Those Calloways (1965)

Film: Those Calloways (1965)

Stars: Brian Keith, Vera Miles, Brandon deWilde, Walter Brennan, Ed Wynn, Linda Evans

Director: Norman Tokar

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Walter Brennan's career is pretty vast & as a result we're going to skip some chapters in it in part because I've seen them (look at something like the western classic Rio Bravo, which we examined last month for Ward Bond), but between 1947 (where we left off last week) and 1965, Brennan's career continued to thrive.  One of the most successful character actors of the Classical Hollywood era (which he'd live long enough to see the beginning & end of), he spent much of the 1950's working in westerns, playing opposite big stars like Jimmy Stewart & Spencer Tracy.  In 1957, though, Brennan (who had been courted for a while to consider television) finally relented to the small screen despite not really needing to (he was working regularly in movies), and took on the leading role of Grandpa Amos McCoy in The Real McCoys.  Though Brennan had occasionally gotten top billing in B-Movies, this was his first really big hit where he got to be the headliner.  The Real McCoys would be one of the most successful television shows of its era, being in the Top 15 highest-rated programs for most of its run.  But Brennan would continue working during & even after The Real McCoys, making today's film Those Calloways for Disney two years after The Real McCoys went off the air.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the Calloways, including father Cam (Keith), mother Liddy (Miles), and their son Bucky (deWilde) who live in the middle of backwoods Vermont in the 1920's, and are considered unusual by the townspeople.  They live with a crow and a black bear cub as pets, and Cam is obsessed with the geese that fly by each year, who are friendly with the American Indian tribe the MicMac's, whom Cam is friends with and is seen as an "honorary" member of their tribe (yes, this is one of the Disney+ movies with a warning label, though as far as western treatment of American Indians, Disney committed far greater sins in other movies).  A traveling salesman, though, sees the potential for the geese to become a hunting tourism destination, and despite the protestations of both the Calloways, as well as some of their friends, particularly Alf Simes (Brennan) and Ed Parker (Wynn), much of the town is onboard with the hunting destination to bring in new revenue...until a gun accident causes Cam to nearly die defending the geese.  After this, they decide to preserve the geese marshland & help the Calloways in their conservationist efforts.

The movie has a lot more story than just that, for the record, but much of it is superfluous.  I generally like this type of Disney movie, even when I don't like it if that makes sense.  Everything is relatively low stakes (unless you're an animal, then good luck, as this has a dog nearly killed by a wolverine), and it's very of-the-moment.  This type of Disney film would barely exist before the 1960's and would become totally out-of-fashion by the late 1970's, becoming pretty much a byproduct of the Disney anthology series (currently called The Wonderful World of Disney) which would see its heyday during this time frame since it was hosted by Walt Disney himself.  The films are fun, and have a loveliness that feels like it's trading on memories of your childhood even when you don't know the movie by heart...it works.

But it's not a good movie, and honestly would've made a better miniseries as there's too much story here, and much of it is shortchanged.  Vera Miles' character is always fussing about, and there are moments where she cries that feel totally unearned.  We see way too little of Brandon deWilde, in pure heartthrob mode (I pity the poor young gay men that watched this movie and got lost in his blond good looks while having to pretend to be enamored with a young Linda Evans), as his romance gets shortchanged.  The best parts of the movie are Brennan & Wynn, in the twilight of their impressive careers, trading jokes & playing on their screen personas without adding much to the actual film.

Brennan's TV career brought about some unusual success for him.  He became, inexplicably, a Billboard artist in 1962 with the release of the song "Old Rivers," which peaked at #5 on the charts, and was followed by a second hit "Mama Sang a Song" later that year (at the age of 67, Brennan was at the time the oldest person ever to chart on the Billboards, and even today where pop acts tour forever the idea of someone eligible for Social Security competing against Dua Lipa & L'il Nas X on the charts is unthinkable).  Brennan would continue working throughout the rest of his life, working on a couple of Disney projects before dying of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.  Next month, we're going to switch away from character actors to a woman who definitely headlined movies throughout the 1940's, including one masterpiece of the era, but who would become synonymous (for the good and the bad) with her hit 1950's television series that set the standard for Eisenhower Era domesticity.