From the Archives: Third Man on the Mountain (1959)

It looks like Rudi (James MacArthur) has a sweetheart! Who can resist the charms of cute Janet Munro? You just know she'll snag him by the end of the picture. This lobby card features a scene from the entertaining Third Man on the Mountain (1959), a Walt Disney film based on the Newbury Honor book "Banner in the Sky" by James Ramsey Ullman. Click here to read our full review of the film. 

From the Archives is our latest series of posts where we share photos from the Silverbanks Pictures collection. Some of these may have been sold in the past, and others may still be available for purchase at our eBay store: http://stores.ebay.com/Silverbanks-Pictures 

James MacArthur and Janet Munro - A Disney Duo

Every once in a while when you are watching a film you probably find yourself proclaiming, "Hey! These two actors also played together in [fill in the blank]!" 

Well, like you, the bloggers behind The Flapper Dame and Phyllis Loves Classic Movies experienced this, too, and so they decided to launch The Duo Double Feature Blogathon giving us clever film buffs a chance to compare the different characters and films of a duo of our choice. I chose James MacArthur and Janet Munro. They were an adorable young couple who starred together in only two Walt Disney films: Third Man on the Mountain ( 1959 ) and Swiss Family Robinson ( 1960 ), and then went on their own separate acting paths, with MacArthur focusing on television work and Monro attempting to alter her wholesome image with spicier British dramas. 

James MacArthur, the son of screenwriter Charles MacArthur and actress Helen Hayes, made his Disney debut in Light in the Forest ( 1958 ), opposite Carol Lynley, and he proved himself to be a talented and very personable actor. Walt Disney liked his honest face and natural acting ability, and young girls liked his rugged good looks and shy demeanor. He was an ideal hero for Disney's live-action features. 

Third Man on the Mountain was his second feature for the studio and Janet Munro was selected to portray his sweetheart Lizbeth in the film. Munro caught the eye of Disney when she came to audition among 300 other actresses for the part of Katie O'Gill, the green-eyed winsome Irish lass in Darby O'Gill and the Little People ( 1959 ). She had an appealing spunky nature and was quickly signed to a five-picture contract for the studio.

Third Man on the Mountain tells the story of a boy who joins a famous mountaineer's climbing expedition in the hopes of discovering a route to reach the top of the Matterhorn, which was long deemed insurmountable. His mother and uncle aim to curtail the boy's desire to become a mountain guide but he is encouraged to pursue his passion by two dear friends, hotel owner Theo ( Laurence Naismith ) and Lizbeth ( Munro ). 

MacArthur's character, Rudi, is a bright lad who has a love for mountaineering ingrained in his heart. His father died attempting to find a path to the Matterhorn's pinnacle, and so he understands his family's fear for him when he takes off climbing but, at the same time, he knows that this is his passion and what he was meant to do in life. He is brave enough to stand up against the other mountain guides who ridicule him as a "mere boy" but he finds he must curb his impetuousness during his climbs, especially when it endangers the lives of those whom he is guiding. 

Munro's character, Lizbeth, is only happy when Rudi is happy. Together with Theo, she helps Rudi train for his climb up the Matterhorn, keeps him focused on climbing, and also strengthens his confidence. She is a sweet girl who always has a smile on her face. She is also frank and fearless. She tells Rudi exactly what she thinks of him if he fails in any way to live up to the hero she believes him to be. 

MacArthur and Monro's second film together came just a year later. Swiss Family Robinson was an adventurous re-working of Johann Wyss' famous 1812 novel about a family ( John Mills, Dorothy McGuire, Tommy Kirk, MacArthur, and Kevin Corcoran ) who get shipwrecked on an uncharted island. Janet Munro's character, Roberta, shows up unexpectedly when she and her father arrive on the island as prisoners of pirates.  

MacArthur's character, Fritz, is quite a different fellow compared to Rudi. He is practically a grown man; he displays admirable leadership qualities, is willing to work hard with his family to make the island a decent home, and demonstrates good judgment in difficult situations. Roberta admires these qualities, but at times he seems too proud and cock-sure of himself, and so she amuses herself with his younger brother Ernst ( Kirk ), sparking jealous feelings between the brothers. 

Roberta isn't the carefree country girl of Third Man in the Mountain. She is a well-bred young lady from London's society. To her the prospect of choosing to live in seclusion on a deserted island is preposterous. But Fritz's pioneering spirit and his hard-working ways eventually win her over and, at the end of the time, we are to suppose that they wed. 

A wedding between MacArthur and Monro is something that I for one would have liked to have seen happen in real life because they made such a lovely couple onscreen. Offscreen, there was no spark of romance between them ( Munro was actually married at the time of filming Third Man on the Mountain ), but had Munro or MacArthur pursued their careers with Walt Disney studios I'm sure they would have been teamed up again.

Like Father, Like Son - Celebrity Father/Son Look-Alikes

Happy Father's Day to all the proud papas of the world! This Father's Day we thought we'd pay tribute to some of the famous actor dads of yor through the legacy they left behind them in their sons....their facial legacies! 

Here is a selection of some of our favorite lookalike fathers and sons: 

Leslie Howard and Ronald Howard 

Ronald Howard was a true-blue Brit like his father and especially resembled him during the 1950s when he starred in the television series "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" taking the role of the famous detective that his father never had a chance to play. 

Robert Walker and Robert Walker Jr. 

If there ever was an actor who gave birth to a mini-me it's Robert Walker. And he didn't do it once, but twice! Brother Michael Walker also resembled his father with his mop of curly brown hair. 

Lloyd Bridges with sons Beau and Jeff

Lloyd Bridges made a ton of films, it's a wonder he had time to raise a family! Beau and Jeff made a name for themselves as actors starting the now famous Bridges family acting legacy. 

Desi Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. 

From his marriage to Lucille Ball, the father of Babaloo had only one daughter and son ( and his name wasn't Little Ricky ). Both children took after papa with those big Cuban eyes really popping out in Junior as he got older. 

Kirk Douglas and sons Joel and Michael

Michael Douglas is always touted as being the twin boy of Big Daddy Kirk but we hold that Joel bore more of his facial features. Just look at that chin!

John Wayne and Patrick Wayne

When it came to looks, little Pat topped his father to whom he owes that prominent square-jaw, just ripe for punching. All Pat was missing was his dad's hip-swinging walk. Makes you wonder if brother Ethan and him ever imitated their dad growing up. 

Charles MacArthur and James MacArthur

Screenwriter Charles MacArthur once encouraged his son "To pursue anything you like, just don't become a screenwriter...it's a fate worse than death!" Well, he followed his old man in the acting industry and made an even bigger name for himself than Charles did. 

Robert Mitchum and James Mitchum

One bad boy breeds another. Little James got his start in acting at the age of 8 but it wasn't until Thunder Road ( 1958 ) that girls started swooning over him just like they did with his famous dad. 

Errol Flynn and Sean Flynn

The spirit of adventure carried over from Errol to his son Sean. After a brief stint as an actor he tried his hand at big-game hunting in Africa before becoming a photojournalist, eventually being killed in Cambodia.

Jose Ferrer and Miguel Ferrer

Miguel Ferrer was the son of Jose and Rosemary Clooney but he doesn't look anything like Mom. Not only did Jose pass down that famous schnozz but he gave his son his giant ears too! Too bad he didn't give him hair.

Third Man on the Mountain ( 1959 )

In the late 1950s, Walt Disney took a vacation to Zermatt, Switzerland and, upon his return home to the States, was inspired to produce a film that was as entertaining as the summer holiday he had taken. So, with his usual infallible skill in selecting personnel, Disney rounded up a crackerjack team of individuals to create an exciting adventure based upon the popular 1954 novel "Banner in the Sky" by James Ramsey Ullman. What resulted was Third Man on the Mountain, a film that captures all the majestic beauty of the Swiss Alps and the intrepid spirit of the mountaineers during the golden age of Alpining.

James MacArthur excels in the part of Rudi Matt, a young boy working as a dishwasher at an inn while yearning to become a mountain guide like his late father, who perished in a fall while attempting to climb the impregnable Citadel ( now known as the Matterhorn ). His mother and his uncle, still shaken from the death of his father, have forbidden him to do any climbing and attempt to quench his desire to conquer the mountain. But encouraging Rudi to pursue this dream are his friends Lizbeth ( Janet Munro ) and Teo ( Laurence Naismith ), the cook at the inn who helps him train for the climbs he attempts in secret. 

On one of his secret treks up the Alps, he discovers and saves the life of Captain Winter ( Michael Rennie ) an illustrious mountaineer who had fallen in a crevasse. Winter perceives the natural climbing ability of Rudi and invites him to become a bearer on his climb to examine a route to the pinnacle of the mountain. Rudi's foolhardy daring endangers the lives of the other climbers on this trip and it is then that Rudi learns what it means to be a true guide, just as his father was. These lessons serve him well when he is given a second chance and journeys once more with climbers Winter and Saxo ( Herbert Lom ) becoming the third man on the mountain. 

"It has the sort of high altitude thrills to send the viewer cowering deep in his seat and the sort of moving drama to put him on the edge of it". Variety magazine pegged the excitement of Third Man on the Mountain perfectly with their review of the film when it was released in theatres in November 1959. 

Most public schools had "Banner in the Sky" on the required reading list for its lessons of unselfishness, patience and perseverance....all lessons which Rudi had to learn himself. Screenwriter Eleanore Griffon kept all of these themes intact for the film and encompassed them in a thrilling adventure that entertains jung und alt alike. 

Third Man on the Mountain took three months to film with director Ken Annakin and the cast and crew doing extensive location shooting in the Zermatt area. MacArthur, Rennie, Lom and other cast members trained for several weeks with mountain guides to get the knack of climbing steep precipices. MacArthur recalled climbing up to 11,500 feet and, fortunately, the cast suffered no injuries. The only accident occurred when they returned to England to commence studio shots and MacArthur fell off an artificial rock.

While on location, actress Helen Hayes ( MacArthur's mother ) and Joyce, his girlfriend, visited the set and Annakin lured them into dressing up for guest appearances as mother/daughter tourists. Another bit of interesting trivia : Switzerland enraptured Walt Disney so much during the making of the film that it inspired him to add a new attraction to Disneyland - the Matterhorn. 

Third Man on the Mountain is filled with just the right mixture of drama, humor, and nail-biting tension. It captures the amazing hardiness and daring-do of the 19th century climbers who risked their lives to conquer mountains such as the Matterhorn using only their raw hands and strands of rope and the grandeur of the scenery transports the audience right to the Alpine mountains along with the climbers. These elements, along with a top-notch cast, combine to make it one of the best live-action films to ever come out of Walt Disney Studios, a film that yodel-want-to-see again and again! 

Swiss Family Robinson ( 1960 )

"It was a good thing we set out to do. We were right, and all that hasn't changed just because we were shipwrecked."

Papa Robinson's plans of providing a new home for his family in the burgeoning colony of New Guinea go awry when the ship carrying them from Switzerland to the new land gets shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean after a fierce storm. Robinson ( John Mills ), his wife ( Dorothy McGuire ), and their three sons Fritz ( James MacArthur ), Ernest ( Tommy Kirk ), and Francis ( Kevin Corcoran ) find themselves abandoned by the ship's crew and left to survive on their own. They construct a raft and make their way to a nearby island where they build a home and make a new life for themselves, all the while awaiting to be rescued.

Swiss Family Robinson is loosely based on Johann Wyss' classic novel of the same name published in 1812. Wyss' story had potential but it lacked the action that Disney was seeking for this family adventure film. 

As director Ken Annakin recalled...

"While we were in the mountains near Zermatt shooting Third Man on the Mountain, I remember Bill Anderson saying to me that The Swiss Family Robinson was the subject Walt was toying with as a next picture. I read the book. It was very old-fashioned, and I wondered what Walt's approach was going to be. Bill Anderson and I returned to Burbank and we sat down with Walt. He said, 'Well now, let's throw the whole book out the window. Let's just keep the idea of a Swiss family emigrating, trying to emigrate to America. They get shipwrecked, but they are able to save all the things in the ship. They then make a life on an idyllic island, I think you ought to think of all the things you might like to do, all the animals you could use in an entertaining way. Let's make it a wonderful show for the whole family, with all ideas possible.'"

Walt Disney assigned sketch artist John Jensen to work with director Ken Annakin in creating a storyboard for Swiss Family Robinson. Every scene and every camera angle was plotted in detail. Disney then took the storyboard to screenwriter Lowell S. Hawley and told him to write a story based on what was drawn. It was a novel way to pen a script and turned out to be an excellent way! 

Swiss Family Robinson became Walt Disney's grandest live-action film to date. The entire film took 22 weeks to shot at a cost of approximately $4,000,000. It was also one of the few Disney pictures to be filmed in widescreen. No Hollywood studio sets were used in the making of the movie. It was shot entirely on the Caribbean island of Tobago, providing an authentic tropical backdrop for the intrepid family's escapades. A menagerie of animals were assembled - exotic birds, snakes, tigers, zebras, elephants, lizards and monkeys - and flown to the island to give the appearance that the Robinsons got stranded on a South Pacific island filled with wild creatures. 

The elaborate jungle sets, designed by John Howell, John Hoestli, and Peter Murton, took 5 months to build. The most impressive was, undoubtedly, the tri-level family treehouse which included a stove, hot running water, a skylight roof, and a pirate-proof living room....all the comforts of home. The treehouse became such a beloved edifice that it was given a permanent home at Disneyland, where it was re-constructed in 1962.

"The world is full of nice ordinary people living in nice ordinary little houses on the ground. But didn't you ever dream of a house up on a tree top?"

A previous film version of Swiss Family Robinson was released by RKO in 1940 starring Thomas Mitchell, Edna Best, Tim Holt, Freddie Bartholomew and Terry Kilburn. This adaptation focused on the father's desire to stay on the island and have his sons grow into capable men through the survival skills they were learning on the island, while his wife pined to go home to London to resume her social life.

Walt Disney's version had a much happier tone and the Robinson family displayed the proper attitude that one should have when getting stranded ( in any situation ) : to make the best of it.

As with most Disney films, casting was paramount and Swiss Family Robinson was filled with seasoned and attractive players.  John Mills is ideal as the patriarch of the family striking just the right note of commanding know-how, tempered with humor. Clearly he was a man not disappointed with the situation but thoroughly enjoying the whole escapade. 

Unlike Edna Best's portrayal of Mother, McGuire has her become a woman who supports her husband in his decisions and keeps quiet about the trials of the island...unless worry prompts her to cry out.

The lovely Janet Munro joins the cast as Roberta, the young woman whom Fritz and Ernst rescue from pirates when they take their kayak journey around the island. MacArthur and Kirk were certainly a drawing feature for the young female audience who no doubt would have loved to have been stranded on an island with the boys. Moochie is the only performer who gets out of hand in the film, and seems to be bent on getting himself, and the family, into danger. Rounding out the cast is the legendary Japanese actor Sessue Kayakawa as the leader of the pirates, and Cecil Parker as Roberta's grandfather.

Swiss Family Robinson was released just before Christmas, on December 21, 1960. Critic reviews for the film were mixed, with the New York Times calling it a "grand adventure yarn" while other reviewers found it overlong and the final pirate attack a slapstick travesty. Those critics had their blinders on and failed to realize that the film was made in the spirit of fun and reckless abandon. Nevertheless audiences realized this and they came in droves to see it. The film became the No.1 grossing picture of 1960, earning over 20 million dollars at the box office, nearly twice the return of the second top-grossing film of the year, Psycho.

Swiss Family Robinson gives audiences a ripping good adventure to enjoy and makes for ideal Saturday morning viewing. It has all the key ingredients of an entertaining film - a great story, perfect cast, stellar special effects, and beautiful cinematography. Through the Robinsons we can vicariously enjoy the life of castaways and live out the dream of having a sprawling tree pad...and all within the short span of two hours.