VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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      • And Soon the Darkness
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      • Super Fly
      • Busting
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      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
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    • Blow Up
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    • Hurry Sundown
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      • The Wrong Man
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      • Notorious
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      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
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    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
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    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
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    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
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NEVER A DULL MOMENT
Directed by Jerry Paris
Written by AJ Carothers
Starring Dick Van Dyke and Edgar G. Robinson
Released in 1968
Picture
Even in the days of New Hollywood, somebody had to make movies for little kids and their grandparents. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, that somebody was  Walt Disney Productions. Among the more popular features were Mary Poppins, That Darn Cat!, The Gnome-Mobile, The Jungle Book, The Love Bug and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Think of it as the politics of omission. Not once did Walt expose us to Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, colonialism or air pollution. 
    Disney also quite proudly stole. Take Mary Poppins. Walt Disney did not invent that character. Mary Poppins came from the mind of a woman named P. L Travers in the late 1920s and first appeared in a short story called "Mary Poppins and the Match Man" in 1926.
   Take the animated version of The Jungle Book. That was Rudyard Kipling in 1893 and 1894. The first version of the movie was an independent film released in 1942. Granted, Walt Disney's 1967 animated release remains an absolute classic in movie cartoons and some of the songs were first-rate, but they should have at least given something to Kipling's estate.
   Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella: none of these were born in the mind of the mustacheo'd wunderkind. Yet I can guarantee that when you think of these  movies, you attach the Walt Disney name to them. I can claim that because Walt Disney Productions made sure of it. Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney's Pinocchio, Disney's Cinderella. Pinocchio, whose name was roughly Italian for "pine seed," was written by Carlo Collodi in 1883. In the original story, Pinocchio kills The Talking (Jiminy) Cricket with a hammer and was himself eventually hanged and left for dead. The story was quite good enough for the children of the late nineteenth century, but the era of Walt's great discoveries required literary anesthesia. The original Snow White, based on the life of a woman who may very well have existed, was written by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 and the Wicked Queen was actually a vain stepmother. And the original Cinderella traces back to 7 B.C. when a Greek geographer named Strabo wrote a tale about a slave girl who marries the King of Egypt. 
   When Disney and Company tried to come up with something on their own--something post-Mickey Mouse--they usually delivered something more suitable to the waste management industry. One case in point: Never a Dull Moment. 
   Dick van Dyke plays the lead as a little-known actor who looks like a gangster and who gets involved in stupid crimes because Edward G. Robinson orders him to do so. The basis of the plot is that Van Dyke tries to get out of the mess before he either gets killed or arrested.
   It should be admitted that of all the live action actors employed by Disney, Dick displayed the most talent, with Julie Andrews coming in a close second. And director Jerry Paris (who had worked with Van Dyke on the latter's TV show) did have a true gift for capturing comedic subtleties. But everybody here simply works too hard at their jobs and the enterprise becomes tedious within the first five minutes and never recovers. 
   Social relevance need not appear in a given movie. But at a time when even the major studios had reluctantly acknowledged that the  kids who attended their movies might get killed in a pointless war in a few years, it would not have been asking much for Disney to have at least made mention of Vietnam (even allegorically) in one of his hundreds of pictures. 
   
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links