The Apple Dumpling Gang

The Apple Dumpling Gang

A few years before today, while watching what I think was called “Blackbeard’s Ghost,” a Disney movie, I created the Thunder Index for measuring kiddie matinee audience enthusiasm. If the kids don’t thunder up and down the aisles (and up and down on each other), they’re enjoying the movie or at least it has lulled them. When there are more kids at the candy counter than in the theater, something has gone wrong.

By this standard, Walt Disney’s “The Apple Dumpling Gang” is a success. It even got a cheer at the end, which doesn’t always happen; kids are just as cheerfully willing to boo. The story is simple and obvious, but it’s told with great energy, and there are lots of actors doing their things. When you have Slim Pickens, Harry (Dragnet) Morgan, John McGiver, Don Knotts and Tim Conway all on the screen together at once well, you’ve always got something to look at.

But in many ways “The Apple Dumpling Gang” is a throwback to Disney productions of two or three years ago a period of overwhelming banality in the studio’s history. More recently they’ve made some genuinely inventive entertainments; particularly good were “Escape to Witch Mountain” and “Island at the Top of the World.” With “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” it’s back to assembly-line plots about wholesome adventures for clean-cut kids.

This time three orphans are dumped in a California town where they have to fend for themselves until they come under the wing of a traveling gambler (Bill Bixby) and a lady stagecoach driver (Susan Clark). They stumble onto an enormous golden nugget that inspires a local competition among dozens of citizens who now want to adopt them which leads to two simultaneous attempts by bad guys both teams try to steal the nuggets from inside the bank vault.

There are, as usual, two sets of bad guys: the Good Bad Guys (Knotts and Conway) and the Bad Bad Guys (led by Slim Pickens disguised as an itinerant preacher, as if you could ever disguise Slim Pickens). The Good Bad Guys team up with the kids to steal the nugget so that the kids won’t be so rich and can stay with the gambler and stagecoach driver. The Bad Bad Guys but you get the idea.

Every time I see one of these antiseptic Disney films, I am reminded of how exciting and artistically satisfying their movies were during the golden years in the 1940s and 1950s. Is it just that I’m older now or were those really better movies than what they’re making today? At least up at the Biograph last weekend they revived “Alice in Wonderland,” with its disappearing Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter and all. And you know something? Even though I haven’t seen “Alice” for years I remember it better than “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”

Watch The Apple Dumpling Gang For Free On Gomovies.