The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.3

There’s a really strange moment early in episode three where it just repeats a scene from episode one. It’s very curious, almost as though they might have done a “previously on…” but they didn’t want to make anybody who missed either of the first two installments on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color think that they really needed to have seen them to follow the narrative. I guess that speaks to producers’ and networks’ estimation of their audience’s intelligence in 1964.

Our son enjoyed the third part more than the second, and I did as well. It’s a really tense story where the Scarecrow has to put a very complex plan together very quickly to free two prisoners from the general, and he has to rely on making a bet on one man’s better nature for it to succeed. Superbly directed and acted, just like the other two, this was a real treat.

I’ll go to my grave grumbling that Disney didn’t make a full season of these. The story comes to a reasonable stopping point, but there’s a lot more that they could have done with this premise. Nevertheless, what we got was even better than I had been hoping for over the last thirty years. This is up there with 20,000 Leagues as one of the most entertaining things that Disney did back in its classic period. Get yourself a Disney Movie Club subscription and see for yourself.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.2

For thirty years, I was mildly annoyed that this program was so difficult for people to watch. Now I’m absolutely infuriated that Disney only made three episodes of it. I understand “we make three episodes, we can cut it into a movie.” That’s not good enough for me anymore. There should’ve been twenty-four of these, minimum. I’m sure Disney could do it now and do an acceptable, serviceable job, but I want twenty-four episodes with Patrick McGoohan and George Cole and all the guest stars of the day. This one features Patrick Wymark as a member of the Scarecrow’s gang. General Pugh figures out his haste in paying off old debts quite suddenly means that he must be a smuggler. So our hero has to make an example of the traitor before he can squeal.

So our son’s not enjoying this as much as I am. Nobody is, ever, probably. This time, he grumbled aloud that he was “ready for some Scarecrow action.” What he got was quite surprising. Wymark is put on trial before an assemblage of his masked fellows. I guessed how it would be resolved, but the rest of the hour was satisfyingly twisty and unpredictable, with Dr. Syn having to stay a step ahead of some very intelligent villains. The kid enjoyed the first episode more than this, with a footnote that its opening chase scene felt “like fluff,” and was therefore unnecessary, but he allowed that the two courtroom scenes this time – one in an official court and one for smugglers to judge their own – were pretty good.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.1

There was a little shouting around these parts a couple of months ago, the sort of all capital letters bellowing in which one engages when a lost media treasure shows up unexpectedly. Here, it was the thunderous revelation that Disney had released a no-frills but very nice collection of something I’ve wanted to see for more than thirty years: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. I read about it in that great, great old book of classic television Harry and Wally’s Favorite TV Shows, and only seen a clip and some pictures. In a truncated movie version, it showed in British movie theaters at Christmas 1963, and showed up in full form across three episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in February 1964, meaning Patrick McGoohan made it in between the half hour run and the hour-long seasons of Danger Man.

So there it was, sitting in Disney’s subscription Movie Club, on Blu-ray since late 2019. They don’t draw much attention to these things, do they? Also on Blu-ray exclusive to this club, by the way, are a whole pile of good old live action films that we’ve watched for these pages: Return to Oz, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the only Witch Mountain movies that matter, Watcher in the Woods, even The Black Hole, which isn’t worth my dollars to upgrade, but the others certainly are. You may balk at joining a subscription club, but honestly, anybody who can’t get their money’s worth out of this thing isn’t trying very hard.

So anyway, a paycheck later – okay, not that much – I finally had this, along with all these long-sought treasures, which, back in 2018, I wrote about, figuring I’d have to resort to a bootleg to ever see it. Delightful timing. I made room on the schedule to watch it this month, and tonight, I enjoyed every minute of it. Patrick McGoohan plays the mild-mannered vicar Dr. Syn, who is, by night, the Robin Hood of the Dover Coasts. George Cole is his assistant, Jill Curzon has a tiny role, and Geoffrey Keen is the general who has been commanded by the king to bring in this smuggler by any means necessary. In episode one, he brings a Naval press gang to the area to round up all able-bodied men until someone confesses who is really running this smuggling ring.

I’ve said for years that Disney’s been foolish leaving money on the table by not making this more available, and now that I’ve seen part one, I stand by that. This is really, really good stuff. It’s fairly bloodless, with guns shot out of hands and blows thrown out of shot, but it’s exciting and intelligent. The general is ruthless but not dumb, and nothing’s played for laughs. Admittedly I watch a lot of old teevee, but this felt quite timeless, honestly. A remake’s director could film this script again tomorrow and not need to change very much. There’s perhaps more music than a modern production might employ, but you can hear Thurl Ravenscroft in the theme tune, and that’s never a bad thing.

Actually, while nothing is played for laughs, there is a knee-slapper at the beginning. Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was hosted by Unca Walt himself, who gave a little introduction to whatever the program was showing in any given week. This time, Walt bafflingly told audiences that the Scarecrow, Dr. Syn, was a real historical person, and that the locals still talk about him. I guess nobody told him that this is a fictional character who was created just fifty years previously. Thanks for green-lighting this great show, Walt, but we’ll skip what you have to say tomorrow evening, okay?

The Saint 3.6 – The Saint Steps In

Afraid our son wasn’t in the right frame of mind for tonight’s episode of The Saint. He said that he enjoyed all the fights – there’s a brawl about every six minutes – and didn’t like all the smooching, but he got lost in a plot detail. He’s done this before when he’s a little tired and overstimulated, but he convinced himself that the story’s macguffin was vitally important to his understanding of the plot. Plus he misheard “Process G” as something else, and stayed completely confused until he asked us to pause and explain why in the world some American company is going to pay an old man a million dollars for processed cheese.

Since he didn’t understand the macguffin, he decided the story was too complex for him and tuned out. It’s been a while, but I remember a New Avengers left him similarly stumped and bored. Interestingly, he realized afterward just where he misunderstood. He recited straight back to us a pretty good definition of a macguffin, that it’s merely the object that drives the plot and the action. Once he understood he was hung up on something unimportant, he conceded that he enjoyed the scraps.

And that’s a shame, because he could have enjoyed a good one, packed with great actors, with a very funny opening. It begins with Simon in a fancy hotel bar overhearing two young men mocking him, because he’s got the looks of a fellow upon whom damsels in distress throw themselves. Cue, immediately, a damsel in distress played by Annette Andre.

So Simon doesn’t give her story of death threats and macguffins any attention, congratulates the chaps on pulling a good gag, and has to run to her rescue because some villains, among them Peter Vaughan, Neil McCarthy, and Michael Robbins, really did send her that death threat because they want her father’s macguffin. McCarthy and Andre appeared together a few years later in a Randall and Hopkirk. Other familiar faces include Justine Lord as the maneater who wants to do all the smooching that bothered the kid, along with Ed Bishop, Geoffrey Keen, and David Jackson. That is a really terrific cast for a fun and entertaining story. Hopefully he’ll be less wired for the next episode, although I’m not expecting him to recognize Justine Lord in it since he tuned her out completely tonight.

What We’re Not Watching: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

We’re not watching Disney’s 1964 mini-series The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh for our blog, because both the original television version and the feature film, called Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow, are out of print. It seems to be one of the most curious omissions from Disney’s extensive library of old live-action material, a project that has only been released in limited editions and returned to the “Disney Vault” to collect dust while bootleggers profit.

Doctor Syn was the hero of a series of juvenile adventure novels written by Russell Thorndyke. Most of the books appeared in the 1930s and were still pretty popular with kids into the seventies. I remember seeing copies in the library with the same sort of design, and appeal, as Jack London’s books, or those lurid 1960s hardbacks-for-kids editions of Kidnapped and Treasure Island. The stories are set in the 1770s, where the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn appears to be a respectable English vicar in a remote coastal village, but by night, he dresses in a horrifying Scarecrow costume with a glow-in-the-dark mask and leads a band of smugglers, getting in needed material from France to avoid the crippling taxes levied by the king. With the military bent on destroying the ring, and constantly capturing one low-level smuggler or another, it’s full of daring escapes, cunning plans, last-minute rescues, that sort of thing.

There was a feature film at the height of the books’ popularity in the thirties, and then Hammer and Disney went at the source material in the early sixties. Hammer might fairly be accused of hearing a big idea coming down the pipe and rushing something into production. That version stars Peter Cushing as the renamed “Captain Clegg.” Disney’s has Patrick McGoohan as Syn, with George Cole as his ally Mipps. The three-part adaptation was shown on the ABC anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in 1964. It also features some familiar faces from 1960s British film and television like Jill Curzon, Geoffrey Keen, and Patrick Wymark.

Like some other Disney material that we’ve seen, Scarecrow was released in a variety of formats and lengths. The 150-minute TV version was edited down to a 100-minute feature film which was shown in several countries. In the 1980s, the series started to get a small, strange, underground buzz as something worth looking out for. You’d see it mentioned here and there as a lost classic worth seeing. The delightful guidebook Harry and Wally’s Favorite TV Shows, essential in its day, singled out McGoohan’s wild and manic performance as the Scarecrow and made it sound like something I needed to see.

It was out on VHS for a while. There was a limited release of an edit of the movie (possibly a little different from the first movie release), but in that old Disney way, it became impossible to find. A limited edition DVD came out in late 2008. You can buy a copy for a few hundred dollars on eBay. You can also get a pirated copy from any number of sellers right this minute for a whole lot less, but we don’t do that at our blog.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh has remained in the “Disney Vault” for almost a decade. There are higher profile projects for the Mouse to worry about these days, and smuggling on the Cornish coast hasn’t captured the imagination of any kids in a long time. Still, it’s been about ten years, which is, they say, the average time that the locked-away releases remain in the Vault. Maybe we might see Doctor Syn dust off his mask and scream that terrifying laugh of his again one day soon?

Photo credit: Disney Wiki, which points out that in one of Disney’s recent comic books, the Scarecrow returned to team up with Captain Jack Sparrow, which is probably a far more interesting event than anything that happened in the third, fourth, or fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movies.