Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN (1966)

Film: Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN (1966)
Stars: Dick van Dyke, Nancy Kwan, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Byron Paul
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned last week, Nancy Kwan's career never really hit the heights of The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song again.  That should not, however, be confused with the idea that Kwan never made another big hit...because she did.  In 1966, Walt Disney was essentially about to die (he'd die before the end of the year), but he was making a lot of money not on his animated films, but instead on theme parks and live-action films, frequently that blended in some sort of animation, the most famous being Mary Poppins.  Disney actually if you look at his credits made far more live-action films in his lifetime than fully-animated films (though if you add in the shorts, those numbers quickly revert).  One of the films he created at the end of his life was a modern-day comic retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story starring Dick van Dyke, and you guessed it, Nancy Kwan.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is odd at first.  It starts initially with van Dyke's Robin Crusoe writing a letter to his longtime love Jane, and trying to explain why he missed their wedding.  We then flashback to Robin flying and getting in a plane accident over the middle of the ocean, where the narrator shifts briefly to a manual, which sarcastically mocks the scenarios that van Dyke is getting into, namely a shark trying to eat him while he's on a raft no bigger than a couch cushion.  When he washes ashore, the narration stops (he buries the manual in the sand), and we see him interact with a monkey named Floyd (supposedly one of the chimps sent into space by the NASA program), and then by an island woman named Wednesday (Kwan), who speaks English for, well, the script doesn't really explain that one but it feels like it's there for convenience.  Soon a whole group of island girls are coming to be with Robin (who remains faithful to Jane, though not without temptation), and demand equal rights in whom they marry from Wednesday's father, the chief (Tamiroff).  The film ends with Robin pretending to be an island deity to get rights for the women, only to have Wednesday start hunting him down because he won't marry her, as he's loyal to Jane...after which he's rescued just-in-time.

The movie is, and I cannot stress this enough, stupid.  Dick van Dyke would've been one of the biggest stars in America in 1966 not only due to Mary Poppins but also because of his eponymous television series, but his schtick doesn't really hold for modern audiences.  There's a kind of fun with the sarcastic narration of the manual, and I wish the film had stuck to that motif as it was its most charming asset, but absent that, it's really overlong, charmless, and awfully racist toward the end (not only in the provincial way that Wednesday & the island girls are treated, but also in the casting of the white Tamiroff as the brown-skinned island chief...this may also explain why this film is not on Disney+).

That said, Robin Crusoe was a big hit in 1966, making it onto the list of the year's highest-grossing films and affording Kwan an extension on her stardom.  She's not in a lot of the film, and though she's the best part, that's not saying much.  She is asked to be beautiful and vivacious, which she is, but we aren't given any challenge like she got with Suzie Wong and the movie doesn't have fun with her character like we saw in Flower Drum Song.  As a result, this is a crucial (given the box office) chapter in looking at Kwan's stardom, but it's pretty dispiriting that she had to take these kinds of parts so soon after she'd been getting more authentic roles.  Next week we're going to end our month-long look at Nancy Kwan with a movie that created a lasting friendship between Kwan and another screen legend...a film that got an unexpected chapter in its pop culture shelf life when it become a plot point in a blockbuster Best Picture nominee decades later.