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I believe I have a thought which obviously will be of service to mankind
If you would like to see a good film version of Sid Fleischman's By the Great Horn Spoon! (1963), don't watch The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1967). If, however, you are intrigued by the prospect of Roddy McDowall as a tall-tale American trickster hero who never ceases to be an essentially straitlaced butler from Boston, you might as well give this modest Western not-quite-spoof a whirl. It is far from the worst live-action Disney out there, even if its cartoon logic does run a little less than gracefully sometimes. Its actual cartoons are generally quite charming.
The plot is a picaresque, which means things happen and then more things happen and eventually the end credits roll. In 1849 Boston, well-bred siblings Arabella and Jack Flagg (Suzanne Pleshette and Bryan Russell) are left inauspiciously penniless when the last bequest of their self-made grandfather turns out to be a fanciful will, an opinionated portrait, and a mountain of mansion-mortgaging debts. Spirited Arabella takes the news philosophically, more amused than daunted by the prospect of making her way in the world: "Grandpa used to say people are ninety-eight percent water and if you don't stir them up once in a while, they stagnate." Young Jack, however, takes it as an excuse to run off to the gold fields of California, which he has been avidly studying via such trusty eyewitness accounts as The Bullwhip Brannigan Library No. 21, Vol. II: A Son of the Mother Lode, and the efforts to prevent him undertaken by the family's imperturbably resourceful butler Eric Griffin (McDowall) only ensure the accidental stowing away of both butler and boy aboard the Frisco-bound Lady Wilma, their fortunes entwined with floridly faded actor Quentin Bartlett (Richard Haydn), shamelessly sententious confidence man "Judge" Higgins (Karl Malden), and a much-traded map to the coveted "mother lode" itself. A variety of frontier hijinks ensue, in the course of which Jack gets a lesson in the grittier sides of melodrama, Griffin proves his credentials as barber, boxer, miner, cook, and all-round Odysseus-class liar, and Arabella tires of waiting for news of her menfolk and heads west herself, readily finding lucrative employment at the dance hall of genial operator Sam Trimble (Harry Guardino) and his oversized enforcer the Mountain Ox (Mike Mazurki). Fortunes are made and lost and stolen and made again. Eventually, somewhat ahead of schedule, San Francisco burns down.
It is unfair but irresistible to imagine this material adapted by Newbery Award-winner Fleischman himself and directed by his three-time collaborator William Wellman instead of the serviceable Lowell S. Hawley and James Neilson—I understand that the late 1960's were a weird time for Disney in the wake of Walt's death, so I can't tell whether the film had a troubled production or whether it was just awkwardly conceived from the start, but either way it doesn't quite seem to know whether it wants to be a rip-roaring boy's adventure or an undercranked sendup of same. The running narration of Mel Levens and George Bruns' "Ballad of Bullwhip Griffin" gently mocks each scene as it sets it: "A home of quality / Bespeaks of aristocracy / And comfort that is soon to be destroyed." Ward Kimball, credited with "Titles & Things," accompanies the verses with interstitial animations done in the old-timey style of dime-novel woodcuts, herky-jerky as a zoetrope. The very notion of the slight, mannered, primly spoken Griffin as a hero of the rough-and-tumble boomtown West is a fish-out-of-water classic, although it is also as queerly affirming as Way Out West (1930) and the strongest aspect of the film, seconded by the scenery-chewing of Haydn and Malden and the underutilized but effective chemistry between McDowall and Pleshette, which plays rather sweetly like a very specific handful of AO3 tags when not interrupted by a tiny bare-assed cherub tootling its way across the screen to signify that romance has entered the plot. You see the difficulty. The physical comedy oscillates with a similar lack of warning between slapstick and special effects. I imagine it was supposed to contribute to the tall-tale atmosphere, but I found it chronically jarring, especially since McDowall's face needs no assistance maintaining an irreproachable sang-froid through back-to-back stickups or dissolving into rueful nerves having just breezily agreed to a prizefight where the odds are fifty to one in favor of being pounded into a frittata. He's a beautifully physical actor and one of the funniest and sexiest moments in the film is accomplished entirely by Pleshette literally pulling him up by his dropped jaw into an embrace, which clears Griffin's brow for a second of shocked happiness before he remembers their ostensible stations and tries to reassert decorum and Arabella is having none of it and they argue instead of kissing, which doesn't stop him from falling back into his seat like he's been poleaxed the minute she puts a finger to his chest and tells him to "wait right here." These are not people who need a tiny bare-assed cherub, is what I'm trying to say. By the same token, the climactic bare-knuckle rematch between Griffin and the Mountain Ox does not need all the Keystone silliness that gets larded onto it until it feels spliced in from some broader, wackier family film. I suppose the screenwriter had to come up with something, having already disposed of the novel's finale at the bottom of the second act.
McDowall was also just a beautiful actor and I appreciate the film acknowledging it. It's not so obvious in the early scenes where Griffin is so implacably proper that he doesn't crack an eyebrow at the reading of a million-dollar will and his hair appears to have been shellacked even more severely than his face, but following the time-honored shorthand for spiritual loosening-up, by the gold strike at Shirt-Tail Camp he's quite appealingly tousled and cheekbone-smudged and rocking at least one nineteenth-century vest and calico shirt I would probably, personally wear. He never loses the bowler hat and black umbrella of his butler's identity, though increasingly the one is knocked carelessly back and the other is decisively gestured with; more importantly, he never stops sounding like a three-dollar-bill tenderfoot, preposterously scrupulous in grammar and principles, which perhaps accounts for the willingness of his uncultivated audiences to believe the arrant double-speaking coming out of his mouth. Even clip-joint Trimble says admiringly of him, "Why, that shifty little shyster!" It is one of the vestiges of the novel and a gesture toward a more comedically coherent film that Griffin comes by his swaggering sobriquet through a combination of seven-at-one-blow chance and canny marketing—his legendary one-punch knockout of the Mountain Ox involves a glove weighted like a blackjack with gold dust, but before the apologetic Griffin can admit as much to the ring of astounded onlookers, Jack eagerly acclaims him with the heroic epithet of his favorite frontiersman and adds for good measure, "You ought to see him wrestle a grizzly!" After that, without any more legendary action than leaving town that afternoon and returning with the rest of the miners next spring, the myth of Bullwhip Griffin is sealed. It's a witty Chekhov's gun for a hero with a silver tongue and a glass jaw and McDowall gets all the wry sympathy he can out of lines like the manful and for once completely unconvincing, "Fortunately, I once read The Gentleman's Guide to Boxing." On the other hand, he really can cook and he takes a dive off the side of a steamboat like an Olympian. Jack's younger-brotherly hero-worship is not unjustified; neither is the glint in Arabella's eye as far back as the first act, when she fondly recalls her childhood playmate as "the only boy I knew in Boston who ever broke a window deliberately." I can't remember the last time I saw McDowall as a romantic lead, if ever, and I especially enjoy that he's such a realistically slant-rhymed one. I just wish the movie that bears Griffin's name rose more to his level.
It's not a bad movie; it's amiable; it's even clever at times. I could have done without the stereotypical Mexican bandits or the mercifully brief episode of Higgins disguised as a Chinese laborer, but The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin's failures as a Western are based more on narrative longueurs and conceptual fuzziness than on lazily harmful tropes. If I'd managed to see it at summer camp at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club where I was exposed to and occasionally even paid attention to any number of classic or obscure Disney movies—and if I hadn't reacted too violently to the divergences from By the Great Horn Spoon!—I imagine I'd have imprinted on Griffin for all the usual reasons I loved weird, serious, plausibly queer-pinging characters as a child, but I also imagine I would have forgotten entire swathes of the film around him; as an adult I recognize and salute him and indeed he is the reason I've written about it at all. Maybe it should have been more rollicking. Couldn't have hurt if it had a real third act. Now I want to re-read Fleischman. This service brought to you by my gentlemanly backers at Patreon.
The plot is a picaresque, which means things happen and then more things happen and eventually the end credits roll. In 1849 Boston, well-bred siblings Arabella and Jack Flagg (Suzanne Pleshette and Bryan Russell) are left inauspiciously penniless when the last bequest of their self-made grandfather turns out to be a fanciful will, an opinionated portrait, and a mountain of mansion-mortgaging debts. Spirited Arabella takes the news philosophically, more amused than daunted by the prospect of making her way in the world: "Grandpa used to say people are ninety-eight percent water and if you don't stir them up once in a while, they stagnate." Young Jack, however, takes it as an excuse to run off to the gold fields of California, which he has been avidly studying via such trusty eyewitness accounts as The Bullwhip Brannigan Library No. 21, Vol. II: A Son of the Mother Lode, and the efforts to prevent him undertaken by the family's imperturbably resourceful butler Eric Griffin (McDowall) only ensure the accidental stowing away of both butler and boy aboard the Frisco-bound Lady Wilma, their fortunes entwined with floridly faded actor Quentin Bartlett (Richard Haydn), shamelessly sententious confidence man "Judge" Higgins (Karl Malden), and a much-traded map to the coveted "mother lode" itself. A variety of frontier hijinks ensue, in the course of which Jack gets a lesson in the grittier sides of melodrama, Griffin proves his credentials as barber, boxer, miner, cook, and all-round Odysseus-class liar, and Arabella tires of waiting for news of her menfolk and heads west herself, readily finding lucrative employment at the dance hall of genial operator Sam Trimble (Harry Guardino) and his oversized enforcer the Mountain Ox (Mike Mazurki). Fortunes are made and lost and stolen and made again. Eventually, somewhat ahead of schedule, San Francisco burns down.
It is unfair but irresistible to imagine this material adapted by Newbery Award-winner Fleischman himself and directed by his three-time collaborator William Wellman instead of the serviceable Lowell S. Hawley and James Neilson—I understand that the late 1960's were a weird time for Disney in the wake of Walt's death, so I can't tell whether the film had a troubled production or whether it was just awkwardly conceived from the start, but either way it doesn't quite seem to know whether it wants to be a rip-roaring boy's adventure or an undercranked sendup of same. The running narration of Mel Levens and George Bruns' "Ballad of Bullwhip Griffin" gently mocks each scene as it sets it: "A home of quality / Bespeaks of aristocracy / And comfort that is soon to be destroyed." Ward Kimball, credited with "Titles & Things," accompanies the verses with interstitial animations done in the old-timey style of dime-novel woodcuts, herky-jerky as a zoetrope. The very notion of the slight, mannered, primly spoken Griffin as a hero of the rough-and-tumble boomtown West is a fish-out-of-water classic, although it is also as queerly affirming as Way Out West (1930) and the strongest aspect of the film, seconded by the scenery-chewing of Haydn and Malden and the underutilized but effective chemistry between McDowall and Pleshette, which plays rather sweetly like a very specific handful of AO3 tags when not interrupted by a tiny bare-assed cherub tootling its way across the screen to signify that romance has entered the plot. You see the difficulty. The physical comedy oscillates with a similar lack of warning between slapstick and special effects. I imagine it was supposed to contribute to the tall-tale atmosphere, but I found it chronically jarring, especially since McDowall's face needs no assistance maintaining an irreproachable sang-froid through back-to-back stickups or dissolving into rueful nerves having just breezily agreed to a prizefight where the odds are fifty to one in favor of being pounded into a frittata. He's a beautifully physical actor and one of the funniest and sexiest moments in the film is accomplished entirely by Pleshette literally pulling him up by his dropped jaw into an embrace, which clears Griffin's brow for a second of shocked happiness before he remembers their ostensible stations and tries to reassert decorum and Arabella is having none of it and they argue instead of kissing, which doesn't stop him from falling back into his seat like he's been poleaxed the minute she puts a finger to his chest and tells him to "wait right here." These are not people who need a tiny bare-assed cherub, is what I'm trying to say. By the same token, the climactic bare-knuckle rematch between Griffin and the Mountain Ox does not need all the Keystone silliness that gets larded onto it until it feels spliced in from some broader, wackier family film. I suppose the screenwriter had to come up with something, having already disposed of the novel's finale at the bottom of the second act.
McDowall was also just a beautiful actor and I appreciate the film acknowledging it. It's not so obvious in the early scenes where Griffin is so implacably proper that he doesn't crack an eyebrow at the reading of a million-dollar will and his hair appears to have been shellacked even more severely than his face, but following the time-honored shorthand for spiritual loosening-up, by the gold strike at Shirt-Tail Camp he's quite appealingly tousled and cheekbone-smudged and rocking at least one nineteenth-century vest and calico shirt I would probably, personally wear. He never loses the bowler hat and black umbrella of his butler's identity, though increasingly the one is knocked carelessly back and the other is decisively gestured with; more importantly, he never stops sounding like a three-dollar-bill tenderfoot, preposterously scrupulous in grammar and principles, which perhaps accounts for the willingness of his uncultivated audiences to believe the arrant double-speaking coming out of his mouth. Even clip-joint Trimble says admiringly of him, "Why, that shifty little shyster!" It is one of the vestiges of the novel and a gesture toward a more comedically coherent film that Griffin comes by his swaggering sobriquet through a combination of seven-at-one-blow chance and canny marketing—his legendary one-punch knockout of the Mountain Ox involves a glove weighted like a blackjack with gold dust, but before the apologetic Griffin can admit as much to the ring of astounded onlookers, Jack eagerly acclaims him with the heroic epithet of his favorite frontiersman and adds for good measure, "You ought to see him wrestle a grizzly!" After that, without any more legendary action than leaving town that afternoon and returning with the rest of the miners next spring, the myth of Bullwhip Griffin is sealed. It's a witty Chekhov's gun for a hero with a silver tongue and a glass jaw and McDowall gets all the wry sympathy he can out of lines like the manful and for once completely unconvincing, "Fortunately, I once read The Gentleman's Guide to Boxing." On the other hand, he really can cook and he takes a dive off the side of a steamboat like an Olympian. Jack's younger-brotherly hero-worship is not unjustified; neither is the glint in Arabella's eye as far back as the first act, when she fondly recalls her childhood playmate as "the only boy I knew in Boston who ever broke a window deliberately." I can't remember the last time I saw McDowall as a romantic lead, if ever, and I especially enjoy that he's such a realistically slant-rhymed one. I just wish the movie that bears Griffin's name rose more to his level.
It's not a bad movie; it's amiable; it's even clever at times. I could have done without the stereotypical Mexican bandits or the mercifully brief episode of Higgins disguised as a Chinese laborer, but The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin's failures as a Western are based more on narrative longueurs and conceptual fuzziness than on lazily harmful tropes. If I'd managed to see it at summer camp at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club where I was exposed to and occasionally even paid attention to any number of classic or obscure Disney movies—and if I hadn't reacted too violently to the divergences from By the Great Horn Spoon!—I imagine I'd have imprinted on Griffin for all the usual reasons I loved weird, serious, plausibly queer-pinging characters as a child, but I also imagine I would have forgotten entire swathes of the film around him; as an adult I recognize and salute him and indeed he is the reason I've written about it at all. Maybe it should have been more rollicking. Couldn't have hurt if it had a real third act. Now I want to re-read Fleischman. This service brought to you by my gentlemanly backers at Patreon.
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What did you think of it as a child? I had no idea it even existed until it turned up on Disney+ and
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He is eminently lovable.
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Those are the movie's defining characteristics!
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Anyway, I'd like to see a young Roddy MacDowell as a romantic lead in a wild west adventure--it sounds fun.
Eventually, somewhat ahead of schedule, San Francisco burns down. --That just made me laugh.
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Harry Guardino drove me nuts by sounding but not looking familiar until I realized I knew him from the original cast recording of Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle (1964). Other perfectly distinguished character actors such as Hermione Baddeley, Cecil Kellaway, and Liam Redmond exist in the film, but they don't have that much to do.
It's the you-can-never-have-too-much school, but yes you can definitely have too much!
. . . you so can. I would have been fine with the interstitial cartoons if they hadn't bled into the live action. You have to be, like, Frank Tashlin or Louis Malle or Robert Zemeckis to make that work—or even Robert Stevenson. I guess he was directing something else for Disney that year. (The Gnome-Mobile?!)
Anyway, I'd like to see a young Roddy MacDowell as a romantic lead in a wild west adventure--it sounds fun.
He's absolutely delightful!
--That just made me laugh.
I have been informed since making this post that boomtown California actually spent a fair amount of its time on fire, but I continue to side-eye the finale's historicity.
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I can't remember if I read the McBroom books!
The movie sounds delightful and I will have to look for the book.
Enjoy! Both Rob and I have good memories of it.
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I re-read Chancy and the Grand Rascal as recently as 2012 and thought that it held up. Unless a couple of titles are lurking at my parents' currently, equally inaccessible house, all of our Fleischman is in storage right now, alas.
Tangent: a while ago I got some compostable flatware, and quipped on Facebook that it was really quite good, and their slogan should be Buy the Great Corn Spoon!
. . . That might well induce me, personally, to purchase one.
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Agreed. Those are aspirational crows' feet.
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Slightly to my surprise, it appears to exist on DVD, although I am demoralized that an official website cannot apparently spell "rollicking." Otherwise, godspeed your greymarket endeavors. McDowall is lovely throughout.
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Happily, it's rentable on Prime!
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I have difficulty believing that Disney of all megalithic corporate entities cannot afford a spellcheck!
Happily, it's rentable on Prime!
Hooray! Have fun. The cartoony bits are what they are.
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I was very fond of the part where the theme song admitted they'd lost track of Arabella, but were now going to catch up with her.
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That was cute and very well timed.