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.Thanks to jets, which halved the flighttime to Europe starting in 1959, his overseas visits were now more frequent.He and Lillian visited Europe four times in 1960, stopping in London eachtime.They were in Vienna twice that year and were there again in 1961, whenthey also visited London (three times) and Paris.In August 1962 they visitedLisbon, and then London in September.34 Disney found ocean voyages toEurope tedious, his daughter Diane said in 1956  Daddy when he gets awayfrom the studio, and has nothing to do except sightsee and walk around and278 where i am happytalk to people, he gets bored 35 so the greater speed of air travel was madeto order for him.More and more of the films made in the United States were television-flavored, too, not just in their obvious back-lot shooting, flat lighting, ham-fisted music, and reliance on TV-bred actors, but in their tendency to in-struct the audience how to respond to what was happening on the screen,through reaction shots at supposedly funny or touching moments.Movieslike Toby Tyler (1960) are as curiously airless as many TV shows of the time;there is little or no sense that the movie s events are part of life going on out-side the screen.Disney was pleased, though, with the hack TV directors hehired to direct more and more of his theatrical features. I like young tal-ent, he said in 1963. When people get to be institutions, they direct pic-tures with their left hand and do something else with their right. 36 Thosereaction shots in Toby Tyler were probably his editing choices.In live action, as in animation, Disney was spread thinner than ever be-fore, and in consequence he made careless, self-indulgent decisions that un-dermined films he cared about.Pollyanna (1960) may have been fatally hob-bled by its title, as Disney himself believed; but it is also much too long, andaccording to its director, David Swift, Disney rejected his eªorts to trimtwenty minutes from the film and restructure a sequence devoted to a turn-of-the-century bazaar.The eªect would have been to strengthen the film snarrative line and make it less of a nostalgic bath, but Disney insisted that itbe the latter.37Pollyanna was Disney s first film with Hayley Mills, a young (thirteen atthe time of filming) British actress who all but rescues it.The illusion of spon-taneity in her performance is complete and vital, because any sense of cal-culation, whether originating with the actor or imposed by the director, wouldbe deadly.Instead, Pollyanna s goodness (which is most emphatically not thesame as sweetness) seems natural and unforced, and is thus wholly winning.It was no wonder that Disney signed her to a multipicture contract.Mills and her parents, the actor John Mills and writer Mary Hayley Bell,were British film people who, like Richard Todd and Ken Annakin, wereguests in Disney s home.(Fess Parker and James MacArthur, the two youngAmerican actors who succeeded Todd as the principal leading man in Dis-ney films, both spoke warmly of Disney, but neither was ever invited toHolmby Hills.)  I loved going to his home in Hollywood [sic], Hayley Millssaid in an interview published in 1968. In most Hollywood houses, thereare those private viewing theaters for the latest films, and you sit back in thosecomfortable chairs with a drink in your hand, and the Renoirs disappear, andres tles s i n the magi c ki ngdom, 1 959 1 965 279the screen comes down.But at his house, he didn t have a bar in his screen-ing room.He had a soda fountain, and all through a movie, you d hear pshissh,squirt, bubble bubble he was behind there concocting all those wonderfulsodas and sundaes. 38Ken Annakin was ultimately undone, as a Disney director, by the samesort of warm social relationship with Disney.After directing Third Man on the Mountain, Annakin directed Swiss Fam-ily Robinson, a difficult and, for Disney, unusually expensive film (shot en-tirely on the Caribbean island of Tobago, at a cost of $4.5 million) that wasextremely popular when it was released just before Christmas 1960.AlthoughAnnakin worked on the script and storyboards with Disney at Burbank be-fore shooting began early in 1959, Disney never visited Tobago during film-ing, and the film s most distinctive characteristics are clearly Annakin s.Asdiªerent as the film s actors are in accents and acting styles, it is possible tobelieve they are a family, thanks to the way they respond to one another.Thereis real tenderness between John Mills and Dorothy McGuire, as the parents,and the sibling rivalry between James MacArthur and Tommy Kirk is strongbut never overplayed.Because these characters form a believable family, SwissFamily s knockabout qualities this is a film about a family stranded on adesert island and besieged by pirates never quite get out of hand.Not long after Swiss Family s release, on one of Walt and Lillian s visits toLondon in the early 1960s the date is uncertain they had dinner with An-nakin and his wife, Pauline, at their London apartment.Disney and Annakintalked warmly about a new project, a film based on the life of Sir FrancisDrake. Over dinner, Annakin wrote in his autobiography,  Pauline talkedmainly to Lillian, whose glass I seemed to be refilling more often than usual.(Pauline, who had met Lillian during the filming of Third Man on the Moun-tain, described her as  pleasant but  tricky compared with Walt, meaningthat she was not as forthright; in Pauline s eyes, Lillian lacked Walt s open-ness and enthusiasm.)39When the Disneys limousine arrived at the end of the evening, Ken An-nakin wrote, Lillian  began descending the six stone steps onto OnslowSquare, teetered and fell, sprawling on the ground.I rushed down to helpher and was raising her to her feet when Walt took over.Brusquely, he pushedme aside and led her limping to the car.As we waved them away and closedthe door, Pauline said,  You ll never work for Walt, again. 40Such was the case.Annakin said in 2005:  I d made Walt four very suc-cessful pictures, and I never heard from him again. 41 The Annakins hadknown the Disneys for years, but given the limited importance that Disney280 where i am happyassigned to a director s part in making his films, there was no way that a recordas successful as Annakin s could outweigh a moment of embarrassment, alapse in control.Even as Disney s grip weakened on each film as a whole, his intimidatingawareness of details did not [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]