By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Duck lays golden eggs.
Albert Dooley (Dean Jones) is a research scientist who brings home a duck as a pet for his young son Jimmy (Lee Montgomery) after the bird accidently gets exposed to radiation while at the lab. To his shock he finds that the duck can now lay eggs with a golden yolk every time she hears the sound of a barking dog. Albert decides to use this to his advantage has he is drowning in unpaid bills, but his neighbor (Joe Flynn), who works at the United States Treasury Department, tries to take the duck away from Albert, so that the government will control it and used the eggs for their own purposes.
The film became notorious as being one of the three that critic Gene Siskel walked out of during his film reviewing career and to which he would brag about for many years later. Roger Ebert described it as “one of the most profoundly stupid movies I have ever seen.” and while I agree it’s no classic I failed to see how it was any sillier than any of the other Disney movies that came out during the same decade.
With that said the plot is loopy although it does define what the term bullion means, so in that respect it’s actually a bit enlightening. The concept though of having a duck lay an egg every time it hears barking is pretty dumb especially when the barking comes from humans who don’t sound anything like a real dog especially Jones’s pathetic attempts. I also didn’t understand why a pinging noise resembling bell had to be heard each time an egg was laid. Did the radiation cause this to occur too?
The action is pretty light for Disney standards and the only two funny parts are when Sandy Duncan, who plays Jones’s wife, tries to a deposit a golden yolk at a bank as well as when they try to find their duck on a farm amidst hundreds of other ducks who all look the same. The film also comes with a car chase finale that seemed to be a standard plot device for Disney movies of that era although this one is more restrained and not as funny or exciting.
Jones is bland while Duncan and Terry Roberts, who plays Jones’s lawyer friend, are far more amusing. Both Roberts and Duncan had starred together that same year in Star Spangled Girl and they could’ve easily have played the couple while Jones could’ve been cut out of it completely and not missed at all.
Montgomery is cute in his film debut and Flynn is funny as the exasperated neighbor. He had co-starred in many Disney films during his career and seemed to have a different color of hair with each role. In some of them his hair was graying while in others it was jet black and here it had a reddish tint. I also found it ironic that he plays a character with a backyard pool and at one point he gets pushed into it as in real-life he ended up mysteriously drowning in his own backyard pool just three years after this film came out.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: June 30, 1971
Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes
Rated G
Director: Vincent McEveety
Studio: Buena Vista Distribution
Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube
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