Follow Me, Boys!
by Norman Tokar
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Ruggles, Elliott Reid, Fred MacMurray, Lillian Gish, Vera MilesDirector: Norman Tokar
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Cinematographer: Clifford Stine
Editor: Robert Stafford
Producer: Walt Disney
Producer: Winston Hibler
Writer: Louis Pelletier
Writer: MacKinlay Kantor
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 131 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-02-03
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Closed-captioned; Color; DVD; NTSC
Movie Reviews of Follow Me, Boys!
Movie Review: A home town hero
Summary: 5 Stars
This nostalgic tale is one of my favorite Disney live-action offerings. It begins in 1930, when Lem Siddons (Fred MacMurray), "out of South Chicago" and a veteran of the battlefields of France, is travelling with a low-end jazz dance band, Melody Murphy's Collegians ("We're not collegians any more," he observes wryly), that takes a pit stop in Hickory, a classic small town probably somewhere in southern Illinois (they hope to get Chicago before night, and there's a "Clark County" right next door). Lem has been nicknamed "Counsellor" by his bandmates for the set of law books in his luggage and the correspondence legal course he's always studying; now in his 30's (MacMurray was 58 when he made the film but doesn't look it), he's beginning to feel a need of "roots." When he spots Vida Downey (Vera Miles), secretary and sometime girlfriend of bank president Ralph Hastings (Elliot Reed), and has his attention called to a "clerk wanted" sign at John Hughes's (Charlie Ruggles) mercantile, he decides Hickory is the place to put them down. Within a few weeks, partly in hopes of impressing Vida, he volunteers to serve as scoutmaster if Hickory will form a Boy Scout troop. Starting out with 15 boys in very much improvised kit, he reaches out (as he was once reached out to) to the town's "tough kid," Whitey (Kurt Russell), whose father (Sean McClory), once a respected plumber, has fallen into drink since the death of his wife, and when Ed's heart gives out from all the bootleg whiskey he's consumed, Lem and Vida, by now married but aware they can't have children of their own, take his son in. Through a crisis of leadership brought on by Whitey's appointment as patrol leader, an opportunity to shine in court when the troop's patron, town grand dame Hetty Seibert (Lillian Gish), fights nephew Ralph's attempt to have her declared mentally incompetent, and a delightful interlude in which his 1944 troop gets inadvertantly caught in the middle of a wargaming exercise and ends up capturing a tank, he finds not only the roots he sought but rich fulfillment and--without seeking it--a role as a town hero. When overwork forces him to retire from scoutmastering, he learns just how much Hickory has come to love him and how much influence he has really had (one of his original boys, Hoodoo, has become Governor of the State, while Whitey, after a stint in the Army Medical Corps, is now a town doctor, and Leo an attorney).
Lem's character shows us just how possible it is for even an ordinary American to make a difference, and its image of contented, self-sufficient small town life (including some of its warts, as when Mrs. Seibert declares, "Gossip! That's all anybody does around here--gossip!"), while perhaps a bit idealized, gives a strong sense of the kind of environment in which Disney himself must have grown up, and which didn't really begin to change until the booming economy and the Interstate Highway construction of the 1950's. I personally think the movie would have been better if it had been extended to 1960 (which would certainly have been possible) rather than ending 10 years earlier, but it's definitely highly enjoyable even as it stands, and the closing act, when Hickory proclaims Lem Siddons Day and honors its home-town hero, can bring tears to your eyes. The title (the original source was "God and My Country," a slender novel by "Andersonville" author MacKinlay Kantor) comes from the jaunty marching song, formerly sung by "our outfit over in France," that Lem adopts for his first troop. Families can enjoy this movie over and over, and kids can pick up some important lessons from it.
Summary of Follow Me, Boys!
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