SUMMER MAGIC was one of Disney’s seven rollouts for 1963. Though not a big hit (Walt’s The Sword In The Stone and Son Of Flubber were 4th and 5th at the boxoffice, sandwiched between the decidedly un-Waltish Tom Jones and Irma La Douce) it did manage a comfortable 25th place, grossing $11,000,000. That was due to the popularity of star Hayley Mills, in her 4th of six Disney pictures. It’s also the weakest; she thought so, too. *

The Ragtime Era, early 1900s. Widowed mother, financially strapped, takes her teenage daughter and two younger sons from the city to live in a country house outside a small town in Maine. They meet nice folks, fix up the place, gain a dog (a ‘shaggy’ one, naturally), teach a snooty cousin to be agreeable and then the girls match up with two handily handsome fellas. The End.

Directed by studiously bland James Neilson (nine Disney flicks), Sally Benson’s script was based on the 1911 novel “Mother Carey’s Chickens”, done as a movie in 1938.Maybe that version plays better. This one, a wholesome comedy with a smidge of drama and seven pretty feeble songs, (okay, “The Ugly Bug Ball” is passably cute) is so insubstantial it evaporates as it unfolds.

Incapable of a bad performance even when the material is weak, Mills handles the job effortlessly, as does Dorothy McGuire as the mother. Hayley got some anti-antiseptic relief in her next part in The Chalk Garden. Blessed/cursed with a beatific aura, McGuire had been typecast playing mamas of one kind or another since at least Friendly Persuasion in 1956. This was her ninth mom in a row; her next was proto-mother The Virgin Mary in The Greatest Story Ever Told. As the transplanted family’s chief supporter, Burl Ives walks thru his ‘genial sage’ part with patience. One-time ‘Gidget’ Deborah Walley (1941-2001) plays the the spoiled cousin who finds humility. Pretty and talented, Walley, then 21, was afterwards wasted for years in beach party dross. She deserved better.

Casting—the eligible swains: James Stacy, Peter Brown and especially Michael J. Pollard (!) Golly, when you think Disney, these 60’s turks don’t leap to mind. That said, thanks to Lawman and Laredo, Peter Brown was always pretty cool.

110 minutes snore into autumn. With Eddie Hodges (a bit much), Una Merkle, Jimmy Mathers (Jerry’s younger brother, 7),Wendy Turner, O.Z. Whitehead and Eddie Quillan.

That Darn Script

* Walt’s other offspring in ’63: Savage Sam, the actionful sequel to Old Yeller 37th place, Miracle Of The White Stallions 40th, with horses vs. the Wehrmacht, The Three Lives Of Thomasina, 48th and fondly recalled, and at 73rd, kid-charmer The Incredible Journey.

Guess if I’d seen this at age eight (agog from How The West Was Won, convulsed by It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) I might’ve enjoyed it, just because of crushing on Hayley and Walley. But soldering open the cookie jar in the ever-more-worrisome fall of 2023 finds a stale tale. There’s a ravine between bucolic and boring and a rickety rope bridge slants between whimsy and wish-it-would-stop. Like you wish, by now, that this poopy review would.