme park ride. So it is the beginning of a food chain that leads us to the Depp pirate projects. That Davey Crockett ride lasted 40 years! (Incidentally, students of film will see blocking similarities between Depp's boat ride in the bayou and Parker's.)

Its also one of the movies most obviously designed for boys. Here you have guys pretending to be Indians and dying by falling down. You have water play. You have racing. You have tricksters.

And most of all, you have a juvenile version of that John Ford/ John Wayne meme: real men achieve honor through recreational fighting.

Seeing it again fifty years later is very strange. Young people watch movies more closely than adults I think. I remembered the smallest details, like the lettering on barrels, which incidentally was inspired by the Our Gang/Little Rascals cosmology that things become props by labelling them.

There are no "girls;" this is strictly boy's play. The only time girlie stuff appears is when the pirates try to attract Mike Fink's crew to an ambush. They do this by dressing up as floozies, which of course he cannot resist.

And its also an influential film in melding a certain collection of values to a certain collection of cultural carriers.

The values are honesty, plainspokenness, insight outside of book-larnin', loyalty (at least among men). The cultural carriers today are what's been labelled as "country" music (and its advertising affiliate, NASCAR).

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Great Disney sequel to the first Disney movie on Davy Crockett. I enjoyed the characters, particularly Mike Fink, who gave the film a lot of humor. I particularly liked the scene when Mike Fink had to eat his hat after losing the keelboat race. Meaning, in Disney fashion, the "sort of" villain was actually a tough guy with honor. Of course, at the end, the King of the River and King of the Wild Frontier part as friends.

Excellent plot, good story, good action and a lot of good humor.

Capitalizing on the popularity of the Davy Crockett phenomenon, Disney produced a story that had to take place at an earlier time. Mike Fink is a keel boater (boats that are pushed with poles), the best around. Georgie Russell (Buddy Ebsen) makes a bet with Fink, banking on the ingenuity of Crockett who has never pushed a keel boat. If they don't win the race, they will lose several month's work. The race is fun with Fink using every method he can to take away Davy and Georgie's chances of winning. The two manage to endure and the first half ends. What the heck. But what happens is an alliance among the three men. River pirates have been robbing the hard working people who depend on the waterway for their business. They must find a way to stop them for everyone's benefit. If this phenomenon had been in more recent times, we would have had a series, starring Fess Parker, that would have lasted a long time. It was a different time, obviously.

Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen are back as Davy Crockett and his sidekick in another film culled from Disney's TV series. This time they encounter Mink Fink, King of the River captaining a boat on the Mississippi. They agree to race him to New Orleans, and then they team up with him to defeat pirates masquerading as Native Americans. This one is slightly superior to the original film mostly due to having a less episodic story.

This was the second of two Disney Crockett theatrical features, edited from a pair of Disneyland TV episodes during that show's second season. The first three Crockett stories, run during the first season and then later released theatrically as a mini-epic, were all at least in part based on Crockett's life, as the opening image - his journal allowing us to slip inside - makes clear. The follow-ups were based on the famed Almanacks that appeared after Crockett's death in 1836, and so are right filmed in a much broader style, visually suggesting a tall tale rather than a fact based adventure. In the first half, Davy (Fess Parker) and pal Georgie (Buddy Ebsen) engage in a legendary keel boat race with Mike Fink (Jeff York). Lots of good natured action-fun. In the second part, they join forces to eradicate the wicked river pirates who not only prey on innocent passersby but blame their wicked deeds on the innocent Indians. That allows for a highly effective message, much like that in the first film, whereby Crockett becomes a spokesman for Indians' rights. As always in Disney, the entertainment qualities are balanced with an attempt to educate the audience on the greatness of ethnic diversity. Some fifty years after its release, this is still a delight.