Walking Away from Walt

Writer-director David Swift and actor Jack Lemmon
pretend to go over a script for a publicity photograph.

There’s an interesting Hollywood anecdote about David Swift (future writer and director of the popular Jack Lemmon comedies “Good Neighbor Sam” and “Under the Yum Yum Tree”), who was an animator at the Disney studio in the 1930s. When Swift, who was Jewish, informed his boss that he was leaving for a job at Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney, in an exaggerated Yiddish accent, said, “Okay, Davy boy, off you go to work for those Jews. It’s where you belong, with those Jews.”

The story displays two facets of the enigmatic essence that was Walt Disney. Firstly, questions of Disney’s anti-Semitism have been lampooned explicitly in gags on Seth McFarlane’s “Family Guy” and Seth Green and Matthew Senreich’s “Robot Chicken.”

Walt Disney testitifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee

In fact, Walt Disney was virulently anti-Communist. In the 1940s, he publicly sided with the anti-Communist organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (whose other prominent members included Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, and John Wayne). Disney himself would testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee against Herbert Sorrell, a Hollywood union organizer, as well as David Hilberman and William Pomerance, two Disney animators who advocated unionizing studio employees.

Leni and Adolf in happier times

Only two Hollywood studio heads openly greeted documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, when she visited California to promote “Olympia,” her cinematic paean to the 1936 Games in Berlin: Hal Roach and Walt Disney.

If that wasn’t unsettling enough, in the 1930s, Hal Roach and Vittorio Mussolini, the buffoonish son of Italian despot Benito Mussolini, embarked on a partnership to make news documentaries promoting Italy. Roach wisely bought out of the deal after being ostracized by the Hollywood community.

Hal Roach is amused by Vittorio Mussolini's impression of his dad, Il Duce.

Incidentally, as a bomber pilot for the Italian Royal Air during World War II, Vittorio pompously likened exploding bombs to “budding roses” and boasted of killing as “exceptionally good fun.” Somehow, he managed to live to the old age of 80.

(To further limn the mindset and the mood of the period, Henry Ford, like many other enterprising businessmen of the Great Depression, mistrusted President Franklin Roosevelt and was convinced the White House was conniving to inch the U.S. into a global war, while Ford himself continued to do business with Nazi Germany. The unabashedly anti-Semitic Ford had earlier accused Jews of fomenting the First World War.)

Even after news of “Kristallnacht,” the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues throughout Germany and Austria were vandalized and ransacked in November of 1938, Disney welcomed Leni Riefenstahl with a tour of his studio.

One pervasively notorious scene in Disney’s classic 1933 animated short, “Three Little Pigs,” depicted the Big Bad Wolf in a ludicrous disguise as a Jewish peddler, replete with an oversized nose and a beard (above). The scene was soon cut and replaced with new animation of the Wolf posing as a door-to-door salesman but still with a Yiddish accent. On TV, the voice was redubbed to avoid the stereotype.

A lamentable truth is that Walt Disney, like so many of his Hollywood contemporaries, indulged in racial stereotyping, and a number of Disney cartoons inevitably featured insensitive material. Disney biographer Neal Gabler insisted that Disney “never, either publicly or privately…asserted white superiority,” but, “like most white Americans of his generation, he was racially insensitive.”

On the other hand, once the U.S. committed itself to the Allies in World War II, Walt Disney and his animators cast their lovable cartoon characters as popular, anti-Nazi patriots, most notably Donald Duck in “Der Fuehrer’s Face.”

By the 1950s, Walt Disney had distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. As for the previously mentioned David Swift, he was welcomed back warmly by Disney as the writer-director of “Pollyanna” and “The Parent Trap.” He said he “owed everything” to Walt. When Smith left the studio a second time, Disney told him that there would “still be a candle burning in the window” if he ever wanted to return.

Secondly, Disney’s emphatic reaction to David Swift’s initial departure was emblematic of how Walt perceived his employees and of his knee-jerk reaction to those who abandoned him. “Some of Disney’s employee’s did not always hold him in such high regard,” author Leonard Maltin noted in the 1995 edition of The Disney Films, “but this was not the usual employer-employee type of situation.” The studio itself was a maverick amidst the corporate environment of Hollywood, an idiosyncratic entity in which Disney, according to Maltin, “would have loved nothing better than to do everything himself.”

Despite occasional “bitterness that sometimes came to the fore,” in Maltin’s words, Disney inspired extraordinary loyalty from his employees, several of whom stuck by his side for decades. Now the stuff of legend, a core of animators dubbed by Walt the “Nine Old Men” (even though they joined the company in their 30s and 40s) remained steadfastly loyal to their boss and created some of Disney’s most endearing animation, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers.”

Disney's Nine Old Men

Most of the employees, Maltin observed, “realized that they were working in a unique enterprise, one of the few places in Hollywood where the creative spark did mean more than the bank book.” Maltin wrote, “Disney’s work was his life’s blood – like most men burning with creative energy, he had no use of relaxation – and it meant everything to him. When others joined him in his enterprise, he implicitly expected them to feel the same way.” And when they didn’t…

Fred MacMurray

Walt Disney confers with alter ego Fred MacMurray.

Disney’s 1959 comedy “The Shaggy Dog” presented Hollywood veteran Fred MacMurray with the golden opportunity of being established as the studio’s in-house surrogate father figure for the aging Walt, but before starring in a series of successful family comedies that included “The Absent-Minded Professor,” “Son of Flubber,” and “Follow Me, Boys!” MacMurray portrayed the utterly loathsome heel, Sheldrake, in director Billy Wilder’s bittersweet comedy “The Apartment” (1960). Sheldrake, a personnel director at a New York City advertising agency, browbeats a doormat of an office drudge (Jack Lemmon) into borrowing his flat for extramarital flings with an elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine).

Fred MacMurray as the quintessential schnook in "The Apartment" (1960)

This wasn’t the first time Fred MacMurray played a despicable reprobate. For the 1944 film noir classic “Double Indemnity” (co-scripted by director Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on James M. Cain’s novel), the role of Walter Neff, the morally weak insurance salesman seduced into a murder plot by a platinum blonde femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), was allegedly turned down by Alan Ladd, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and Gregory Peck before Wilder thought that it needed to be played by an actor who could be both a cynic and a nice guy. At the time, MacMurray was complacent portraying happy-go-lucky characters. He told Wilder, “You’re making the mistake of your life,” but the filmmaker pursued him relentlessly, resulting in a performance that surprised the actor, who later reflected, “I never dreamed it would be the best picture I ever made.”

Film historian David Thomson described MacMurray as “a romantic lead built on quicksand, a hero compelled to betray, a lover likely to desert.” Indeed, in his second ignominious turn as a heel, he threw his shipmates under the bus as the manipulative mutineer Lt. Keefer in 1954’s “The Caine Mutiny.”

“Whether I play a heavy or a comedian,” Fred MacMurray once said, “I always start out Smiley MacMurray, a decent Rotarian type. If I play a heavy, there comes a point in the film when the audience realizes I’m really a heel.” He played the heel so well that even as he embarked on his twelve-year stint as the beloved dad on TV’s “My Three Sons” in 1960, a woman who had seen “The Apartment” accosted him in public, clobbering him with her purse and berating him for making a “dirty filthy movie.”

Fred MacMurray bought stock in Disney, and this and other shrewd investments resulted in him becoming one of Hollywood’s wealthiest, and famously stingiest, performers. While filming “My Three Sons,” he would bring dyed Easter eggs for lunch weeks after the holiday so as not to waste them. In Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe, Billy Wilder laughingly  recounted, “There was a scene in ‘The Apartment’ before he comes into his office. He has his shoes shined by a black man. And then from his suit he gets out a quarter and he flips a tip to the shoeshine guy. And now, we’re shooting it, and we’re shooting it and he cannot do it. And I say, ‘That’s all right, it’s too small, let’s do it with a fifty-cent piece, it’s bigger.’ And MacMurray says, ‘I would never give him fifty cents – I cannot play this scene.’”

Tommy Kirk

In the previously mentioned “The Shaggy Dog,” Tommy Kirk played an 18-year-old inventor who discovers an enchanted ring that transforms him into an Old English Sheepdog. Three years earlier, Kirk and fellow juvenile actor Tim Considine starred in episodes of the serial “The Hardy Boys” on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” and in 1957, Walt Disney cast Kirk as Travis Coates in the heart-tugging “Old Yeller.”

Tommy Kirk and Spike in "Old Yeller" (1957)

After “The Shaggy Dog,” Walt unceremoniously dropped Kirk, who later recalled, “I was thin and gangly and looked a mess…I thought the whole world had fallen to pieces.” But then Disney had a change of heart and offered the actor a long-term contract, beginning with a substantial role as the middle son in 1960’s “Swiss Family Robinson,” which was a box-office hit and remains Kirk’s favorite film.

Tommy Kirk and James MacArthur in ""Swiss Family Robinson" (1960)

Kirk subsequently costarred in three successful Disney comedies with Fred MacMurray – “”The Absent-Minded Professor,” “Son of Flubber,” and “Bon Voyage!” It was on the set of “Bon Voyage!” that MacMurray gave Kirk “the biggest dressing-down of my life.” Kirk recounted, “I really liked him very much, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. That hurt me a lot, and for a long time I hated him…I was sort of looking for a father figure, and I pushed him too hard…We had a couple of blow-ups on-set…He was a nice person, but I was just too demanding. I came on too strong because I desperately wanted to be his friend.”

Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley, Fred MacMurray, Kevin Corcoran, and
Jane Wyman pose for their passport photo in "Bon Voyage!" (1962).

Kirk had a small role in 1961’s “Babes in Toyland” (starring Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands), which he described as “sort of a klunker” and “an oddity” with “a few cute moments,” and he enjoyed working with venerable funnyman Ed Wynn.

Tommy Kirk and Ed Wynn in the toyshop in "Babes in Toyland" (1961)

He repeated his role as Travis Coates in the 1963 sequel to “Old Yeller,” “Savage Sam.” When he portrayed a “scrambled egghead” of a college student inventor in 1964’s “The Misadventures of Merlin Jones,” costarring Annette Funicello, it became one of the year’s biggest hits. Kirk always recalled Funicello fondly as “a perfect lady, perfect manners, very careful about her career, a very cool-headed businesswoman, friendly. We’ve always been friendly, but never friends…People say bad things about everybody in the business, but I don’t know anybody who ever say anything bad about her.”

While filming “The Misadventures of Merlin Jones,” Tommy Kirk was often seen in the company of a teenage boy he had met at a local swimming pool. “I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy,” Kirk later said. “I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings…The lifestyle was not recognized, and I was very, very lonely…When I was about 17 or 18…I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to change. I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that I was going to wreck my Disney career and maybe my whole acting career.”

The teenage boy’s mother informed Walt Disney who at first opted to not renew Kirk’s contract but not before asking the actor to return for the 1965 sequel to “The Misadventures of Merlin Jones,” “The Monkey’s Uncle,” again costarring Annette Funicello, because, in Kirk’s words, “the Jones films had been moneymakers for the studio.”

“Disney was the most conservative studio in town,” Kirk noted. “The studio executives were beginning to suspect my homosexuality. Certain people were growing less and less friendly.” Ultimately, Walt fired him.

Kirk had been cast as the kid brother of John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Earl Holliman in the western “The Sons of Katie Elder,” but a Christmas Eve 1964 bust for possessing marijuana led to his replacement by Michael Anderson Jr. “After I was fired from Disney,” Kirk recalled, “I did some of the worst movies ever made, and I got involved with a manager who…put me in every piece of shit that anybody offered. I did…terrible things, but it was only to get the money.”

“Mars Needs Women” (1966), which paired Tommy Kirk with TV’s “Batgirl,” Yvonne Craig, was directed by Larry Buchanan, a self-proclaimed “schlockmeister” who also directed Kirk in 1969’s “It’s Alive!” about a very hungry pet dinosaur. “What I was doing in those pictures, I don’t know,” Kirk said. “I had a drug problem then…I was an idiot. (Larry) Buchanan’s like a cinematic serial killer…But I’d also like to add that, personally, Larry Buchanan was one of the nicest, most gracious men I’ve ever worked for. He paid me well, he was generous, and he was decent.”

Tommy Kirk in "Mars Needs Women" (1966)

Finally, after bottom-of-the-barrel roles in “Track of Thunder,” “Ride the Hot Wind,” and “Blood of Ghastly Horror,” Kirk said “to hell with show business” and drugs. The actor whom his “The Hardy Boys” costar Tim Considine once called “a monster talent” observed, “I don’t blame anybody but myself and my drug abuse for my career going haywire. I’m not ashamed of being gay, never have been, and never will be…I have no animosity toward anybody because the truth is, I wrecked my own career."

Tommy Kirk these days...

Annette Funicello

Conversation from “Stand by Me” (1986):

Teddy (Corey Feldman): “Have you been watching ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’? I think Annette’s tits are getting bigger.”

Gordie (Wil Wheaton): “Yeah, I’ve been noticing lately that the ‘A’ and the ‘E’ are starting to bend around the sides.”

Vern (Jerry O’Connell): “Annette’s tits are great.”

Chris (River Phoenix) and Teddy: “Yeah.”

Tommy Kirk’s frequent Disney costar, Annette Funicello, was twelve years old when she was discovered by Walt, who cast her on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” From 1955 to 1957, she received as many as 6000 fan letters a month. Although ill at ease over being thought of as a singer, she recorded several hit pop songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Paul Anka reportedly had a crush on her, but the over-protective Walt put the kibosh on the relationship, and a brokenhearted Anka wrote and recorded “Puppy Love.” Disney’s plans to feature Funicello as Ozma in a live-action feature film called “Rainbow Road to Oz” fell by the wayside, but he did cast her as Mary Contrary in 1961’s “Babes in Toyland,” costarring Tommy Sands as Tom Piper, with Ray Bolger, Ed Wynn, and Tommy Kirk.

Annette Funicello, Tommy Sands in "Babes in Toyland" (1961)

(Tommy Sands’ post-Disney career was relatively shortlived, when his five-year marriage to singer Nancy Sinatra ended in divorce in 1965, and papa Frank Sinatra – who had recently cast Sands in the World War II drama “None But the Brave,” which Frank starred in and directed - virtually had Sands blacklisted from the entertainment industry.)

John Ashley, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon
in "Bikini Beach" (1964)

When American International Pictures cast Funicello - who was still under contract to Disney – in her first beach movie, “Beach Party” (1963), Walt requested that she only wear modest one-piece bathing suits that would cover her navel. The buxom, rebellious starlet, however, wore a pink two-piece outfit in “Beach Party,” a white two-piece fishnet bathing suit in “Muscle Beach Party” (1963), and a blue-and-white bikini in “Bikini Beach” (1964), all three fetching outfits baring her bellybutton. Funicello’s other highly successful beach pictures include “Pajama Party,” “Beach Blanket Bingo,” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”

Johnny Crawford, Chuck Connors in "The Rifleman"

Among Annette’s fellow Mouseketeers, Johnny Crawford went on to five seasons of the popular TV series “The Rifleman” as Mark, son of Chuck Connors’ Lucas McCain. He also played the rancher’s hapless son who ends up on the wrong end of John Wayne’s gun in the 1965 western “El Dorado.”

Cissy King, Lawrence Welk, Bobby Burgess

Bobby Burgess later appeared as half of the audience-pleasing dance team of Bobby & Cissy on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” 

Cubby O'Brien poses front and center with Karen and Richard Carpenter.

Cubby O’Brien played drums for The Carpenters when they toured, freeing drummer Karen Carpenter to sing their hits unfettered.

Fred MacMurray, Don Grady, William Demarest in "My Three Sons"

Don Grady played Robbie Douglas for 11 years on the Fred MacMurray series “My Three Sons.”

(Left to right) Don Stroud, Michael Sarrazin, Jan-Michael Vincent, James Caan,
Paul Petersen (all grown up), Michael Burns, and Harrison Ford
in the 1968 Universal Pictures backlot western "Journey to Shiloh"

Paul Petersen costarred as Jeff Stone for eight seasons on "The Donna Reed Show" before becoming an outspoken advocate for supporting the rights of former child actors.

Occasional Mouseketeers included two of Mickey Rooney’s sons: Mickey Rooney Jr., who afterward appeared in the 1967 drive-in potboiler “Hot Rods to Hell” before pursuing a career as a musician (above center), and Tim Rooney, who costarred (with fellow ex-Mousketeer Johnny Crawford, Disney refugee Tommy Kirk, Beau Bridges, and a young Ron Howard) in 1965’s “Village of the Giants,” and in 1967’s "Riot on Sunset Strip.”

Joy Harmon, Tim Rooney, Beau Bridges in "Village of the Giants" (1965)

(Interestingly, among the thousands who auditioned but failed to make the cut for the original “Mickey Mouse Club” were songwriter-and-“Smokey and the Bandit”-costar Paul Williams and Candice Bergen.)

The most infamous alumna of the original Mousketeers has to be Darlene Gillespie, who, in December of 1998, was convicted in federal court of aiding her husband in a check-kiting scam to purchase securities. She served three months of a two-year sentence. In 2005, Darlene and her husband were indicted on federal charges of filing several fraudulent claims in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit.

Speaking of notoriety, among the alumni of the rejuvenated “All-New Mickey Mouse Club” of  1989 (which included future N’Sync boy-bandmates Justin Timberlake and J.C. Chasez, movie-star-to-be Ryan Gosling, and TV’s “Felicity,” Keri Russell), Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera wasted little time in flaunting their independence from the apron string of the Disney studio.

Mouseketeers Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears could barely wait to bust out
of the Clubhouse...And don't even get us started on Miley Cyrus shedding her
homespun threads from the Disney Channel's "Hannah Montana."

Julie Andrews

It was during the era of the original “Mickey Mouse Club” of the late 1950s when Walt committed the studio to churning out live-action features. “A few standard formulas (slaptstick comedy, action-adventure, animal films) served the studio well,” Leonard Maltin noted in The Disney Films, “and before long a kind of ‘house style’ merged, with the same proficient production team putting its stamp on every Disney picture.”

Maltin observed, “If these films weren’t up to…the Disney standard, it is probably because Walt himself wasn’t involved with them to the extent he was in times gone by.” The old man was, in fact, distracted by Disneyland (and particularly by his fascination with Audio-Animatronics, as “personified” by the amusement park’s “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” attraction) and by plans for Florida’s Disney World, all of which, according to Maltin, “meant more to him than film or television toward the end of his life.”

Even a notable exception like the smash hit “Mary Poppins” was followed by “another host of amiable comedies,” in Maltin’s words, “none of them outstanding, all of them adhering to certain patterns that had been set up over the years (clean-cut hero, wholesome good-looking heroine, plenty of slapstick…).”

It was not without reason that Walt Disney deemed 1964’s “Mary Poppins” the crowning achievement of his career. It was, to date, the studio’s biggest hit, financially and critically. Disney first tried to purchase the movie rights to the beloved children’s book as early as 1938 (actress Maureen O’Hara allegedly first recommended the story to Walt), but it wasn’t until 1961 when author Pamela Lyndon Travers, faced with declining books sales, sold the rights.

Walt Disney originally considered Mary Martin, Bette Davis, and Angela Lansbury before seeing Julie Andrews in “Camelot” on Broadway. Andrews supposedly didn’t commit to the role until the day after Warner Bros. announced that Audrey Hepburn would be starring in the film version of the musical “My Fair Lady,” in the role Andrews originated on Broadway, which she had hoped to reprise onscreen.

Author Travers immediately approved of the casting of Julie Andrews after a single telephone conversation with her, but the writer would later decry the finished film as an over-sweetened, vulgar, disrespectful departure from her book. It was an onset visit to view rushes from the movie that led director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman to decide immediately that Andrews would star in 1965’s “The Sound of Music.”

Julie Andrews’ wholesome, spoonful-of-sugar image endured until her role as an Academy Award-winning actress in a 1981 film written and directed by husband Blake Edwards, “S.O.B.”, a dark, cynical comedy (starring William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Robert Webber, Robert Vaughn, and Larry Hagman) satirizing the Hollywood motion picture industry. (“S.O.B.” supposedly stood for “Standard Operational Bullshit”).

The self-indulgent farce was Blake Edwards’ reaction to studio interference with a number of troubled movies he directed, including “Darling Lili” (starring Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson), “Wild Rovers” (with William Holden and Ryan O’Neal), and “The Carey Treatment” (starring James Coburn and Jennifer O’Neill). The movie’s most memorable scene has Julie Andrews, in the film-within-the-film’s spooky twist on the “Polly Wolly Doodle” song, drop her top (a moment that would have caused Walt to drop his jaw).

When Andrews subsequently appeared on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson thanked her for “showing us that the hills were still alive.”

Don Bluth

Walt’s older brother, Roy Disney, who survived his sibling by five years, said that “it was Walt’s wish that when the time came he would have built an organization with the creative talent to carry on as he had established and directed through the years.”

Seven years after Walt’s demise, the success of the 1973 animated “Robin Hood” revitalized the studio’s commitment to animation, and the company, according to Leonard Maltin, “embarked on a full-scale program to seek out and enlist young talent…The first group of young people to join the Disney staff not only embraced the values and traditions of their elders, but did them one better by pushing for a return to the full-bodied brand of animated filmmaking the Disney had pioneered…”

Don Bluth, the studio’s newest animation director, declared, “The pictures now are entertaining, they’re fast-paced, and they’re clear. Walt had all those things, and he touched you besides.” Bluth had earlier worked at Disney in the mid-1950s as an assistant animator on “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Sword in the Stone.” As a child on the family farm in Payson, Utah, Bluth, a Mormon who claims to be a direct descendant of Pocahontas (and is distantly related to presidential also-ran Mitt Romney), Bluth would milk cows while singing classic Disney songs.

Elliott (voiced by comedian Charlie Callas), Mickey Rooney in "Pete's Dragon" (1977)

Bluth followed work on “Robin Hood” with “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too” and “The Rescuers” before directing the animation on 1977’s “Pete’s Dragon.” In September of 1979, after working uncredited on “The Fox and the Hound” and “The Black Cauldron,” Bluth, on his 42^nd birthday, led a walkout of a cadre of Disney’s “new generation” of animators in a bitter exodus that made international news. The sour departure was based on creative, as well as financial differences.

“We felt like we were animating the same picture over and over again with just the faces changed a little,” Bluth said. “They’ve gutted all of the meaning from ‘The Fox and the Hound.’ It’s become a cute story instead of a meaningful one.” He remarked, “It was all much different because Walt was gone. It was a committee running the place. The pictures did not look very good.”

Mrs. Brisby from "The Secret of NIMH" looks over Don Bluth's shoulder.

Bluth and his fellow refugees formed Don Bluth Productions and burst out of the gate with the surprising box-office hit “The Secret of NIMH” in 1982, followed by the successful collaborations with producer Steven Spielberg “An American Tail” (1986) and “The Land Before Time” (1988). Leonard Maltin, however, pointed out, “Even disenchanted ex-employees do not hesitate to admit what invaluable experience it was to work for Disney…”

Robert Butler

When it came to live-action feature films, “the final years of the 1960s,” in Maltin’s words, “saw ‘business as usual’ on the Disney release calendar.” The studio “was content to continue turning out an average of four films a year, alternating between gimmicky slapstick comedies…and homespun stories about nature, children, and animals.” The old man’s willingness to take risks apparently died with him, and there was, according to Maltin, “a general feeling within the film industry that most decisions at the Disney studio were still being made on the basis of the question, ‘What would Walt have done?’”

One business-as-usual director was Robert Butler. Butler launched his prolific TV career as a stage manager before directing episodes of “The Untouchables,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Fugitive,” and “The Twilight Zone,” not to mention directing the pilots for “Star Trek,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Batman,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Remington Steele,” and, among others, “Moonlighting.”

Kurt Russell, Raffles, Heather North in "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" (1969)

As an in-house filmmaker for Disney, Butler directed a young Kurt Russell in “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” “The Barefoot Executive,” and “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t,” by-the-numbers comedies attempting to update the tried-and-true formula established by Tommy Kirk’s “Merlin Jones” misadventures. Butler’s other Disney assignments included 1971’s “Scandalous John,” starring Brian Keith, and 1978’s “Hot Lead and Cold Feet,” featuring Don Knotts.

In what can undeniably be called the most drastic departure from Disney’s fold, Robert Butler cut loose with the 1980 visceral, out-and-out thriller “Night of the Juggler.” In a breathtaking tour de force, James Brolin plays an ex-New York City cop who blew the whistle on corrupt fellow officers, forced to launch a harrowing, one-man search for his adolescent daughter, kidnapped by a bullgoose-looney psychopath after being mistaken for a wealthy man’s daughter. Right out of the gate, the film unleashes a rip-roaring car chase (helped out by Broadway musical theater star Mandy Patinkin’s off-kilter role as a helpful, yammering cabbie), but for that matter, the entire movie is an intoxicating, relentless chase.

The New York Times critic Janet Maslin viewed “Night of the Juggler” as “a thriller that starts out at an exhilaratingly brisk pace” and “winds up as breathless and overplotted as a thriller can be.” Maslin commented that although director Butler “overloads the story desperately he also gives it a lot of verve, and the film’s street scenes have a crisp immediacy,” including Brolin having to “slug it out with the same menacing street gang twice.” She also complimented the director for casting the film “beautifully, with Richard Castellano (Clemenza in “The Godfather”) in a scene-stealing supporting role and a pair of talented newcomers in smaller roles. Abby Bluestone is sweetly sympathetic as the kidnapped girl, and Julie Carmen is lovely as a helpful young woman Mr. Brolin meets along the way.” (Abby Bluestone, whose only other screen role was as “Chubby” in the 1980 Kristy McNichol-Tatum O’Neal coming-of-age drama “Little Darlings,” became a successful talent agent whose clients included Amanda Seyfried, star of “Mamma Mia!”, “Red Riding Hood,” and “Lovelace.”)

Julie Carmen, James Brolin in "Night of the Juggler" (1980)

The film, which almost gleefully exploits what New York critic Janet Maslin described as “some of the city’s nastiest neighborhoods” – from skid row peep shows to rundown dog kennels, gutted ruins of high-rise projects, and rat-strewn sewers - casts New York’s New Yorker Cliff Gorman as the South Bronx kidnapper, nicknamed “The Mole.” Gorman was an acclaimed stage actor who garnered a Tony in 1972 for playing controversial comedian Lenny Bruce in “Lenny” and whose portrayals “of working-class characters,” in the words of one internet wag, “reeked of New York realism.”

Cliff Gorman as "The Mole"

At one point in the mayhem, Gorman shouts to Brolin what he’s going to do the abducted, under-aged girl, but the MPAA strongly urged the filmmakers to tone the intent down, so instead Gorman yells, “I’m gonna keep her! I’m gonna keep her!” If that wasn’t creepy enough, Gorman coaxes her to put on an old blue dress that reminds him of his mother.

What would Walt have done?