The Shaggy Dog (1959)

Film: The Shaggy Dog (1959)

Stars: Tommy Kirk, Fred MacMurray, Jean Hagen, Annette Funicello, Tim Considine, Cecil Kellaway

Director: Charles Barton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Annette Funicello joins Shirley Temple as the only two actresses this season that really became famous as children, and that's where they started their reign as "America's Sweetheart."  In Funicello's case, though, she began not in the movies like Temple did but in television.  Funicello was the star of the original Mickey Mouse Club TV series on ABC during the 1950's, but unlike the 1990's remake (which would feature future superstars Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, & Britney Spears), the only one of the stars of the original that would truly break out into superstardom was Funicello, who proved to be the most popular actor in the cast from the start.  Hand-selected by Walt Disney for the show, she quickly turned around her fame with The Mickey Mouse Club into starring roles in both the Disney TV series Zorro and then her feature film debut with the studio, today's film The Shaggy Dog.

(Spoilers Ahead) Even by the standards of a Disney live-action movie, this is a bizarre plot, but I'll give it a shot.  Wilby Daniels (Kirk) is an ordinary teenage boy, one who pals around with his buddy Buzz (Considine) and lusts after girls, namely Buzz's on-again-off-again girlfriend Allison (Funicello) and the new neighbor Francesca (Roberta Shore).  When he's visiting Francesca's father's house, he comes across a man named Professor Plumcott (Kellaway), and accidentally takes a ring from him that has magical powers, namely that it will turn him into Francesca's sheepdog Chiffon.  Adventures ensue, as Wilby transforms (with little control) between both himself and Chiffon, including when he and Buzz are attempting to take both girls to the Prom at the same time, but it's a Russian spy ring that's uncovered by Wilby that takes over the wackiest final third of the film.  With the aid of his dog-hating father Mr. Daniels (MacMurray), he stops the spies, but Buzz & Wilby end up getting neither girl, as Francesca moves back to Paris and Allison realizes that she can do better.

You'll notice that I barely mentioned Fred MacMurray in that plot, which is weird because MacMurray is the most famous name in this cast and would've been in 1959 as well.  Walt Disney had a history of making a lot of live-action films in the 1950's & 60's, and the studio would continue to do this after his death well into the 1970's.  This was because at a time when the studio's costly animated features struggled at the box office (it's hard to believe now, but in their initial run, now-beloved classics like Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty were flops for the studio), the live-action movies were gigantic hits.  The Shaggy Dog was the studio's most successful feature of the decade (more than even Cinderella), and because of this movie's success, three stars who would feature prominently in a lot of those pictures were Kirk, MacMurray, & Funicello.

Annette, though, doesn't have a lot to do in this movie (and while he's in a lot of it, MacMurray doesn't get much to "do" in it either).  She's basically just sitting around waiting for one of the boys to call (this was apparently a recurring motif for her until she broke out in non-Disney films a few years later).  Maybe that's for the best as The Shaggy Dog isn't very good.  The plot makes no sense, and it's really more silly than funny (when you need it to be both).  Kirk is charming as the lead (you get why he became a star in films like this), but MacMurray and his onscreen wife Jean Hagen are a snooze.  Given both of them have roots in film noir, and we're watching a movie about a plot to foil Russian spies, you kind of wish they'd ditch the dog and just make this into a gritty thriller.

OVP: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

Film: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

Stars: Fred MacMurray, Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Fred Stone, Beulah Bondi

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"A Melody from the Sky")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Sylvia Sidney-click here to learn more about Ms. Sidney (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I've mentioned a few times in this series, Sylvia Sidney's time as a major player in Hollywood was quite short, even if her career lasted many decades.  So we are now entering the third of our three 1936 films starring Sidney during the peak of her career (our last one will be in 1937), and the only one of the films this month we'll watch that was filmed in color, Technicolor in fact (the process had just started to happen in feature-length films less than a year before the movie's release with 1935's Becky Sharp).  Trail of the Lonesome Pine was a hit, and a big deal for Sidney, but despite three big name stars, I have to admit that this movie has a sentimental place for me because it was the favorite film of my grandfather.  A man who was not short on opinions, but rarely talked about the movies he liked (though he did go to the movies every year on his anniversary), this was the first movie he remembered seeing as a teenager, and oh how he would wax on about The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.  So while I was thinking of Ms. Sidney, my first thought for this movie kept being "this is the movie I would hear about so much in my childhood" & am excited to finally put a film with a name.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a love triangle between June (Sidney), her cousin Dave (Fonda), and Jack Hale (MacMurray).  June & Dave live in the backwoods of Kentucky, where their family the Tollivers have a longstanding feud with the Falins, but are content with the way things are.  When Jack comes into town, he offers both the Falins & the Tollivers enormous sums of money to mine their land, but in the process June begins to fall for Jack.  Dave, in his anger, attacks a Falin, and this sets off the feud between the two, which culminates in two Tolliver deaths: June's younger brother Buddie (played by Our Gang regular Spanky McFarland), and then eventually Dave, who is shot in the back & afterward ends the feud.  Some synopses of the movie indicate that Jack & June then engaged, but either I have a scene missing on my DVD or I totally missed a plot point (or, more likely, people who have read the book interpreted the ending was the same as the novel even though the movie has more ambiguity), as while it's obvious that's what is likely going to happen, the movie ends rather somberly with Dave's death.

The picture itself is sluggish & a bit saccharine (with due respect to my grandpa, he tended to like saccharine films/television-he was not an "edgy" man by any stretch-and so I get why he enjoyed the movie).  It's beautiful, of course.  The color cinematography, though in its infancy (it doesn't really utilize it to its full effects with rather drab costuming), is glorious, particularly the shots of the old mill, but that doesn't make up for a so-so storyline, and under-performances from MacMurray & Fonda, both of whom I generally like.  Sidney, our star of the month, once again doesn't necessarily give us a great performance, but she firmly establishes she has star presence.  Her gigantic eyes & kewpie doll face are magnetic, and I kept rooting for her throughout.

The film won one Oscar nomination, but it was weirdly not for Cinematography (they didn't give nominations to color films then, and a different movie won the special prize), but for Best Original Song.  The movie has two original songs, and for some reason the Academy went with the one that has almost no bearing on the film itself, "A Melody from the Sky," sung briefly about halfway through the film by a side character with no real connection to the movie.  Meanwhile, "Twilight on the Trail" is a much catchier number that shows up repeatedly through the film, including at both the funeral scenes, and would go on to be a huge hit.  I...don't have an explanation here-"Twilight on the Trail" is the better number, better-used, & is far more famous today, and yet they went with the other song.  It's proof that the Music Branch has always done its own thing.

OVP: The Swarm (1978)

Film: The Swarm (1978)
Stars: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda
Director: Irwin Allen
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Typing up the call sheet for The Swarm, you're right initially to be perplexed by this film's reputation.  There are, in fact, seven Oscar winners in The Swarm, seven, making it one of the most decorated casts in the history of Hollywood (seriously-aside from stunt films like The Player or Around the World in 80 Days, you only really have the late-stage Marvel movies like Avengers: Endgame that can come close to a movie like The Swarm).  So seven winners, and that doesn't even count the nominated Katharine Ross & Richard Widmark and screen legend Fred MacMurray in his final role.  So, why exactly is it that The Swarm is considered by so many people to be one of the worst movies ever made?  And how exactly did it get nominated for an Oscar?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of killer African bees invading Texas.  That's the plot in one sentence, but if you want an expanded one, while the killer bees are invading Texas, initially focusing on one small town and then moving on to Houston, we have two men Dr. Bradford Crane (Caine), assisted by Dr. Walter Krim (Fonda), in a turf battle with a military commander General Slater (Widmark).  Dr. Helena Anderson (Ross) is also there, but naturally becomes nothing more than the romantic interest for Crane, and then we frequently cut to the town, which is focused on a senior citizen love triangle (between de Havilland, MacMurray, & Johnson), and Rita (Duke), who is having a baby.  Almost every one of these characters ends up dying, but in the end Crane (with his new girlfriend by his side) burns all of the bees in the Gulf of Mexico by using their mating call against them.

If you can't tell, this movie is kind of hilariously bad.  The plot is absurd, even in an era where murder hornets feel like they're about to add a true level of ridiculous onto 2020.  Forgetting for a second the sexist treatment of Ross' character, the loopholes and twists in the movie are bizarrely unsatisfying.  The movie has no sense of how a plot is supposed to work, and frequently introduces tension that would normally trigger to an audience "okay, this is something I should be emotionally invested in" without any sort of resolution.

Take, for example, the skepticism of Caine's character coming out of nowhere at the beginning of the picture.  Widmark is suspicious of him, and the ominous Jerry Goldsmith score agrees, but not only does he end being the good guy, we never have a moment where there is a bad guy-it just sort of skates into "we're all in this together" mode without any sort of friction between Caine & Widmark that doesn't last longer than three lines.  De Havilland's character is met with a love triangle, but unlike any other movie, all three characters die before she chooses or even tips her hat to which man she might marry.  And Patty Duke's pregnant mother just sort of shows up, has a baby, and then is never heard from again-what was the point of this character?!?

The movie won one Oscar nomination, and it's not, as you might expect, Visual Effects, but instead Costume Design.  I just don't get why.  The only costumes of any note in this movie are the hazmat suits that seem to be crossed with a beekeeper costume, but there's nothing special about this, and the action happens all in one day, to the point where most characters are wearing maybe 2-3 costumes at most (de Havilland probably has the most costume changes at I think three).  I don't have a problem with Oscar going subtle, but there is almost no precedent for a costuming choice this mundane getting an Oscar nomination, and there were certainly other options that would have been showier (California Suite, The Brink's Job, The Boys from Brazil, The Deer Hunter) and were in films that were Oscar-nominated already.  That The Swarm got in instead is kind of hilarious, but just another confusing aspect to this movie's tale.

OVP: Kisses for My President (1964)

Film: Kisses for My President (1964)
Stars: Fred MacMurray, Polly Bergen, Eli Wallach, Arlene Dahl
Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars (if I could go lower I would-this is the worst kind of movie)

In 1964, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine did something no woman had ever done before: she had her name put into nomination by a major political party's convention.  She wouldn't win, of course, but it was an incredible step forward for women in a time when few women held political office.  Sen. Smith had served in office since 1949, was the first woman to serve in both the House and the Senate, and as a fifteen year veteran of the upper chamber, would have been considered a serious contender regardless of her gender.  In fact, Smith was once considered for the vice presidential nomination in 1952 by General Eisenhower, and though she had a solid quip when asked in 1952 what she'd do if she ever woke up in the White House (she said, "I'd go to Mrs. Truman and apologize...then I'd go home"), she made it so that it wasn't a laughing matter for a woman to be considered for the highest office in the United States.

Fifty years after Sen. Smith's nomination, we still don't have a female president, but the concept is hardly alien to the United States.  Dozens of states have had female senators and governors, and it's not a matter of if but when the country will elect a female president.  Still, I can't help but feel, while I was watching the Fred MacMurray comedy Kisses for My President that some of the attitudes of the film still exist and how the film, which I found offensive, patronizing, and vomit-inducing, probably wouldn't make me want to throw my TV out the window so much if it didn't still have a nugget of truth regarding people's attitudes toward women in high office.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about the first female president, Leslie McCloud (Bergen) who was recently elected to the White House in large part due to the overwhelming support of the entire female populace, but it's more about her husband Thad (MacMurray) and his ability to cope with his wife being the most powerful person on earth.  The film follows Leslie as she must deal with a series of crises, including giving foreign aid to a dictator (Wallach) while balancing her husband's insecurities and occasionally wandering eye, as well as her children's well-being.  At the end of the film, it is not she but her husband who saves the day, and she ends up being pregnant and resigning the presidency to take care of her family.  The last line of the film, in fact, is a crack by her husband about the superiority of his gender since it took 40 million women to get her into the White House and only one man to get her out.

The entire film is, of course, incredibly dated, and I'm aware that the film was made in 1964 and attitudes have shifted greatly, but let's not pretend that the concept of a female president wasn't real (there's a reason I brought out the anecdote about Sen. Smith).  Women would continue to grow in stature and in 1972 three female House members (Bella Abzug, Patsy Mink, and Shirley Chisholm) would go on to run for the Democratic nomination.  The idea that a woman wouldn't be able to handle the presidency is pretty much on-display this entire film, and I found it appalling.  It's quite clear that the director only thinks of Polly Bergen's Leslie as a prop, someone that could play the part of the president but who couldn't actually do it.  The idea that a man would resign the presidency would be unthinkable in a movie of this era, much less to take care of his wife and children.  You also see that in the idiocy that Thad would continually be bothered by his wife's success-he would have been able to tell early on that she was going to win, and it's foolishness to think they wouldn't have discussed his role before the inauguration.  It's also foolishness to think that someone just "randomly" becomes president like it seems Leslie did, and if so, she wouldn't just resign it at the drop of a hat.  It takes hard work and determination to reach that high of an office, and the film is downright offensive in the way it treats its title character, and Fred MacMurray has never been more unlikable.  Arlene Dahl and Eli Wallach are both laughably bad in their supporting roles; honestly, the only person remotely resembling passable acting is Polly Bergen, and she gets nothing but grenades of awful chucked at her by the screenwriters.

The film earned one Oscar nomination, and I'm sad to say (considering the quality of the film) that the costume designs are pretty good.  The film is all modern clothing (there's no period aspects to this), but the clothing worn by Bergen is chic and elegant-a combination of Wallis Simpson and Jackie Kennedy-it looks like something Peggy Olson would have worn on Mad Men if she'd had the budget to buy Chanel.  Dahl's wardrobe is deliciously trampy, overtly feminine but with a hint of the gaudy.  I truly hope that The Night of the Iguana or Edith Head's A House is Not a Home manages to be something special, as I would hate to give the OVP title of Oscar-winning to such garbage.

Have you seen this film?  Are you just as appalled as I am by the plot and characters (and especially that corny ending)?  Do you feel that these stigmas still exist about women running for higher office?  And where do Howard Shoup's designs fall in your opinion in regard to the Best Costume category?  Share in the comments!