Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Hot Lead And Cold Feet
By 1978, conventional Hollywood wisdom held that the Western was dead. Sure, there were a few true believers trying to keep the genre on life support but even Clint Eastwood had more or less moved on to focus on Dirty Harry and costarring with an orangutan. The last Western to make a dent at the box office had been a parody, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. So it kind of made sense for Disney to attempt evoking memories of that movie with the poster tagline (“A Blazing Saga Of…”) for their latest Western comedy, Hot Lead And Cold Feet. Whether or not fans of that R-rated movie would have any interest in a G-rated Disney movie with Don Knotts is another question.
Hot Lead And Cold Feet was the last screenplay credit for longtime Disney veteran Joe McEveety, who had died in 1976 not long after the release of No Deposit, No Return. His cowriters on that film, Arthur Alsberg and Don Nelson, completed McEveety’s work after his death. This would also be their last Disney feature, although they later wrote several episodes of the short-lived Herbie, The Love Bug TV series.
Speaking of last movies, this will also be the last appearance in this column for director Robert Butler, last seen behind the camera on Now You See Him, Now You Don’t. Butler went on to direct a few more features, including the thrillers Night Of The Juggler and Turbulence and the comedies Underground Aces and Up The Creek. But he spent most of his remaining career in television, directing episodes of Remington Steele, Hill Street Blues, Lois & Clark and many others. He’s still with us but he’s been retired since 2009.
Disney’s promotional material for Hot Lead And Cold Feet heavily played up Don Knotts’ appearance but, as usual, he’s relegated to a supporting role. The real star is Jim Dale, the British actor who’d appeared as Dr. Terminus in Pete’s Dragon. As a songwriter, Dale had been nominated for an Oscar for the song “Georgy Girl” in 1967. He’d also been a regular player in the long-running Carry On series, hugely popular comedies in the UK that generally failed to catch on in the States. Dale’s Disney films were really his biggest vehicles in the US, at least until he became known as the audiobook narrator of the Harry Potter series.
Hot Lead And Cold Feet is, if nothing else, a nice showcase for Dale’s talents, giving him three separate roles to play. He first appears in heavy old age makeup as Jasper Bloodshy, the ornery miser who essentially owns the Old West town he named after himself (Bloodshy, not Jasper, although I’ve actually heard of towns named Jasper). Dale also stars as Jasper’s twin sons. Wild Billy, the heir apparent, is a rootin’ tootin’ outlaw feared by all. Eli was brought up by the boys’ mother in England (justifying Dale’s British accent), eventually becoming a Salvation Army missionary in Philadelphia feared by none.
As the movie opens, Jasper has just learned of Eli’s continued existence and changed his will to include him. This does not fit in with the plans of Mayor Ragsdale (Darren McGavin, reunited with Knotts after No Deposit, No Return), who assumed the town and the Bloodshy fortune would go to the rowdy but easily manipulated Billy. Before the news has a chance to sink in, a strong wind causes Jasper to plummet off a cliff in front of Ragsdale, Sheriff Denver Kid (Knotts) and Jasper’s butler, Mansfield (John Williams, also from No Deposit, in his last film).
Eli receives word of his father’s death and heads west, dragging along a couple of orphan kids, Marcus (Michael Sharrett) and Roxanne (Debbie Lytton), because it wouldn’t be a Disney movie without a couple of kids. Mayor Ragsdale intends to have Eli eliminated before he even makes it to Bloodshy. But nobody expected the Bloodshy brothers to be twins, so the hired muscle mistakes Eli for Billy and nobody crosses Wild Billy.
Everything gets straightened out a little later when Billy walks into the saloon and is shocked to meet the identical twin brother he never knew existed. Ragsdale informs the boys that Jasper’s amended will takes the form of a race. Billy and Eli will be forced to compete in a grueling obstacle course known as the Bloody Bloodshy Trail. The winner inherits the town and the entire Bloodshy fortune. The loser will be lucky to complete the race at all.
Really, the entire story is just a pretext to set up another Patented Disney Competition Sequence, complete with the usual stunts, pratfalls and tomfoolery we’ve come to expect. That’s not a lot to hang your hat on, so Butler and the writers fill time with a lot of tangential side business. For one thing, Jasper turns out to be a lot less dead than everyone thinks. He and Mansfield faked his death so Jasper could test the mettle of his two boys. They lurk around the fringes of the action, spying on the competition and engaging in their own slapstick routines.
There’s also a love interest, more or less, for Eli in the form of newly arrived schoolteacher Jenny (played by 70s TV mainstay Karen Valentine, who will be back in this column). I say “more or less” because Eli and Jenny don’t exactly set off sparks. Jenny is such a non-entity that I’m struggling right now to even remember if she and Eli end up together. I assume they do but honestly, she could have wandered out of the picture halfway through and I wouldn’t have noticed.
The funniest subplot is the one that has the least impact on the larger story. Sheriff Denver spots an old nemesis named Rattlesnake (Jack Elam, making a welcome return after appearances in Never A Dull Moment and The Wild Country). Denver and Rattlesnake have unsettled business from a long-ago, never-specified beef and keep trying to have it out in a good old-fashioned showdown. Throughout the film, circumstances conspire to keep that face-off from ever happening. It has nothing to do with anything but it’s a good gag and the decision to cast Don Knotts and Jack Elam as old adversaries was kind of inspired.
As for the main story, it goes pretty much as you’d expect. Eli survives several attempts to either slow him down or outright knock him off. Eventually, he overhears Ragsdale plotting to kill Billy to claim the entire fortune for himself. Eli saves Billy’s life and the pair put their differences behind them. Ragsdale ends up behind bars and the Bloodshy brothers decide to split the inheritance and clean up the town. Jasper, who could have very easily put a stop to all this by revealing himself, opts to remain dead and he and Mansfield ride off to pay a visit to his daughters.
Even at just 90 minutes, Hot Lead And Cold Feet often feels padded and overlong. Whenever the focus shifts to Jenny or the orphans, you’ll feel like hitting the fast-forward button. But the rest of the cast helps keep things lively, especially Knotts, Elam and the always watchable Darren McGavin. Jim Dale is also fun in his three roles, even though the Disney effects department seems to have forgotten a thing or two about creating believable twinning effects since the days of The Parent Trap.
Disney released Hot Lead And Cold Feet on July 5, 1978. It was one of the studio’s bigger hits of the year but it was only a middling success compared to the business movies from other studios were doing. It earned slightly less than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, a movie widely misremembered today as a notorious flop (it was a fiasco, sure, but not a flop…it made a little money).
The fact that Hot Lead And Cold Feet didn’t make Jim Dale a big star in America wasn’t his fault. Disney promoted the movie as the new Don Knotts comedy, not as a Jim Dale vehicle. Dale would be back at the studio but not as the lead, much less the co-leads. And the movie did well enough to assure Disney that the public still had a taste for seeing Don Knotts in an Old West setting. We’ll be seeing him again one more time.
VERDICT: It’s not actively bad enough to warrant a Disney Minus, so let’s go with a soft Plus.
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