If I have seen this movie before, I do not remember having done so. It’s not as forgettable as Condorman, because nothing is as forgettable as Condorman, but a cowboy movie set and filmed on Kauai starring James Garner shouldn’t be something you can legitimately forget having seen. This means the movie is high on my Go Ahead and Remake It list, and the only shame is that Garner isn’t alive anymore to be involved. The movie somehow manages to suppress his natural charm in a layer of surliness without seeming to realize what it’s missing, too. It’s not subverting anything; it’s just forgotten to make his character more appealing.

He is the eponymous cowboy, one Lincoln Costain of Texas. I’m not sure when this is set, so I don’t know how plausible it is to have a Texan named Lincoln, but anyway. He’s from Fort Worth. He was shanghaied and has ended up in Kauai, having jumped ship. He is found by young Booton MacAvoy (Eric Shea), who lives with his mother, Henrietta (Vera Miles), on the largest potato farm in Hawaii. However, little of it is under cultivation and they’re really struggling and honestly, they’re about to go bankrupt. They are also constantly bothered by feral cattle. Costain suggests they solve both their problems by rounding up said cattle and selling them.

Let’s start with the most obvious. While this is not even the most racist movie Disney made in the ’70s, its treatment of the natives is . . . not great. Okay, so they do appear to be played by people of Pacific Islander descent, which is better than a lot of other movies. However, there’s not a lot to them. The housekeeper, Liliha (Elizabeth Smith), gets less character development than Verbena of The Parent Trap—well, frankly, everyone in this movie gets less character development than Verbena of The Parent Trap. But there’s a running thing that the natives would rather play in the water than do the kind of hard work needed to become proper American cowboys. “They’d rather giggle than laugh; they’d rather laugh than eat.” And, sure, that was not an uncommon sentiment in the era in which the movie is set, but in 1974, I’d hope for better.

It’s also not exactly great optics having the natives be completely hopeless and determined to just hang around laughing while the white guy imposes his way of doing things on them. He decides to leave, he’s so frustrated, and the way they get him back is by riding after him, dressed as he wants them to dress, and having the kid yell back his own “I didn’t hear the dinner bell” response. Instead of maybe considering that the way things are done in Texas doesn’t have to be the way things are done in Hawaii? Heck, there’s a character with nothing better to do who could turn out to be a gaucho and know how things are done in South America, where they have some success with cattle.

There’s also “witchcraft,” inasmuch as one of the villains is Malakoma (Nephi Hannemann), who takes against Costain and first tries to fight him—he wins a spear fight and is then punched by Costain and frankly it doesn’t work for me—and then enchants one of the cowboys, Kimo (Manu Tupou), into believing he’s going to die. And while I don’t expect a Disney movie to get into the rich history of Hawaiian beliefs before the coming of Christianity, the way it’s handled is a bit ooga-booga and no little offensive.

Honestly, if you’d put a little less time of the movie into “gee, these guys are bad riders!” and more into getting to know just one or two of them as people, you’d already have started a better movie. Sure, start with Liliha if you want, but the IMDb page lists five of the cowboys, and there are more than that sort of hanging about, and why not start showing them as people? Surely they must have an interest in what we’ll laughingly call the main plot, inasmuch as it’s why they’re becoming cowboys in the first place.

Because that plot doesn’t really hang together, either. Mrs. MacAvoy is broke, and she’s struggling to keep from losing her land. She lost her husband two years earlier and is raising Booton all by herself. Okay, fine. And we have Evil Banker Calvin Bryson (Robert Culp), who wants the land and is willing to sabotage their plans to get it. But he also seems to want the widow herself, possibly, and seems to believe that driving her into bankruptcy will convince her to marry him? And, sure, there are people who’ve tried that approach. But it’s left so vague that it just doesn’t work here. And he’s got Sinister Henchman Marrjua (Gregory Sierra of Barney Miller), who does not, from what I can tell, actually do anything in the movie other than lurk.

Also, there’s a running thing where Costain calls Booton things other than Booton because, seriously, that’s not a name. (A quick Googling turns it up as a last name, I suppose probably Mrs. MacAvoy’s maiden one.) And this is, I guess, supposed to be part of the bonding between man and boy that will eventually lead to the man’s being willing to be a father after all and blah blah blah, and honestly, it just serves to remind me that Booton is a terrible name. And I feel we never get to know his mother well enough that I feel comfortable thinking of her as either Henrietta or Mrs. MacAvoy or “Maca,” which is what the workers seem to call her.

The movie is not adapted from a book, but it feels as though it is in that sense of “there must be a lot they left out.” It’s 91 minutes long and feels like there’s at least about ten or fifteen minutes’ more plot necessary. Or they could cut about half the scenes wherein we see badly chroma keyed scenes of the natives’ riding horses? Walt himself had been one of the pioneers of the process, with his Alice shorts in the ’20s, and he would’ve been heartbroken at how badly it was done here.

The crew on this movie is fun to contemplate, because it seems to be about half old Disney hands—Oscar-winning (for Ship of Fools) production designer Robert Clatworthy didn’t do much for Disney, but it included The Parent Trap and my beloved Summer Magic—and half people Garner knew personally from work on Maverick who would go on to work with him on The Rockford Files. The guy he wins a hat from in the poker game scene was his own long-time personal assistant. Really, the problem with this movie is that it’s neither as impressive as it could be nor as fun as it could be.

Vast amounts of the people involved in this worked primarily in television, including director Vincent McEveety. He directed a lot of Murder, She Wrote and some Columbo, and six episodes of the original Star Trek. While he directed fifteen movies, the first of those is really three episodes of a TV show cobbled together. Almost all his feature credits were for Disney, including the last two Herbie movies (which I like, but which definitely aren’t as good as the first two) and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (which I like, but which definitely isn’t as good as the first one). He is also responsible for The Million Dollar Duck.

I actually ended up paying to rent this, it’s so obscure—though it is on the Disney+ list! Keep me in fine articles like this by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!