In Search of the Castaways (1962)

In Search of the Castaways Having children on a rescue mission is smart because when they find the corpse their piercing shrieks will alert everyone.Unfortunately, the rescue effort in this adventure also includes a useless senior.Convinced that their shipwrecked father, Captain Grant (Jack Gwillim), is alive somewhere between South America and New Zealand, Robert (Keith Hamshere) and his sister Mary (Hayley Mills) recruit a Scottish lord (Wilfrid Hyde-White) to lead their expedition.Along for the ride are an elderly professor (Maurice Chevalier) and the Lord's son (Michael Anderson, Jr.).Together, the quintet faces an array of adversaries, from giant condors to Mother Nature's wrath, to a nefarious gunrunner (George Sanders).While the harrowing adventure is elongated by a red herring wrong turn, when Captain Grant's whereabouts is finally revealed this Disney adaptation of a Jules Verne tale really gets rolling.Mind you, once they find their father alive, there goes the insurance money. Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

I'll give Disney's "In Search Of The Castaways" a seven out of ten because of the possibilities, not for what it is! If you were to take all the noted bloopers from the original Star Wars series, you'd run out of fingers, instantly! Compared to other Disney live action films and some real turkeys, this film fared much better. Not everyone is into Maurice Chevalier and I am not one of them. But he did manage to play the bumbling fool of a professor very well. Sometimes you have to overlook the Disney staple of sticking to sugary family fare. We cant all have homeboys on top of a mountain, spraying graffiti. Quite frankly, the movie really suffers from simply becoming outdated. I wish the movie moguls would think to look at this movie one day-for a remake. If anything, I like the sudden idea of being caught and trapped on a slope, riding on a loosened mountain chunk down a ravine. The next in line biggest adventure, would be the tied to a rope, upside down, swinging wildly in the air! COOL. I give it a seven, for the possibilities. Robert.

After so many attempts by others to recapture the magic of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's own belated return to the Jules Verne genre must have been greeted with tremendous anticipation. When it did finally come however, with 1961's In Search of the Castaways, audiences can only have responded with a bewilderment bordering on stupefaction. Castaways has a scenario so bizarre and features a set of adventures so patently absurd, that it makes Journey to the Center of the Earth seem like cinema verité. The fact that the makers appear to have been perfectly aware of these illogicalities and may have been indulging in some kind of a rarified joke only makes things worse in my opinion. You tell me: The children of a marooned sea captain receive from him a message in a bottle—a bottle found in the stomach of a shark. Unlikely, you say? So do about five characters in the film itself--repeatedly. Later, the party decides to rest overnight in "The Land of Many Earthquakes." The hut they sleep in seems, nonetheless, to have been standing for hundreds of years so they feel confident it will make it through one more night--and they tell us so. An enormous tremor strikes within moments and shakes the entire building down before our eyes. During this quake, the stone ledge the party has been standing on breaks loose and becomes a bobsled hurtling down the mountainside. Do the explorers cling to it for their lives in mortal terror? No, they laugh and yodel and enjoy the ride as if nothing at all were at stake--which the audience has now begun to realize is in fact the case. Soon, they come to the broad, treeless landscape of the Argentine pampas; here, the earth is parched and cracked, the sky cloudless. In spite of this, Indians warn them to beware of floods. The Europeans take pains to point out the extreme unlikelihood of such an eventuality--and are, of course, shortly interrupted by an 8-foot wall of water that reaches from horizon to horizon. As Disney expert Leonard Maltin remarks, "There seems no earthly purpose for throwing in a giant condor or a massive flood, and the slightly off-center feeling is only amplified when Maurice Chevalier starts to sing about their troubles!" On and on it goes until about the midway point of the film, at which time the searchers learn that their whole expedition has been a wild goose chase to begin with and that they've been looking on the WRONG CONTINENT. And the audience throws up its hands. If we could write In Search of the Castaways off as a low-budget quickie like Valley of the Dragons, padded out with stock footage, the whole thing would be easier to figure. But no—-extreme care was taken with Castaways. It has lush Technicolor photography, stunning miniatures, and a non-stop parade of the most gorgeous matte paintings you ever saw (Peter Ellenshaw). The special effects are, in fact, some of the best in any Verne film and were accomplished by the very same people who did similarly magnificent work for 20,000 Leagues. Yet the situations these effects are called upon to depict are so far-out that they would have been more appropriate in something like This Island Earth or First Spaceship on Venus. The aforementioned "sleigh ride" for instance, really does play out like an attraction at Disneyland, and would probably be interpreted by today's critics as a crass send-off for the inevitable theme park tie-in. (Actually, it seems to have been the other way around, with a Disneyland ride providing inspiration for the movie; the park's Matterhorn Bobsleds attraction opened four years earlier and was based on a different film, 1958's Third Man on the Mountain). Most curious of all, however, is the way this script actually rubs your nose in each of its many improbabilities and underlines every deus ex machina. In retrospect the filmmakers do seem to have tried to warn us in advance; the title work introduces the movie as "Jules Verne's Fantasy Adventure." This might have been our cue that it was all intended as some kind of a spoof of the genre, or "live action cartoon," and ought to be taken as such. Still, the joke sails right over my head. Make no mistake: In Search of the Castaways has plenty going for it. But the screenplay (based on Verne's 1865 book Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant) ought to have been sent back down Dopey Drive to the Story Department for some heavy revision. (Incidentally, the George Sanders villain in this movie, Thomas Ayerton, reappears in Verne's L'Île mystérieuse—which happens to be a sequel to both this book and 20,000 Leagues). Director Robert Stevenson, at any rate, did get another crack at Verne-flavored adventure for Disney—-1974's Island at the Top of the World—-and he fared much better there.

Part of Jules Verne's trilogy that includes "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" with Captain Nemo as the antagonist, "Mysterious Island" with Captain Grant as the castaway protagonist going up against Nemo, and "The Children of Captain Grant...aka 'In Search of the Castaways'" with (as the titles suggests) the children of Captain Grant as the protagonists in search of their castaway father. Even if Walt Disney had made "Mysterious Island" (in 1961 another studio made a pretty nifty though obviously 60's style sci-fi movie from it) there still wouldn't be much to tie this film to Walt Disney's classic starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason. Without knowledge of the characters from "Mysterious Island" there is no clue that the Grant children live in the same world as the first film, let alone that of Captain Nemo. With that said, the film does work as a wild and fun Disney adventure (Disney films are a genre all their own). Starring familiar Disney faces such as Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier (hey it could have been Annette Funicello and Burl Ives) this is Walt Disney's film not Jules Verne's and a good time can be had by the whole family. Some of the special effects are inferior to Disney's standard but Mills and company are very watchable as are the endless stream of natural disasters that befall them. Recently remakes have been made of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Too bad a mini-series involving the entire trilogy wasn't tackled. Just a thought.