 |
 Jack Crandall is a helicopter pilot that works for a radio station doing
traffic reports, but his show is "caught in a bad-ratings tailspin..." Then a
St. Bernard hides out in his copter and the ratings for Jack's traffic reports
go way up. The dog is a kleptomaniac though and accidentally steals a necklace
from some jewel thieves. "Join the fun in a hilarious adventure that'll have
the whole family dizzy with laughter!" 1969, 88 minutes, VHS
This is a deservedly-obscure Disney flick from 1969 that features a bunch of
has-beens embarrassing their families in a movie about a dog that steals stuff
(hence the title). Most of the movie you'll spend wondering just what went
wrong in each of these people's lives so that they ended up being outclassed by
a St. Bernard (I suppose one could ask Charles Grodin about that, too.).
You've got Elsa Lanchester who plays the nosy landlady that doesn't like dogs.
Thirty some odd years prior to this, she was the Bride in Bride Of Frankenstein. You've got Dwayne Hickman who is best remembered as Dobie Gillis and the
younger brother of Daryl Hickman (who had roles in films such as Leave Her To Heaven and The Grapes Of Wraith, but I'm sure playing opposite Gene Tierney and Henry Fonda is pretty much the
same as acting with a slobbering dog). There's Mary Ann Mobley, who was Miss
America once upon a time and is apparently married to Gary Collins (maybe this
movie wasn't that embarrassing for everyone). Robert Stevenson directed this, though years
before he was making movies like Jane Eyre with Orson Wells and Joan Fontaine. Stevenson would make a career out of
these Disney flicks, churning some of the most famous ones of this period,
including The Gnome-Mobile, Bedknobs And Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, and The Love Bug. Shoot, working with gnomes and talking cars was probably easier than dealing
with Wells. There's even a guy in this movie that was in McHale's Navy! Are you salivating yet? I'm not real sure what possessed Disney to give this
TV movie a video release, but I needed to fill a minimum order requirement to
get some coupon from someplace on the internet and they were trying to move
this one for about a $1.90, so here we are.  The first thing you notice when the feature begins is this astoundingly
un-catchy theme song that goes on and on and on, describing what a thief this
dog Barabbas was. I think it's great that Disney sometimes used the theme song
to further the plots along in these films, and I'm sure all of us find
ourselves humming the snappy theme from Kurt Russell's The Barefoot Executive (go ahead - you know the words "...and his little bitty barefoot friend!"),
but I couldn't make out half the lyrics to this one, because you had some guys
trying to do some bad Beach Boys harmony stuff while some woman's high pitched
voice caterwauled, apparently indifferent to whatever the guys were trying to
accomplish. I do remember part of the lyrics were something like "that dog is
a doggone thief" or something similarly expected and/or hideous. To their
credit, they did manage to set up the fact that this dog is a kleptomaniac,
because they had a montage of him stealing lunches, golf balls, gloves and
ladies' undergarments (okay, I made that last one up, but you know that's what
the dog was really after) while all the townspeople rose up against this
evil dog and finally forced the owner to ship his thieving ass back to the
pound. Now, this dog's name is Barabbas and to show you how warped I am, I
spent a good portion of the movie trying to determine just why in tarnation
someone would name a dog after a crabby gladiator played by Anthony Quinn.
Then one of the characters explained to me that he was named after the thief in
the Bible (which is the same Barabbas I was thinking of, but I had forgotten
about his job prior to being saved by Jesus). What was really annoying was
that I think it was Miss America who had to explain this to me. I'll give her
a 9.6 for her knowledge of Bible trivia. En route to the dog pound, Barabbas runs his big jailbreak play and bolts for
the airfield just outside of town. Meanwhile, a mild mannered traffic reporter
named Jack Crandall is going about the business of boring his listeners with
his vanilla take on all the car-jackings going on all over the freeways of
southern California and his station manager decides to fire him. In the middle
of his report however, Jack notices this big St. Bernard hitching a ride and
foam-mouthed hilarity ensues! Watch as Barabbas tries to crash the helicopter!
Squeal with delight as Barabbas sneaks a donut from Jack's lunch! Piss your
pants with laughter as Barabbas tries to choke out Jack with the microphone
cord! As you might have guessed, Jack and Barabbas become instant celebrities
and in spite of his initial dislike for Barabbas (This is one of those
mismatched buddy movies at heart, so its mandatory that the stuffy Jack's
sphincter is all puckered up over having to work with a big dog. Just once,
I'd like to see the big dog be the uptight one.). The station manager tells
Jack that he and Barabbas are partners, so Jack goes to the pound and grudgingly
adopts Barabbas, but not before being informed that Barabbas has been adopted
and returned eight times before. Well no wonder he's always giving himself the
five-fingered discount! Here's a guy that doesn't know the security of a
loving home and is trying to get someone to pay attention to him. Someone who
won't just run off and dump his shaggy butt at the pound whenever there's a bump
in the road. This dog is obviously going to have some self-esteem and
intimacy problems. Now, just adopting a delinquent dog isn't the only problem
that Jack faces. No siree! See, he happens to live in an apartment building
where dogs are strictly prohibited because the old landlady's cat is allergic to
them. You know what this means, don't you? A really huge box that gets put
over top of Barabbas as Jack attempts to smuggle him in like a pack of cancer
sticks into the county jail! So with Barabbas in this box and riding the
elevator up
with the landlady and Jack's new neighbor, Miss America, the dog starts whining
and stuff and Jack has to play it off like he was yawning. This is just about
as close as you're going to get for actual yuks in this one. You're not going
to actually laugh, but if there was a moment in the movie where you
theoretically might have thought about laughing, this one would probably be
that time. But it really isn't funny.  Barabbas causes problems between Miss America and Jack, when he unravels one of
her sweaters (Dang it dog! You've got to do that while she's wearing the dang
thing!) and she thinks he's a big poopy-head for doing it. If blowing his shot
with Miss America wasn't bad enough, during one of their traffic reports,
Barabbas lets on that he needs to take a whiz. So Jack sets the copter down in
the boondocks and Barabbas runs off to do his bidness. What Barabbas and Jack
don't know is that we've gone ahead and inserted the bumbling jewel thieves
that everyone in the audience knew had to be in a movie like this. These dopes
have stolen the much-vaunted Cosgrove necklace and are en route to their leader
to turn it over to him. Suddenly a tire blows out and they end up right smack
dab where Barabbas was going to drain the lizard! The necklace is in a lunch
pail and for some reason it's outside the car or something and Barabbas
snatches it and hightails it into the weeds. He returns to the copter and Jack
and he take off, with Jack none the wiser as to Barabbas' latest felony
theft. The thieves are understandably irked and are determined to get the
necklace back and trail Jack back to his apartment. This is about the time
that Barabbas decides it's high time to knock back a few and gets himself into
Miss America's chilled champagne (huh?) and just gets trashed! Miss America
and Jack finally start to like each other when she figures out that Barabbas is
the psycho stalker that is getting into all her stuff, so they go off to the
park to sober up Barabbas. The bad guys follow and get ahold of Barabbas
unbeknownst to Jack, but Barabbas leads them around the park, running them into
jungle gyms and teeter-totters, though this isn't as funny as you would have
hoped (funny would have been one of the guys getting whacked in the nuts with
the see-saw, not the face). Barabbas escapes, but is later lured away from the
local A&W at dinner time by some sexy St. Bernard the jewel thieves have
hired. The standard kidnap and ransom demand follow and Jack is lured to some out of
the way place where he gets held at gunpoint and is made to fly the copter to
where Barabbas last had the lunchpail. Along the way, he manages to alert his
station to his trouble and at first they don't believe him until the police
tell them there really is a Cosgrove necklace that was stolen. Barabbas is
waiting for them with one of the other bad guys and he's given ten minutes to
find the necklace. He finds it, there's some really minor chase and everyone
ends up getting what they deserve (especially those of us who paid less than
two dollars for this). This is pretty shoddy, even by late sixties live-action
Disney standards. That should be obvious from the odd collection of ex-movie
stars, child actors, and beauty queens, but it's all run through the bland
Disney machine so that there isn't even anything remotely campy or kitschy
about it. It's exactly what it purports to be: a dumb story about a
kleptomaniac dog getting mixed up with jewel thieves. Hickman isn't
particularly memorable like say a Dean Jones or even a Tommy Kirk. He stands
around looking a bit constipated most of the time and is forced to make dog
noises once in awhile to cover up for Barabbas (though I think it's obvious
those dog noises are dubbed in, so he's really just pretending to make dog
noises. Does that make it better or worse?). Miss America doesn't really
distinguish herself one way or the other, neither being particularly awful and
certainly not being particularly good. She's a pretty mild looker that fills
the bill of the girlfriend and she can't really be called a "befuddled
girlfriend" like in a lot of these movies, because once she meets Barabbas she
just goes along for the ride, with nary a complaint (we call that the "perfect
girlfriend"). It goes without saying that the strongest performance is given
by Barabbas and he's got that hang-dog face down pat whenever the story
necessitates it. He's clearly the smartest and most talented performer in the
film and you just wish that he could have been given better material and a
stronger supporting cast. It would have really cool if he could have talked or
if we could hear what he's thinking ("I wish Dwayne Hickman's brother was in
this" and "I've got more personality than Gary Collins" come immediately to
mind). There's nothing surprising about this one and it's merely a
particularly anemic version of the "whacky animal and stupid
criminal" movies the
Disney company seemed to have a fetish for during this time period.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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