Treasure of Matecumbe

Disney’s relationship with the US South, particularly when it comes to the latter half of the nineteenth century, is a strange and complicated one. One of the kids in this movie would go on to be one of the first black Mouseketeers the next year. The main character is a white kid. Everyone in the movie takes it fully for granted that the two boys are best friends and ever shall be. There is an implication, however, that Our Hero’s family owned slaves only a few years before; possibly they owned the boy’s best friend and definitely they owned another character who is killed at the beginning. There’s a Klan lynching in this movie, but it isn’t a black character getting lynched, and the villain is explicitly a “carpetbagger.”

Davie Burnie (Johnny Duran) lives at Grassy, a Kentucky plantation, with his aunts Effie (Jane Wyatt) and Lou (Virginia Vincent). Odds are pretty good they’re going to lose it. One day, a man comes looking for Ben (Robert DoQui), referred to only as the family’s “black,” who went off to war with Davie’s dead father and hasn’t been seen since. Ben returns and tells the Burnies that Davie’s father buried a treasure somewhere in Florida and that an evil man named Spangler (Vic Morrow) is after it. Davie and his best friend, Thad (Billy Atmore), go in search of it.

On the way, they meet a runaway bride, Lauriette Paxton (Joan Hackett). She initially tries to send them home, but when she meets Spangler, she is wooed to their side. They also pair up with Dr. Snodgrass (Peter Ustinov), a snake-oil salesman who agrees to take the boys down the river to New Orleans, from where they’ll make their way to Florida and Matecumbe Key. They seek out Davie’s uncle Jim (Robert Foxworth). Together, they plan to beat Spangler to the treasure.

Boy this movie’s a lot. The two kids are treated like any other Disney kids; the s-word is never spoken. Not about Thad and not about Ben. There is only one other black person in the movie. He has no lines; he just dances. I’m not even sure he’s credited. He dances really well, but all he does is dance. It’s also kind of not great that they’ve got the black kid dancing, even if it’s a prelude to the Incel Ball, wherein a bunch of men who actually refer to Lauriette as a “female” try to kidnap her. The white men all dance really well, too, but still.

Also, let’s be real, the portrayal of Native Americans is genuinely terrible. There’s a guide named Charlie (Valentin de Vargas), who’s given a few lines but not many and is mostly there to tell us about the evil Cougar band of the Seminole. Who throws in what is quite possibly Disney’s first gay panic joke at the end, so that’s . . . really not okay. (I would note that the word they use does mean “woman” in Algonquian, but neither Mohawk—the descent claimed by a character—nor Seminole is an Algonquian language.) The Cougars show up in the third act to be a major threat.

There’s never any doubt that Lauriette’s going to end up with Uncle Jim. He says something early in the movie about how he believes strongly that women belong in the home, but I think it’s at least as likely that he mostly means women of her class. Even middle class women would have had a lot more to do than sit around and look delicate. Besides, after she goes down the Mississippi and across Florida with the boys, it’s clear that she’s no delicate flower. I wouldn’t want to get in that woman’s way if she wanted something.

The cast is pretty wild. Peter Ustinov is clearly having fun playing a character not unfamiliar to fans of Huckleberry Finn; he’s not as blatantly a con artist as the King and the Duke, but he’s got no little of that flair. Though the moment where he saves Thad from going near the Klan is different. Dick Van Patten runs a three-card monte game for about a minute. In fact, a lot of the minor performers are familiar, be they George Lindsey or Mills Watson. I might have even heard Robert Foxworth’s dulcet tones when I visited Mount St. Helens over the summer, as he narrated a documentary about the eruption.

Disney+ suggested that, if I like this, I might like, yes, The Castaway Cowboy. I definitely liked this better. Thad’s given more personality than any of the Hawaiian characters in that, though the Seminole characters are deeply problematic. Davie’s more interesting than the kid from that movie, whose name I can’t remember. I’m not saying rush out and see this, though it does have a certain charm scattered among the madness. And remember that “carpetbagger” is a term with a lot of baggage. Still, we’ve seen worse movies in this column, and not just The Castaway Cowboy.