Follow Me, Boys! (1966) You can think of this as an end-of-an-era cinema landmark......the last film personally supervised and produced by Walt Disney before his death during the year of the film's release.....
In its dramatic structure, it's probably one the most ambitious of Disney movies, a story stretching from post World War I through the 1950's, steeped in sanitized, Disney theme park Americana nostalgia.
We follow the life and times of Lemuel Siddons, played, of course, by the studio's Father Figure Of Choice, Fred MacMurray. Lem, a Great War veteran and travelling band musician, ditches his band bus while it's briefly stopped in a small rural town......he seizes the opportunity to settle into a permanent home and join the town's everybody-knows-everybody community life.
And so he does, using his gentle nature and eternal optimism to romance and woo the town's bank teller (Vera Miles) and borrow her idea of starting an official Boy Scout Troup.......a dedicated calling that will consume Lem for a lifetime and endear him to the entire town and generations of its young boys.
If all of what I just described sounds overly shmaltzy and cornball to you.......prepare yourself.
At a leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world 131 minutes, "Follow Me, Boys!" envelops you in Uncle Walt's never-neverland of Small Town America, U.S.A. But surprisingly, for such an epic length saga, the film make no great attempts to evoke its era.....visually, it looks shot on cheap backlot sets left over from one of Disney's TV shows.....(just compare it, if you will, to Warner Brother's beautifully designed River City, Iowa of its 1962 "The Music Man")
MacMurray and his Scouts march on, encountering all the expected life lessons of teamwork, leadership and self reliance.....and because they're Disney Scouts, they're outfitted with their very own catchy marching tune by the studio's legendary songsmiths the Sherman brothers. For heartfelt drama, there's the subplot of MacMurray bonding with the town's stubborn, delinquent loner (Kurt Russell) who's really a good brave kid but saddened and embittered from caring for his alcoholic father (Sean McClory).
At this point, let me admit and reveal that I grew up on Disney movies, which probably rendered me more overly tolerant of the film's pokey, episodic pace. (What can I say? That's just the way the films were made....) But honestly, even as a Disney-phile, I did wish for a slimmed-down version of the silly sequence involving MacMurray and his Scouts stumbling across an Army war games operation. (Interesting side-note for further discussion: the film's depiction of the wargames soldiers and officers as mostly blustering boobs. .....
And on and on the film goes, so determined to wallow in its well worn cliches and 1950's filmmaking techniques that it invited derision and mockery from even old-fashioned conservative film critics like the New York Times Bosley Crowther. But certainly Uncle Walt achieved what he wanted for the last film that would truly deserve the possessive credit "Walt Disney's" above its title.......a dreamy, comforting vision of an America that existed only in his imagination......and in the "Main Street USA section of his theme parks.....
A genuine time capsule for all fans of vintage Disney.....(and a chance to see a young Kurt Russell - at age 15, already bursting with long-lasting charismatic talent ) If you're willing to surrender yourself to all its long-long-ago charms, you might even give it the same 3 stars (***) that BQ's awarding....
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