All we need is Dean Jones, and this would be a bit of a Disney live-action Bingo card. Fred MacMurray? Check. Kurt Russell? Check. Harry Morgan? Check. Cloris Leachman? Check. Even most of the minor characters are played by people who have been in a Disney movie or two before or since. Now, Disney did tend to like a good stable of performers, goodness knows, but when I saw the cast, I knew I had to watch it.
MacMurray is Charley Appleby. As in Follow Me, Boys!, he is a storekeeper; in this, he owns a hardware store. And it is the Great Depression, so money is tight. Even beyond that, Charley’s incredibly stuffy and work-obsessed. His family just acts on the assumption that he’s going to be no fun and not take any interest in their lives, and they’re not wrong. But one day, an angel appears to him and tells him that he was supposed to die, and that got screwed up, and hold on—they’ll get this figured out any minute now. Meanwhile, his boys, having taken to heart his “learn the value of a dollar” speech, get a job—that turns out to be delivering “cooking oil” for a local junkyard operator (Larry D. Mann), because the kids don’t quite get what’s going on.
Honestly, I think the movie is advocating for work-life balance. There is nothing wrong with working; probably a lot of Charley’s worry comes from trying to make ends meet as a store owner during the Depression. But after all, hardware stores at the time kept shorter hours than they do now, and even when Charley is home, he’s not exactly making kites with Willie (Vincent Van Patten, yes one of those Van Pattens) and Rupert (Scott C. Kolden). On the night he decides to be wild and take the family to the movies, Willie and Rupert are already going with the dad next door. Leonora (Kathleen Cody) has plans with beau Ray Ferris (Russell). Even Nettie (Leachman) has other things to do. Because none of them ever assume that Charley will have time for them.
Similarly, the boys are not shown as wrong for trying to earn some money; they are shown as kind of stupid for not realizing that Felix has them delivering booze, but that’s different. (Also, I’m not sure how sending kids who are likely to get pulled over by the cops is a solution to “they recognize our driver,” but there we are.) Honestly, I’m not even sure Charley is wrong for asking them to earn their own money. After all, it is the Depression, and while the Applebys are better off than most, that doesn’t mean they’re entirely well off. They have a hundred bucks at home to loan to handyman Pete (George Lindsey), but with the bank closed, they really probably shouldn’t have loaned it.
There’s also the conflict, though we see little of it, between Ray and Derwood Moseby (actually Ed Begley, Jr.!) for Leonora’s affections. Leonora prefers Ray, who seems to genuinely like her and treat her well, but Nettie assumes that Charley will hate him. She wants Leonora to keep company with Derwood, who apparently is seen as having better prospects. It’s the early ’30s, presumably, and that matters quite a lot given the unemployment rate at the time. We don’t even see enough of Derwood to know why Leonora likes Ray better, but it almost seems not to matter; what matters is that she does.
The Angel Formerly Known As Roy Zerney is barely a character in this movie. If anything, he’s a plot device. He appears with a few special effects now and again—Disney was awfully fond of invisible people in their movies—and makes vague pronouncements about how decisions are pending, but really, what matters is that Charley has come to be a better person. In this case, because Angel. But it could be anything; Disney played around a lot with this format over the years. This isn’t the best example, but it isn’t a terrible one, either.
The strange thing is that I had literally no awareness of this movie’s even having existed until I was writing about Kurt Russell a few months ago and looked up how many movies he’d done for Disney. I don’t remember ever seeing it on the Disney Channel. I don’t remember ever seeing it mentioned anywhere, not in anyone’s discussions of any of the performers. It’s a 1930s bootlegging movie with an angel in it starring half of Disney’s go-to people from the ’60s and ’70s. It’s Fred MacMurray’s penultimate film. It’s the second pairing of MacMurray and Russell, the first of Russell and Leachman (they were both in Sky High), the only pairing of most of the rest of the cast. And I’d literally never heard of it. How does that happen?
And I rented it from Amazon; consider supporting my Patreon so I can keep bringing you fine films you’ve never heard of, either!