Allow us to explain.......the best thumbnail description of this movie we remember hearing..."rogue Disney." Taken from William Faulkner's coming-of-age novel and dripping with turn-of-the-century Southern Fried nostalgia, "The Reivers" (an archaic term for 'thieves') trafficked in the same golden, sunlit Americana as any of Uncle Walt's Main Street USA movies......
But the film, to its credit and its ultimate box office doom, uncompromisingly included whores, whoring and vicious racial bigotry as key elements in its storyline.....
It may have been the first family film deliberately pitched to families with older kids only and not meant for an outing with the toddlers in tow. And in 1969, that demographic had yet to be cultivated by any studio........(and wouldn't attain its full flowering until the Eisner-Katzenberg reign of Disney ushered in the modernized, PG-13 family film....)
Adding to "The Reivers" woes.......audiences wouldn't swallow Steve McQueen, firmly established as the King Of Cool in the previous year's "Bullit", as essentially a character actor playing a charming 1905 Mississippi rascal named Boon Hogganbeck.
A damn shame......because from the first minute on, the movie proudly wears its huge heart on its sleeve, kicking off with a Burgess Meredith narration as comforting at thick pancake syrup and an achingly gorgeous John Williams score. (Hearing this music probably led then 23 year old Steven Spielberg to want Williams as his lifelong collaborator.)
Handyman Boon, his black co-rascal Ned McCaslin (Rupert Crosse) and 11 year old Lucius (a Tom Sawyer-ish Mitch Vogel) take off for an adventurous joyride in one of those spiffy, new-fangled automobiles.......a bright yellow 'Winton Flyer' that happens to be the brand new pride and joy of Lucius's stern grandfather, known to one and all as 'Boss' (Will Geer, doing a warm-up to his Grandpa Walton TV role) We should point out here that Cross's character is actually a distant relative of Lucius's family, tracing his lineage back to one of the McCaslin plantation's house slaves.....
Off this unlikely trio goes, to Memphis and a sumptuous whorehouse where Boon carries on a semi-romantic relationship with angelic, heart-of-gold prostitute Corrie (Sharon Farrell)
Comic complications ensue when Ned foolishly trades the Winton Flyer for an unreliable race horse, leading to the more than expected rousing sequence where our boys have to win back the car by winning a horse race......
But not before the movie bluntly reminds you this all came from a Faulkner novel......with the arrival of the menacing, racist bully Sheriff Butch Lovemaiden. (played, naturally, inevitably by Clifton James, the all time specialist in such roles. A few years later, James would turn this signature part into a complete cartoon, chasing after Roger Moore in the Bond films)
As steeped in familial emotion as his film is, director Mark Rydell doesn't beg for an audience's affection,,,,,,,,on its way to an all-ends-well finale, the film throws in a disturbing plot development, albeit offscreen, involving McQueen's brutal mistreatment of the too good to be true Farrell, one that 48 years later, still wouldn't sit well along side today's current events. (We're guessing that if the film had been made under the Disney Touchstone banner, this bit would have promptly landed in the deleted scene pile.)
"The Reivers", however, stands its ground, its blatant sentimental whimsy sometimes sharpened with the cruelties of its Old South setting. The film's pleasures are many.........that marvelous Williams score,
a supporting cast of virtually every single country-fied character actor working in films at the time......and a concluding moment between Lucius and his grandfather that we defy anyone to watch with a dry eye
A neglected oddity in 1969, but the BQ's had a soft spot in our hearts for it ever since. And in today's churning cinematic mess of superheroes and self-absorbed mumblecore, we doubt we'll see anything like it in the near future. 4 good ole stars (****).....y'all give it a try, ya hear?
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