An Angel in My Pocket

An Angel in My Pocket

There is no scarcity of family films, just a dearth of family audiences. This sentiment was expressed by Jack Valenti, the head of Motion Picture Association of America, who delivered this speech recently. Certainly “An Angel in My Pocket” should have pleased his heart; it’s a very good movie for all the family. I saw it downtown at one of those neighborhood theaters where everybody was clearly having a great time especially the kids.

And that’s because this movie has everything that kids like: ghosts in a cemetery; a funny car; explosions and fires; parades; Andy Griffiths; dogs; rabbits and cats and other kids to chase them around with spiked punch, and villains with arms raised over their heads saying things like, “Nyahhh!” And at the same time it is also a well-made movie in the old-fashioned sense: It tells an interesting story in civilized language. Not that I’m calling for profundity or brilliance in family entertainment but certainly you want something besides noise and color.

The story is about a new preacher (Andy Griffith) who comes to a small Kansas town for his first pulpit. He brings along three kids, a pregnant wife and assorted dependents including Jerry Van Dyke as his brother-in-law, who lacks some few things above the waistline. The town looks like one from Norman Rockwell paintings 30 years ago: white churches with friendly steeples, mayoral candidates speaking from platforms draped with bunting, the church basement filled with ladies baking cookies while preparing speeches on lawns decorated with flower beds planted around statues holding bird baths.

Actually there are two towns: There’s the little farm town where everybody goes to church on Sunday morning and then watches Ed Sullivan Sunday night. And then there’s city hall down at the other end of Main Street.

City hall is run by two families which founded the town 100 years ago next month during a drunken poker game. They have a municipal government which is thick with graft and incompetence, and they’re not above running telephone wires between the ears of a stuffed squirrel.

Andy walks in on all this while trying to be nice to everybody but especially to his brother-in-law, Jerry Van Dyke, who has been elected county treasurer. He also makes a pass at the town’s grand old lady (Lee Meriwether), when she invites him over for liverwurst sandwiches, but he does this out of curiosity as much as anything else.

The movie more or less follows what we know by now are the dictates of this kind of film. For example: Andy yanks his kids out of school to protest an inadequate education budget. But things go along pretty smoothly right up until an illegal still explodes and burns down the church, just as Andy is managing the campaign of a reform candidate for mayor who is opposed by every member of both families except for one aunt by marriage who had her mind scrambled during Prohibition.

And that’s what kind of movie it is: A good fantasy, well-acted, telling an interesting story in addition to amusing the children. Democracy does not work so smoothly as you’d gather from “An Angel in My Pocket,” nor will small towns ever again be so simple and sunny as this one in Kansas if indeed they ever were. But no harm showing the kids what could be or should be.

Also there’s one other thing I wanted to tell you about “An Angel in My Pocket.” The quality of the print I saw was shameful. It was filled with splices distorting or eliminating many lines of dialog; an occasional splice is inevitable in making prints like these, but this was only the second day of release and already it was among the shoddiest first-run prints I’ve seen since learning how to read.

Print quality doesn’t affect my overall evaluation of a movie (and I can’t even be sure the print was not accidentally damaged after leaving the distributor’s hands). But a poor print does make it difficult to write about a movie; I find myself, for example, asking whether one character really said such and such or whether that line of dialog was lost in a splice and then trying to remember how some scenes ended without knowing if they did.

And so instead of risking error by making things up, I’ll close right here. “An Angel in My Pocket” is good fun. You will like Andy Griffiths. The kids will like it.

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