March 17, 1971
Disney
Children's, Comedy
DVD
B+
This was one of my favorite Disney movies as a kid, but I don't think it's just nostalgia that made me enjoy it so much this time. For one thing, it's really funny, not just the satire of television but even some of the slapstick. (I could've done with less of the "ledge" scene though.) For another, there's actually a consideration of ethics, with Kurt Russell (20 on the day this was released but playing a 21-year-old), as mailboy Steve Post (ha ha, pun), lying and cheating his way to the top of the network, but then realizing that love-- of his girlfriend and of the title character-- and self-respect matter more than money, fame, and success, so the three of them ride off together on a motorcycle, a later '60s version of what the Beach Boys sang of in The Monkey's Uncle: a bride, a groom, a chimpanzee.
Yes, it's another Disney chimp movie, with the simian this time picking programs that will be ratings successes. (One is Laugh-Out. There are lots of little digs at current or at least recent shows.) Raffles is left in the care of Steve's girlfriend, who is played by 20-year-old Heather North, the future Daphne of Scooby-Doo, when her Italian neighbors can't take him on their move to San Francisco. I mention this detail because no one ever points out that maybe the Bernaduccis deserve the million-dollar check for raising the chimp to be a TV critic. The movie is full of holes and implausibilities and WTF moments, but I'm not putting it in the fantasy genre. (It's not like it's a talking chimp.)
Steve, who initially dislikes the chimp, finds out Raffles's talent, and switches him with a look-alike. (Again, you expect some sort of pay-off, like that Steve will sell the Raffles impostor for the big check, but, no, the second chimp disappears from the movie after awhile, his fate unknown.) Steve becomes network vice-president, before Joe Flynn, as Russell's boss Francis X. Wilbanks, and Harry Morgan, as Flynn's boss E. J. Crampton, with the help of Wilbanks's nephew Roger, foil his scheme. Roger is played by 22-year-old John Ritter in his big-screen debut, and he's wonderful. He's cast against type, somehow both nerdy and slimy, but he has a proto-Jack-Tripper moment when he dashes down the hall and leaps over a desk, after figuring out who Post's mysterious roomie is.
The movie has other future and past TV stars, like Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers), who has a larger role here than he did as Wampers in The One and Only...Family Band, this time as the "simple" asthmatic chauffeur for Joe Flynn. Bill Daily, in between I Dream of Jeanie and The Bob Newhart Show, has a not-much-of-a-stretch cameo as a navigator. Dr. Bellows, Hayden Rorke, also shows up.
Alan Hewitt, who was Professor Shattuck in the Merlin Jones movies, plays Farnsworth here. This time Arthur Tovey plays a man at the baseball game, Herb Vigran a fireman. James B. Douglas (later Buddy Didlo, no, that's not a typo, in The Gong Show Movie), Peter Paul Eastman (a newspaperman in The Love God?), George N. Neise (Ben Milford in Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady), and Jeffrey Sayre (a senator in Skidoo) play TV executives. Sponsor Glenn Dixon was a family member in The Love God?
Beulah Bondi (Jimmy Stewart's mother in It's a Wonderful Life) appears in a clip from So Dear to My Heart (1948, I've never seen it). Newscaster Ed Reimers basically plays himself, as he did in Sgt. Deadhead (which also involved a chimp). Bruce Rhodewalt was Clarke in The Perils of Pauline and plays Jason R. Wilbanks. Hank Jones played the town delivery boy in Family Band and is Stan here (the guy who sees the chimp going up and down the mail elevator).
Policeman Peter Renoudet was a Dakota townsman in Family Band and would be a roller derby ticket-taker in The Shaggy D.A. Iris Adrian, who was Mary Lou in Go West and a French soubrette in The Road to Zanzibar, was pushing 60 when she played the irate woman shopper, but she would go on to other Disney films, like Freaky Friday.
I must note that the sort of title song, "He's Gonna Make It" (it says "barefoot" but not "executive"), doesn't have very many lyrics, but what it has manage to be both delightful and embarrassing in the use of '60s slang, with this sentence being the best/worst: "When they start rapping that he's too young/ He makes his mind up/ That he'll wind up/ Number one/ And the whole wide world will know that he's around/ Though other cats get uptight and try to put him down!"
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