Sometime in the late fifties I began to realize that just because a movie had the Walt Disney label on it didn’t mean it was going to be a sunny, feel-good, crowd-pleasing experience for every kid. I suppose I was spoiled by the exhilarating fantasy of such back to back escapism as Sleeping Beauty, Darby O’Gill and the Little People and The Shaggy Dog, all released in 1959. Then I saw THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN (also 1959) and it was not in the same vein at all. The spectre of death was introduced early into the storyline – James MacArthur plays Rudi, an aspiring mountain climber whose father died on the peaks of the Citadel (actually the Matterhorn in the Swiss alps) – and hung over it for the remainder of the film. Although by today’s standards the film is a tame, G-rated family adventure, it seemed like grim realism in 1959, lacking the joyful, spirited sense of fun that radiated through Swiss Family Robinson, from the same director, Ken Annakin, the very next year.    

No, THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN is a movie fraught with tension; tension between the competitive mountain climbers (MacArthur, Michael Rennie and Herbert Lom) and the clannish villagers, near-death scrapes and bloody injuries (runaway rope lines tearing flesh from one’s hands), and most of all, unfullfilled dreams. In the case of Rudi, his goal of succeeding where his father had failed seems more of an obsession than anything else and there is a lockstep determination about the whole trek like an earnest lesson in courage and self-determination. There are compensations, of course -the dazzling on-location cinematography and perky, radiant Janet Munro as the obligatory love interest (and minor subplot). Still, for a Disney adventure yarn, I found it a total bringdown, a wallow in high seriousness when I wanted escapist fun! I was simply unable at the time to appreciate the fact that the film is actually a tightly constructed and well-acted character study.   

THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN, however, looked upbeat and lighthearted compared to GREYFRAIRS BOBBY: THE TRUE STORY OF A DOG, which I saw two years later in 1961. If the spectre of death hovered over the previous film, it became the central conceit in this real-life tale of a little Skye terrier who is left homeless on the streets of Edinburgh when his master Old Jock (Alex MacKenzie) dies of pneumonia.      

Night after night, Bobby stands watch over the grave of his departed master (in real life it went on for fourteen years!) but during the day he begs for food from Mr. Traill (Laurence Naismith), a restaurant owner, and plays with the street children. Because he doesn’t have a dog license, Bobby seems fated for the animal shelter but in the end he’s rescued from impoundment by some neighborhood locals and allowed to wander the streets and haunt Greyfriars’ Kirkyard (the cemetery where Old Jock is buried) to the end of his days. Even though the film was shot in Technicolor, the predominant color I remember most is gray  – and so is the mood – forlorn, wintry, and in a state of mourning.

In essense, the film is about loss and paying tribute to someone’s memory. It has a gritty authenticity unlike other Disney films of the period and with its lower working class milieu is much closer in spirit to a Ken Loach film (It was directed by Don Chaffey of Jason and the Argonauts fame).  In many ways, GREYFRAIRS BOBBY might be the ideal film to teach young children about death and devotion and charity but at the time I just wanted to be somewhere else In Search of the Castaways or maybe marooned on a tropical island with Swiss Family Robinson.

Of course, these two films weren’t the first time Walt Disney introduced death, tragedy or primal fears into his movies. There are dark corners in even his brightest pictures but THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN and GREYFRAIRS BOBBY were much more about the world of adult responsibilities and worries despite their classification as childrens’ films. They were NOT fun. They were NOT escapist. As fellow Morlock Richard Harland Smith said, “Disney films can give you tough love.”     

A perfect example of this is THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY (1963). What could be more heartwarming than a tale about three pets on a long trek to find their masters, especially when they are expertly played by a trained Labrador, Siamese cat and English Bull Terrier? The animals are indeed intelligent, cute, photogenic and fearless as they attempt to cross 250 miles or more of Canadian wilderness to reach their masters’ home. Why are they doing this? Because they were left in the care of a family friend in Ontario while the family vacationed in England. Yet there is something almost sadistic about the way the narrative places one dangerous obstacle after another in the pets’ journey. So even if you know there will be a happy ending, cat and dog lovers are punished for caring too much about this trio – is there a lesson here too? I particularly hate the scene where the cat almost drowns trying to cross a river and in fact, it looks dead when you see it later, limp and lifeless on the river bank. I don’t know if it’s shameless manipulation or dramatic license but when I saw these films as a kid, they were total bummers, man.