Swiss Family Robinson (1960)

Directed by Ken Annakin

Haven’t you ever wanted to live in a tree, to climb up a rope ladder to get into your house? I sure have! I once heard of a man who had a very tall cathedral ceiling in the wide-open front part of his house, and he had an adventurous boy, and he put the two together, and, holy smoke! The boy had his bedroom high up, bounded by walls on two sides and the ceiling overhead, and only a rope ladder for climbing up. God bless that man!

When I was a kid, everybody saw our Film of the Week, because Walt Disney made sure it was shown once a year, just as all the boys I knew read that fine novel of living up in the Catskills by yourself, My Side of the Mountain. Now, Swiss Family Robinson, I mean the novel by the Reverend Johann David Wyss, isn’t about living alone. It’s about leaving behind the staid gray ways of office life and school drudgery in Switzerland — though it’s hard for me to imagine that anything in Switzerland can ever be really gray — to pull up stakes and sail to New Guinea to start a vigorous new life outdoors in the tropics. Pastor Wyss wrote the novel for his sons, to teach them about good hard work, ingenuity, perseverance, sticking together as a family, and prayer to God, who is to be the center of our work and our family life. His novel was titled Die Schweizerische Robinson, meaning The Swiss Robinsons: not that the family was named “Robinson,” because that’s an English name, not Swiss, but that they were a family of Robinsons, that is, of Robinson Crusoes, after the castaway hero of Daniel Defoe’s novel that everybody in Europe had been reading for almost 200 years. The family in the novel consists of father, mother, and four sons; later they discover a castaway English girl who comes to live with them. So they don’t need to discover “Friday” and teach him how to speak English, just so they won’t be alone. They aren’t alone. They work together, they quarrel, they make up their quarrels, they play, they build things — the Swiss of course are notoriously diligent inventors — and they pray together. Why, the first spoken words in the novel are these, by the father, as their ship is sinking,

My beloved children, God can save us, for there is nothing impossible to Him. We must hold ourselves resigned, and rely on what He sees fit to do.

And to give him credit, Walt Disney, though he wrote one of the middle boys out of his movie, didn’t write out the family piety. The first thing they do when they get to the shore is not to unload the raft and knock up some shelter for the night. That’s what Father Robinson suggests, but Mother Robinson gets him to pause. “No, that’s not the first thing,” she says, as she kneels to pray, and all the Robinsons do the same.

So it’s all exploration, invention, pluck, hearty family fun with a bit of rivalry between the two older boys Fritz (James MacArthur, adopted son of the great Helen Hayes; you may remember him as Danny in the old television series Hawaii Five-O) and Ernst (Tommie Kirk, the kid who turns into The Shaggy Dog in Disney’s comedy of errors by that name). The Father is played by John Mills, whom we’ve featured here several times at Word and Song, and the Mother is played by Dorothy McGuire, quite underrated — as might happen to you if you didn’t have the qualities of a femme fatale, like Lizabeth Scott or Lauren Bacall, or if you weren’t girlish and lovable, like Donna Reed. But you don’t really watch Swiss Family Robinson for the subtle acting. You watch it for the sheer fun. What’s the main character in it, after all, if not the wild and strange and somewhat threatening but much-providing and beautiful island where they’ve landed? And that island gives them the chance to find things they’d only read about in books: coconuts, manioc, bamboo, cochineal, wild figs; and to use every part of them that could be used, strings and skins included.

I think that in 1960, if you can judge by what Disney then produced, people were still attracted by beauty, and the wide world was still a mystery to most of them. You’ve got beauty and mystery here aplenty: the sea, the skies, the wildlife, so different from anything in Switzerland, but the people not so different after all — man and woman and the children they love. It’s the antidote to The Lord of the Flies. That’s because the true Lord looks down upon them with benignity.

Click on the image above to see this week’s film.

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