The Missouri Traveler

This movie shows us how "the boy from Shane",has matured, still a soft talking very polite youth. He is a runaway in this movie and is groomed by Lee Marvin, a hard taskmaster who has made a name for himself as the poor boy who made good in this story. He takes unfair advantage of Brandon, but in the process, really teaches the youth some valuable lessons about life and how to take care of himself. These are lessons we can all learn from, and Gary Merrill provides care, comfort, and guidance for Brandon as he overcomes the hard "teaching" of Marvin. The film is anchored by the fine acting of Paul Ford, as usual, a leader of the business community, but with a soft heart for the troubled. This is a great family film, free of Hollywoods blood, guts, sex, and profanity.

"The Missouri Traveler" is a film from Disney that seems to reinforce the values that Walt himself had growing up in this same state. He talked about the joy of growing up in small town Missouri and his Main Street USA at Disney World and Disneyland are modeled after this ideal.

The story begins with Biarn (Brandon De Wilde) walking down a country road. Tobias (Lee Marvin) stops to give the boy a lift into town. While it's obvious the boy is on the run, since he appears to be only about 13, the townsfolk don't question this and are quite taken with him. In fact, in a way, the people take him on as a special project, as they see he's very hard working, decent and honest. But there's a problem.... Tobias is a bit of a jerk and he seems to repeatedly make life tough for the kid. What's to become of this odd rivalry?

"The Missouri Traveler" is a very sweet film that manages to balance sentimentality and schmaltziness with entertainment. In other words, it doesn't overwhelm you with too much false sentimentality and the story works for many reasons. Of course the writing is good, but so is the nice direction and the great cast of actors....who are mostly character actors who really make you love the town. One of Disney's best live action films.

I watched this movie because Brandon De Wilde,who disappeared too soon ,was in it ; he already had under his belt such works as "Shane" and "member of the wedding ",and later on he would play prominent parts in " Hud " and "all fall down" .

Unlike some very young actors,he never hammed it up : all he had to do was act naturally ; an orphan ,he wins a whole town over (after a chilly welcome :does he come from a reform school?).He becomes Magee's protégé ;Gary Merril is excellent as the man feeling time is passing him by and who tries to live again his youth dreams thanks to the teenager who looks like a lot like him ; Lee Marvin may seem an unsympathetic character but the boy learns from him an important thing in life : for any deal ,put it in writing;on the other hand,his love affair is insignificant.

Shades of "national velvet " (the race) and more a chronicle than a classic eventful western ;predictable and derivative, but pleasant to watch with a dose of humor : the statue of the general used as a hiching post for Marvin's horse.

The title role in The Missouri Traveler is played by young Brandon DeWilde, his last role essentially as a child star. Soon he'd be doing such adult stuff as Blue Denim, Hud, and In Harm's Way.

It's a nostalgic look at life at the turn of the last century in a small Missouri town where orphan kid Brandon DeWilde stops and decides to stay a while.

This is a nice easy to take film, moving along at a leisurely pace, but actually it has some serious issues. This is an orphan kid making his own way in the world, a world I might add without child labor laws. Young DeWilde is working for his keep, both as a sharecropper and as a horse trainer, well at least an assistant trainer.

Paul Ford gets a preparatory performance in this film for his later role as the mayor of River City in The Music Man. DeWilde has a couple of adult role models, the cynical Lee Marvin the guy who worked his way up to the top and the loquacious Gary Merrill who is the town newspaper editor. Both give DeWilde some good lessons about life.

In fact both Merrill and Marvin get into a knock down drag out fight that was copied, but lovingly from John Ford's The Quiet Man.

The Missouri Traveler was released through Buena Vista Productions in the beginning years of that company before it exclusively was the distributor for Walt Disney. It's a nice film, especially for family viewing with a lot of good lessons in it.

Missouri Traveler is an okay movie; you and your kids can enjoy it at least once. Biarn is a runaway from an orphan's home who happens across the small town of Delphi, where he settles into an abandoned farm and makes a life on his own with both the help and interference of various of the townsfolk. Brandon DeWilde's performance as Biarn is rather underplayed, almost to the point of making him seem a bit dull; this is probably his weakest film performance but even so he's okay in it. There were so many differences between the book and the movie though, and I wonder why the movie version was changed so much. In the movie, most of the theme seems to be Biarn rising above Tobias Brown's taking advantage of him, but in the book the themes are much deeper and more numerous; just by being himself, Biarn affects many of Delphi's townsfolk to an extent nobody realizes until the end of the story. This unexpected depth of the plot has unfortunately not made it from the book to the movie. Even so, watch The Missouri Traveler - and if you and/or the kids like the movie, get the book. Read it, have your kids read it, or read it to them at bedtime... it's nearly 300 pages and you'll learn the REAL story of the Missouri Traveler. The movie is 'nice' but only a taste of the actual story; I would really like to see this one remade, staying faithful to the actual story. It would be so much better.