One of the oddest realizations that I had while watching Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 was that I had never before seen a Kurt Russell movie in the theatre. This despite the sheer number of Kurt Russell movies I saw as a child. This was one of my favourites, actually, even though he’s a relatively minor character in it. I would say that this is part of the evidence that Walt really cared about Russell’s career; this was one of two movies he appeared in for Disney in 1968. It starred Dean Jones, one of Disney’s big names. Two years earlier, he’d appeared in Follow Me, Boys! with Fred MacMurray. That’s how Walt groomed you for success, clearly!

Dean Jones is ad executive Fred Bolton. He’s your standard single parent, living in a nice house in the country with his Aunt Martha (Lurene Tuttle). Together, they raise his daughter, Helen (Ellen Janov, who died tragically young in a house fire), a teenage girl with a passion for horses. To which her father is severely allergic. Helen gets riding lessons from S. J. Clemens (Diane Baker), the expense of which angers Fred until he finds out the “S” stands for “Suzie.” They are trying to persuade him that Helen should have a horse of her own, but he’s more concerned about the Allied Drug & Foods account at work. Specifically, Tom Dugan (Fred Clark in one of his last roles) wants his company’s stomach pill, Aspercel, to be marketed to the upper crust.

Fred realizes that he can kill two birds with one stone and buy a horse for Susan, provided he calls it Aspercel and she wins all sorts of things to bring attention to the horse. Once she settles in and gets used to things, she’s succeeding at it—but the pressure of horse shows starts getting to her. She has a sweet little budding romance going with Russell’s Ronnie Gardner, the brother of one of her horsey friends. (She got a horse; he got a car and the job of driving her places.) Ronnie discovers her secret and that she knows about the risk to her father’s job and takes matters into his own hands.

I really like the relationship between Fred and Helen, honestly. At the beginning of the movie, the other girls, including Judy Gardner (Robin Eccles), try to teach her how to sway her father, and Helen is shocked. She frankly intends to level with her father, because the pair of them have always been honest with one another. The only reason she’s balking is that horses are expensive, and she knows it. Likewise, she’s afraid of telling her father how she’s come to feel about the horse shows because she’s afraid of the financial fallout.

Similarly, I liked the way the relationship between Helen and Ronnie is shown. Aunt Martha says that one of the reasons Helen cares so much about horses is that she believes herself to be homely. When Ronnie asks her out, she is genuinely startled by it, because she does not believe it likely that anyone would show interest in her. Ronnie is, however, no fool. Helen is pretty and smart and funny, and he’s gotten to know her a little from her friendship with his sister. And it delights me so that there’s all that emphasis about the fact that he wore a tie on their first date. Let’s face it—at their age, that’s a sign of something. Maybe it’s why they end up taking him to Washington with them, which otherwise is left unexplained.

I didn’t really go through the horsey phase a lot of girls do; come to that, I know women who never outgrew it. At least two of my friends actually own or have owned horses. I went through a dinosaur phase, but by Helen’s age, I think my obsession was Phantom of the Opera. Still, I’m surprised this movie isn’t part of the dialogue more simply because a lot of girls go through the horsey phase. This is a girl who gets her own horse. That alone should make the movie better known.

Though after all it is more about her dad. He doesn’t entirely follow the Comedy Father Pattern; while it’s true that he’s never watched Helen at one of her horse shows before the events of the movie, that is because, as he tells Suzie, he can’t see her in jodhpurs without sneezing. He does everything he can to be a good father, but he’s allergic to her obsession. And he still is at least as interested in getting her a horse as he is in selling patent medicine. He really does want what’s best for her, and he’s just happy that their wishes seem to align so neatly.

I can’t help wondering if Suzie calls herself S. J. on a professional level because she’s well aware that things go easier when parents think they’re dealing with a man. That’s sadly often the case. The movie flirts with feminism; one of Fred’s coworkers is a woman, though she’s such a minor character that I’m not sure who she is, and the one played by Morey Amsterdam has a lot more to do with the story. But aside from a mention that she’s more interested in a two-legged family than a career as a show jumper, Suzie is invariably shown as professional, qualified, and intent on her job.

I don’t know if she’ll throw that away to marry Dean Jones; goodness knows the family wouldn’t be hurt by having a second income stream, for all the happy Dugan keeps suggesting to Fred’s bosses that he should be promoted. (And come on—it’s not as though there’s any doubt that the pair will end up together; this is a Disney movie.) At least I get the impression that he won’t expect her to and will let her do what will make her happy, since he’s already done that against his own wishes in this movie.

This isn’t a great movie, but at the same time, I wish there were more movies like it. Almost every beat in it is predictable. That is certainly true. And it’s not exactly a laugh riot. That is also true, and not just because I’ve basically had it memorized for years. And I don’t know; maybe Suzie will settle down, stop teaching, and end up the stay-at-home parent of more kids than they can afford. (Since Fred doesn’t seem great at living within his means.) Still, this is a movie that you can actually watch as a family that doesn’t rely on anyone’s bodily functions for cheap laughs. Not even the horse’s.

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