Follow Me, Boys!

NOT JUST A SCOUTING PRIMER
Follow Me Boys

A Disney classic, Follow Me, Boys! is much more than a scouting primer. Wonderful performances by some Hollywood greats include Fred MacMurray as Lemuel Siddons, the band member and would-be lawyer turned shopkeeper and scoutmaster, Vera Miles as Vida Downey, the bank secretary turned McMurray supporter, love interest and wife, Kurt Russell in one of his first films as Whitey, the small time boy thug who, losing his drunkard dad, is adopted by Lem and Vida, becomes a stalwart in the troop and goes on to become responsible soldier and MD. Finally there's a wonderful cameo by a screen legend, Lillian Gish as the aged business magnate and McMurray benefactor Hetty Seibert.

The film includes wonderful scenes from the boys building a ramshackle troop clubhouse out of odds and ends to a later troop taking a war-games tank with flour-bag explosives in what the boys think is an all-out war.

If you're looking for deep statements about teen angst (though Russell's...

Hey, Disney! This is the kind of film you should be making!
I remember the tune from when I saw it as a kid in the late 60s, and have hoped to see it again ever since. What a breath of fresh air compared to the tripe that Disney puts out today. Films like these remind us of America's Golden Age. Wonderful performances by all, uplifting singing on the trail, and a heart-rending, happy ending make this film a MUST HAVE in the libraries of parents who want wholesome entertainment for their kids. I wonder why more of the 1960's Disney movies have not come out on DVD. As a parent, I dont have to be woried about foul language ,sexual inuendos, or even "attitudes" that my kids will see glorified when we watch films like these. I gave my copy to a newly-minted Eagle Scout, and will order another for my family...

A home town hero
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,...

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