(8 of 9)
The Strike. The decision did not solve all Walt's problems. The day Pinocchio was released, Germany marched into Poland. The foreign market—in which Disney expects to make about half his take—was cut at least in half. The same problem met Dumbo and Bambi. Meanwhile, Disney had his famous strike. Whatever the rights of the affair—Walt maintained that he was being persecuted by the Communists, the union leaders said he was running a sweatshop—Walt handled it badly and lost the decision gracelessly. The studio was closed down for two weeks. Except for the war, it would probably have closed down for good. For the next four years the U.S. paid Disney's bills while he made educational and propaganda films. On the side, Disney's artists designed insignia for the Armed Forces.
After the war, Walt definitely decided: "We're through with caviar. From now on it's mashed potatoes and gravy." His first four postwar features—Make Mine Music, Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free and Melody Time—looked like mashed potatoes all right, but they didn't bring in much gravy. Disney's next big picture, however, made plenty: Cinderella may eventually outgross Snow White. And though Alice in Wonderland was a flop, Peter Pan was another smash hit. which exchanged Barrie sentiment for Hollywood slapstick and almost made the crocodile the hero.
Yet the wolf was still haunting Disney's door. Production costs on cartoons were rising so fast that they gobbled up the profit as it came in. Walt turned to another source of income. With funds blocked in Britain, he made four live-action features between 1950 and 1953: Treasure Island, Robin Hood, The Sword and the Rose, Rob Roy. They were all amazingly good in the same way. Each struck exactly the right note of wonder and make-believe. The mood of them all was lightsome, modest. Nobody was trying to make a great picture. The settings, in the British countryside, were lovely—wide swards and sleepy old castles and glens full of light. Best of all, Disney was careful to choose his principals—Richard Todd, Glynis Johns, Joan Rice, Bobby Driscoll—not for their box-office rating or sexual decibel, but rather as friends are chosen, for their good human faces and pleasant ways. As a result, each of the pictures was just what a children's classic is supposed to be: a breath of healthy air blown in from the warm meadows of faraway and long ago.
It was a promising start, and the new 20,000 Leagues, for all its mechanical clank and ponderousness, is something of a continuation. If Disney goes on at this rate, he will soon have compiled a film library of live-action legends to match his collection of animated fairy stories, and the one should be quite as suitable for periodic redistribution as the other.