Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Castaway Cowboy
Unlike a lot of other Disney contract players, James Garner’s time at the studio was short. On March 27, 1974, nine months after the release of One Little Indian, The Rockford Files made its debut as a TV-movie pilot. The series itself premiered the following fall on September 13, about a month after the release of Garner’s second Disney movie, The Castaway Cowboy. Jim Rockford became Garner’s second iconic role after Bret Maverick. Once The Rockford Files was up and running, Garner really didn’t need Disney anymore.
In his memoir, The Garner Files, the actor is dismissive of his two Disney efforts. On One Little Indian, he enjoyed working with young Jodie Foster but that was about it. For The Castaway Cowboy, at least he got a trip to Hawaii out of the deal. His attitude is understandable. One Little Indian was pretty bad but it had a fairly memorable story. The Castaway Cowboy is such a nothing whiff of a movie, I’d have had a hard time telling anybody what it was about even while it was unfolding in front of me.
Vincent McEveety is back in the director’s chair for the first time since Superdad. The screenplay is by Don Tait, author of Snowball Express, from a story by Tait and TV guys Richard Bluel and Hugh Benson. Now, I have no concrete evidence that McEveety, Tait and producers Ron Miller and Winston Hibler only came up with this idea as an excuse to take a working vacation. But come on. Nobody involved overtaxed themselves coming up with anything too original, that’s for sure.
Garner stars as Lincoln Costain, a Texas cowboy discovered washed ashore and nearly drowned by young Booton MacAvoy (Eric Shea). Costain’s repeated mangling of Booton’s unusual name qualifies as one of the movie’s precious few recurring gags. Booton lives on the island with his widowed mother, Henrietta (Vera Miles, making her sixth and final appearance in a Disney film). Costain claims to have been shanghaied in San Francisco. Somehow he managed to escape by jumping off the ship holding him captive. Of course, we don’t get to see any of that because that sounds potentially interesting and exciting.
The MacAvoys run a struggling potato farm that they’re on the verge of losing to local banker Calvin Bryson (Robert Culp, who had previously appeared in Sammy, The Way-Out Seal, a two-parter for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color in 1962). Their biggest problem is the cattle that roams free on the island, periodically destroying their crops. Costain suggests that instead of fighting a losing battle against the cattle, they convert the farm into a cattle ranch, round them up and sell them.
This sounds great except for two problems. One, there aren’t any piers or long docks on the island, so they’d need to figure out a way to get the cattle to the ships to the mainland. Second, none of their farmworkers knows the first thing about rounding up cattle. So Costain agrees to stick around and train the ragtag group of Pacific Islanders in the fine art of cowboying.
Not everyone is happy about the new direction. Bryson has been trying to get his greedy mitts on the MacAvoy land ever since Mr. MacAvoy died. Since Henrietta hasn’t been too receptive to his romantic advances, he’s now counting on the farm going under so he can swoop in and take the land for himself. There’s also a local witch doctor named Malakoma (Nephi Hannemann) who’s convinced that Costain will destroy their way of life with his big ideas. After Costain gets the best of him in a fight, Malakoma stalks off to plot his revenge.
Costain’s training doesn’t go well at first. The locals are slow to learn and more interested in frolicking in the ole swimmin’ hole than work. The fact that the natives are portrayed as lazy goof-offs with the intellectual capacity of a below-average nine-year-old is one of the movie’s most egregious flaws. Costain eventually gets fed up and quits, stopping in town long enough to win his ship fare home and a boss new cowboy hat in a poker game. But before he can leave, Booton rallies the troops and gets everyone to show off their horsemanship. Turns out they were paying attention after all.
The display is enough to get Costain to agree to stick around and finish what he started. This is bad news for Bryson, who hires Malakoma to prevent the roundup by any means necessary. The witch doctor puts some sort of a curse on the cowboys, causing a farmhand named Kimo (Manu Tupou) to swoon and fall off his horse while trying to rope a bull. Costain doesn’t believe in superstitious nonsense like curses, of course. But since everybody else does, he goes off to confront Malakoma.
He finds him lurking in a cave festooned with skulls and faux native artwork. I’d say it kind of looks like the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland but I don’t want to insult the designers of the Tiki Room. The Tiki Room is pretty cool. This just looks chintzy and cheap. Costain beats Malakoma up and frog-marches him back to the farm to speak some mumbo jumbo over Kimo’s body. Kimo is immediately healed and Costain once again orders Malakoma to leave the farm forever, for reals this time. The defeated Malakoma sadly trudges back to his cave and out of the movie. Poor Malakoma.
I’d love to be able to report that there’s more to The Castaway Cowboy but honestly, that’s about it. Costain and the cowboys successfully round up the cattle. Bryson gets his henchman, Marrujo (Gregory Sierra), to cause a stampede but Costain gets them all back under control even quicker than he rounded them up in the first place. Marrujo gets trampled in the stampede and Costain delivers him back to Bryson, kicks Bryson’s ass for good measure and then goes right back to transporting cattle. Eventually the farm is saved and Costain, for some inexplicable reason, decides to stay on with this woman he has zero chemistry with and her obnoxious child whose name he can’t be bothered to remember.
It took me two days to make it through The Castaway Cowboy. Two days for a movie that clocks in at 91 minutes. If you’re suffering from insomnia, by all means cue it up. It’s more effective than a sleeping pill. James Garner likely would have agreed since he seems completely disengaged throughout. The same goes for Vera Miles. She suffered through some of Disney’s most thankless mom roles during her time at the studio. This one is virtually identical to the one she played in One Little Indian. No wonder she left Disney behind after this.
As for Booton, Eric Shea is one of the more insufferable child actors to appear in this column in awhile. At first it’s amusing to hear Garner forget his name but after the second or third time hearing Shea whiningly protest “It’s BOOTON!!”, you’ll be wishing Costain would just remember his name for once. Shea (whose brothers Christopher and Stephen both voiced Linus in different Charlie Brown specials) stuck around Disney for a bit but it did not break my heart to learn he won’t be back in this column. He appeared in a few episodes of The Wonderful World Of Disney, perhaps most notably as boy inventor Alvin Fernald in The Whiz Kid And The Mystery At Riverton and The Whiz Kid And The Carnival Caper.
The Castaway Cowboy didn’t seem to work for anybody. It got a smattering of lukewarm reviews but audiences weren’t interested. It certainly wasn’t a career-killer. Everybody involved went on to bigger and better (or, at least, other) things. But I can’t imagine anyone who saw it left the theatre humming the “Yippie-Ki-Yi” roundup song James Garner croons along with his Pacific Islander cowboys. The sad thing is that the real story of Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolos, is genuinely interesting. There’s absolutely a good movie to be made on the subject. Perhaps we’re lucky that The Castaway Cowboy isn’t it so that somebody else can take a crack at it.
I like James Garner and have very fond memories of watching The Rockford Files with my grandfather when I was a kid. So I was hoping that his two Disney efforts might be undiscovered gems. Instead, they represent a road not taken that Garner might have had to follow if Rockford hadn’t come along when it did. It would be nearly thirty years before Garner returned to Disney as a voice actor in the (underrated, in my opinion) animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire. So if this column makes it all the way to the 21st Century, Garner will be back. Just not for a long time.
VERDICT: Disney Minus