The Swiss Family Robinson (Buena Vista), like most of Walt Disney's screen versions of the children's classics (17 to date), is good Disney and bad culture. Ostensibly, the film is based on the world-famed boy's book, published in 1812-13, by Johann Wyss, who was inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to produce his own castaway chronicle and give his principal characters the good old Swiss name of Robinson.
Wyss piously proclaimed his tale to be a tract intended to teach children "how blessed are the results of patient continuance in well-doing." What he actually wrote was a sort of sissified, Swissified Tarzan story, describing a number of innocently improbable adventures that took place on an amusingly improbable tropical island populated with an absolutely absurd fauna of Asiatic tigers, African lions, Australian kangaroos, Amazonian anacondas, North American grouse, Mongolian asses and Swiss prigs.
With the exception of one redundant brother (Jack, a "bold lad 10 years old"), Disney retains the whole famdamily (John Mills, Dorothy McGuire, James MacArthur, Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran) and most of the menagerie too—one of his press releases proudly points out that the film contains "some 150 myriad animals.'' But except for the shipwreck and the tree house and one or two minor incidents, he abandons the book's plot and substitutes more photogenic, made-in-Hollywood situations.
Still, it's a great show for what the Disney organization has called "the under-twelve sector," and even though it runs long enough (2 hrs. 6 min.) to make the over-twelve sector squirm. Family seems likely to recoup most of Disney's 1960 losses: $1,500,000. The tigers are pretty, the boa is a swallowpaloosa, the tree house is a little boy's daydream. And the violent, ludicrous last-reel battle with the pirates is a grand display of blow-the-man-downmanship—a regular Donald Duck comedy in live action.