Menace on the Mountain (1970)

Director: Vincent McEveety
Writer: Robert Heverly, based on the novel by Mary A. Hancock
Stars: Patricia Crowley, Albert Salmi, Charlies Aidman, Mitch Vogel, Richard Anderson and Dub Taylor

Index: The First Thirty.

The quickfire opening credits, which list no actors at all, underline that this is a TV movie, released to theatres in 1972, but it didn’t start that way. Before that, it was a two-part story on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1970. Before that, it was a book, the debut of M. A. Hancock, who sold the movie rights to Disney before the novel even reached print in 1968.

What’s odd to me about that is that it breaks so naturally into two parts that it doesn’t flow like a feature and thus presumably didn’t flow like a novel. I haven’t read it to find out.

I’m watching for Jodie Foster, because this is her debut as an actress. She was seven when it was first broadcast on TV and nine when it hit theatres. As that might suggest, she is far from the star here, but, at least for the first half, her screen brother is. He’s played by Mitch Vogel, who was fourteen and about to join the main cast of Bonanza for its final three seasons.

He’s Jamie McIver and, at least right now, he is the man of the house, because his father, Jed McIver, is away fighting for the South and may be dead. Reports suggest that he was gutshot in a battle and nobody knows where he is, not even the many Confederate wounded who roll into town, their war over.

Nowadays we’d see Leah McIver as being in charge, as Jed’s wife and Jamie’s mother, but it just didn’t play that way back then. As we soon find, women are more possessions than actual people. Patricia Crowley, nonetheless, gets the top billing. In addition to Jamie, there are two other children: his younger brother Mark and their still younger sister Suellen, in the forms of Eric Shea and Jodie Foster.

Both the latter get lines and scenes but this is clearly Jamie’s show from the outset. We see him first, bringing home a runaway pet pig, Beauregarde, and encountering a panther out in the hills. In town, he talks with the old folk at the general store, the most talkative Cicero Everhart, played by Dub Taylor, and asks those wounded soldiers if they knew his dad.

He also runs into Poss Timmerlake, who the music cues tell us isn’t just a big guy but a bad one too. Just in case we didn’t catch that, he’s happy to grab Beauregarde because he aims to use him as bait for the panther, which now has a thirty-five dollar bounty on its head. Jamie is man enough to stand up for his pet, even if the rest of the townsfolk clearly wouldn’t.

He’s also man enough to grab a rifle almost as long as he is tall and hunt the panther. That bounty would pay the imminent taxes on their cabin. More importantly, he stays honest and refuses to lie when his mother entreats him to not go after the big cat. There are some things a boy shouldn’t have to do, she tells him.

Vogel is an excellent lead here, even though he’s so young. He sells being a kid but he sells being an old enough kid to try to step up when needed because the South has taken his father. And, of course, what he finds is the menace on the mountain. Actually, he finds a whole lot of them, enough that I wondered who or what is referenced in the title.

Most obviously, there’s the panther, but it’s not a menace for long, not with that bounty on its head. While hunting it, Jamie stumbles onto an escaped Yankee prisoner in a cave. We don’t learn who he is now, beyond the enemy, but he’s exhausted so Leah McIver feeds him and lets him rest in their cabin for the night.

That doesn’t sit right with Jamie, but his ma calmly sets him straight. “It’s a possibility that your pa is sick in a Yankee prison,” she states. “If that be so, I’d like to think those people are treating him with humanity.”

Or, on another level, Suellen wonders where his horns are, because everybody knows that Yankees are devils. Without them, she points out, “he looks just like anyone else.” Now, to us, he looks like Richard Anderson, later to be Oscar Goldman on The Six Million Dollar Man, because that’s exactly who’s playing him.

While both the panther and the Yankee are worthy menaces on the mountain, there’s one more and he gradually takes over. That’s Poss Timmerlake, who wants that bounty and their cabin and Leah McIver too. Well, “I’ll take you with it,” is how he phrases it. “It’s time I took a clean woman.” He even plumps himself down in a chair and says he’ll stay until he’s done.

So, just as he pointed his rifle at those other menaces on the mountain, Jamie now points it at Poss and does so with intent. That sets up a showdown in town, though, when Poss has his bullwhip and Jamie has precisely nothing, but that’s when Poss is arrested for not reporting for military service. He’s technically a deserter even if he’s one who never went to begin with.

I’ve been careful to only talk about the first half of this story, the first episode, and not all of that either. What I’ll add is that it feels very odd for the stars to be Patricia Crowley, Albert Salmi and Charles Aidman. Crowley, sure. She runs the McIver household, even if she isn’t a man. Salmi, fair enough. He’s the villain of the piece, even if he’s been carted off to jail before the halfway mark. But Aidman? He hasn’t even shown up yet! And where’s Vogel, clearly the lead; he only gets a “co-starring” credit?

As we roll into the second half, though, this becomes an opportunity for both sides to team up to take on a gang of vicious bushwhackers. If that sounds like it comes entirely out of the blue, then you’re not used to the convenience and predictability of Disney. Everything is set up in the first half for us to know exactly what will happen in the second, who will play every role and how it will all wrap up in the end. It’s at once the best and worst aspect of the film.

There’s nothing surprising here, even down to the moral lessons which are good. Sure, it’s awkward to watch Confederate heroes reading from the Bible with the external double threat of Yankees and panthers outside; and this does come a little close to “very fine people on both sides”, but the tone is all about reconciliation at a crucial historical moment for the United States. The Civil War ends during the first half.

Of course, I’m not watching for history. I’m watching for film history, because this counts as Jodie Foster’s debut. She does well at seven, but has very little to do, even with a lot more screen time than she’d get two movies later in Kansas City Bomber. She delivers her lines well and does everything the littlest McIver needs to do. No wonder director Vincent McEveety was happy to elevate her to a title character in her next film, Napoleon and Samantha.