Review: Treasure of Matecumbe (DMC #59)
Welcome back to another review in the Disnerd Movie Challenge! This week we watched Treasure of Matecumbe, the 59th film in the challenge. As always, our synopsis is below if you haven’t seen this film or need to brush up on the plot. For the rest of you, scroll on down for our review!
Synopsis
Some time after the American Civil War in the state of Kentucky, an ex-slave named Ben Woods rushes to the estate of Grassy, the home of young David “Davie” Burnie and his aunts Effie and Lou. A sheriff and a man named Catrell arrive at the home looking for Ben, claiming he has stolen some of Catrell’s belongings, but Aunt Effie calls Cantrell a liar. Davie, Effie, and Lou are in danger of losing the estate, but Aunt Lou tells Davie they will find a way to keep it. Davie’s friend Thaddeus whistles for him to come fishing, but Davie’s aunts tell him he has work to do. That night, Davie realizes Ben is outside and rushes to greet him. Ben, who had joined the war and served with Davie’s father Captain Burnie, tells Davie about a treasure his father buried that could allow them to keep Grassy. He tells Davie and the aunts the gold was buried in Florida, but Spangler found out and sent Catrell to ambush Ben for information. Ben says that Captain Burnie’s brother Jim can help retrieve the gold, and reveals that Davie’s father sent a map to the home before he died. The group finds the map hidden in one of the captain’s book’s with invisible ink, just before Spangler and his men break into Grassy. Ben and Davie escape out the attic window and meet up with Thad below, but one of Spangler’s men shoots Ben. As Ben dies, he tears out the map page and hands it to Davie who escapes with Thad, but Spangler discovers the book is missing a page and pursues the boys.
The boys pay for the cheapest fare on a steamboat heading south and discover a woman, Lauriette, in a wedding dress hiding among the bales of cotton so she can escape getting married. The boys help her hide among the animals so she won’t be discovered. Once her would-be husband has been evaded and the boat gets underway, Lauriette ditches the boys to find the ladies’ cabin. The boys sneak upstairs and watch as Lauriette bets $500 that she can win a gambler’s “find the baby card” game. The boys see the gambler cheat, but Lauriette expects this and successfully cons him out of $400 and a large ring before telling the captain to upgrade her accommodations. That night, as the boys sleep, a thief steals Davie’s wallet with all his money and the map page. Lauriette and the boys try to stop the thief, but the thief shoves Lauriette into the river and the boys jump in after her. Though they make it out of the river alive, Lauriette’s money is gone, and so is Davie’s map. But Lauriette still has the ring she won, and she uses it to trade a passerby for his mule and cart so she and the boys can get to the next town. Once there, Lauriette convinces the sheriff the boys are runaways. The boys trick Lauriette and the sheriff and lock both of them in a jail cell before they manage to escape. Spangler’s men catch wind of the tale of two boys who locked the sheriff in his own jail cell and continue on the boys’ trail. The boys meet a snake oil salesman named Dr. Snodgrass and offer to be his assistants in exchange for passage down the river. Dr. Snodgrass agrees, and the boys assist him with a sales pitch in the next town, but Lauriette is passing through and recognizes the boys. She sends the sheriff over, but Dr. Snodgrass works his salesmanship on the sheriff. When Davie and Thad put on an act with Davie feigning a broken back, Spangler and his men join the crowd and spot the boys. The boys make a run for it, but Lauriette grabs Thad and Spangler’s men corner Davie at a cliff over the river. Just as Spangler is about to grab Davie, Lauriette arrives and points a gun at the men. She shoots at their heels until the men jump off the cliff into the river below. Lauriette joins the boys and Dr. Snodgrass on the salesman’s boat and tells the boys she believes their story now. She and Dr. Snodgrass decide to help the boys locate Davie’s uncle, Jim.
They find Jim, but he’s about to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Davie shoots through the rope tied around Jim’s neck, cutting the rope, while Dr. Snodgrass and Thad chuck Molotov cocktails at the KKK, scaring them off. Davie tells Jim about the treasure, and Jim agrees to help the boys. Jim invites Dr. Snodgrass to join the treasure hunt and he agrees (though he initially declines). Lauriette confronts Jim about asking Dr. Snodgrass to join the hunt but not her. He claims she wouldn’t last in the Florida swamps. Lauriette retaliates by tainting soup with one of Dr. Snodgrass’s concoctions and offering it to Jim, but Jim sees through it. When the group arrives at the next landing, they’re greeted by a group of rough-looking men. Jim goes ashore while Dr. Snodgrass, Davie, and Thad begin playing music and dancing to break the ice. It works, and the men on the dock start dancing too, but when Lauriette decides to join the dance against Jim’s warning, the men become rough with her. Jim steps in to rescue Lauriette, and the team quickly shoves off once again. At the next landing, the group is set upon by Spangler’s men and forced to run into the woods. Jim tells Dr. Snodgrass and the others to take over Spangler’s steamboat since it will be faster while he leads Spangler and his men away. Dr. Snodgrass, Lauriette, and the boys manage to escape on the steamboat and Dr. Snodgrass blows up his own ship to prevent the villains from chasing them, but there’s no sign of Jim.
The group arrives in New Orleans and assumes Jim must be dead. Though Dr. Snodgrass tries to convince the boys to return home because it’s not safe to continue, Davie insists on going forward. Lauriette and Dr. Snodgrass reluctantly agree to continue the journey with the boys. They assume Spangler will be watching the docks so they catch a train to Florida, but one of Spangler’s men spots them leaving and alerts Spangler. When they arrive in Florida, they hire a guide to take them in a canoe through the Everglades and avoid telling him where he’s taking them until they’re well underway. Lauriette doesn’t trust their guide, and grows more suspicious when he takes them down a strange turn. Sure enough, he’s in league with Spangler and takes the group right to him. Spangler tries to make Davie tell him where the treasure is, but when Davie refuses, Dr. Snodgrass reluctantly hands over his handkerchief where he embroidered a version of the map. Spangler and his men abandon Davie and the others without a boat. The group is set upon by a swarm of mosquitos, then a rain storm, before they hear someone approaching—it’s Jim and his Seminole guide Charlie. Reunited, the group continues through the Everglades in Charlie’s boat, but they see warning masks from the unfriendly Cougar tribe. Soon after, everything goes quiet and all the birds fly away—a hurricane is coming. The group continues on in spite of the hurricane, not wanting to let Spangler reach the treasure first. They manage to find the five trees that were marked on the map and start digging. Davie finds where the chest is buried, but a giant wave carries Dr. Snodgrass out to sea. The rest of the group manages to dig up the treasure chest and flee into the trees, but Davie falls into a chief’s tomb in the Cougar tribe’s burial ground. The rest of the group climbs in with him to escape the storm. The next day there’s no sign of Dr. Snodgrass, but the Cougar tribe is approaching. The group flees, but they run into Spangler and his men. They trick the villains into following them into the sacred burial ground, and the villains destroy markers and structures as they enter. Just as Spangler finds the abandoned treasure chest, the Cougar tribe finds Spangler and his men. The tribe captures the villains, leaving the chest behind. Davie and his friends then take the treasure for themselves before returning to their boat. Back on the beach, they find Dr. Snodgrass, injured but alive. Together the whole group begins the journey back home, with Davie vowing to only take enough gold to fix up Grassy and to split the rest with his friends. Davie even invites Dr. Snodgrass to come live at Grassy.
Thoughts Before Watching
Kevin: Not quite sure what to make of this one. The description is fairly straightforward, so I basically expect a somewhat by the books adventure movie. As long as it’s more entertaining than Treasure Island, I’m game!
Megan: It looks like it’s maybe trying to do an Indiana Jones thing with the action/adventure/treasure-hunt vibe, though this came out before the Indiana Jones movies did, so who knows. I’ve never seen Treasure of Matecumbe before, nor have I heard of it, but based on previous films of the ‘70s, I’m not getting my hopes up.
Thoughts After Watching
Definitely not Indiana Jones
Megan: Well, this is far from an Indiana Jones type adventure film. I think I can safely assume this film was neither influenced by Indiana Jones (seeing as it came before Indiana Jones), nor did it influence Indiana Jones. But what would you call this instead? Is it an adventure film? A comedy? A work of historical fiction? A drama? We’re pretty sure even the filmmakers didn’t know…
A tonally jarring and messy experience
Kevin: Treasure of Matecumbe has some of the most frequent tonal shifts we’ve seen so far in this challenge. It moves from funny to adventurous to downright horrifying rather quickly, and sometimes those different tones are mixed together. Part of the problem is that the plot just doesn’t make sense. The story bounces from event to event, with each one having little relevance to do with what comes before or after. I appreciated that the comedy is more on the clever side here, as slapstick would not work for this story. It did get some genuine laughs out of me a few times. We have moments such as Lauriette’s awesome swindling of the card game and Davie and Thad tricking Lauriette by locking her in a jail cell. We’re also treated to a rather wonderful dance number… which turns awful as soon as the dancers begin groping Lauriette. The film has no idea what genre it’s supposed to be. Dr. Snodgrass is this movie’s prime example of comedy just by being the hack doctor he is, coming up with all sorts of phony elixirs and medical remedies which he sells to gullible schmucks. (Peter Ustinov’s acting chops deserve so much credit here!) But still, the film suffers from throwing in one too many heavier moments that severely throw its tone off balance. For one, there’s more racism going on here. There are two groups of people that are portrayed negatively: Native Americans and black people. In particular, there’s one major thing I never expected to see in a Disney film: the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, Disney put in a scene of the KKK, down to white hoods and a burning cross. And not just the KKK, but the KKK performing a lynching! This particular scene is punctured by the fact that the victim, the white man Uncle Jim, seems completely unbothered by the situation he finds himself in. He even has enough composure to physically react when he sees the attractive Lauriette for the first time. These light-hearted moments just don’t work for what is a very real, very disturbing part of United States history. I want to give these racially-related issues the recognition they deserve, so I’ll speak more on this a bit later. Apart from these issues, the filmmakers also spend the last third of the film diving fully into the adventure genre when the characters compete with Spangler to find the treasure. They encounter wild alligators, mosquito swarms, curses, corpses and skeletons, and torrential rainstorms with enough force to wash people away. To Disney, I must ask you—what were you going for here? Did you want this to be fun or serious ? All of these shifts result in a clunky film that doesn’t appear to know what its audience is supposed to be, in spite of being produced by a studio known for making “family-friendly” films. I think if I watched this as a kid I might have enjoyed it more, but as an adult I’m left unsure what I was supposed to feel.
Another film with white saviors and unchecked racism
Kevin: The Disney Plus version of the film opens with the same warning message we’ve seen previously, citing negative depictions of people or cultures. Certainly, this is not the best start to the film. We should think about this given the historical context, both when the film was made and when it is set. The film was released in 1976, not too long after the Civil Rights movement (a movement that has never truly ended and continues to this day). Being right off the heels of a large scale movement, it seems odd to create a supposedly family-friendly adventure film set in the American South shortly after the bloodiest and most turbulent conflict in United States history. Racial tensions both in real life and in the film’s setting are still very high. As the film starts, we learn of the titular treasure through the words of an ex-slave named Ben. In hindsight, Ben seems to only serve as a way to introduce us to our main characters, Davie (a white boy) and Thad (a black boy), before being killed by Spangler shortly thereafter. Here we have one of only two black characters with major speaking roles, and Ben is cut down by a white man as he flees with the boys. His death forces Davie and Thad to go on alone until they meet Lauriette, Dr. Snodgrass, and Uncle Jim, all of whom are white. At this point, Thad becomes the only remaining main character who is black. We have to remember that this is a conscious choice of the writer(s). The story was written to kill off Ben, a black character, and have not just one, but three white characters take his place as the adult figures to guide the children and finish what Ben started. Unfortunately, this is believable, even if it was completely unnecessary. Ben’s death serves no real logical sense and has no impact on the story since the children manage to get by on their own quite well. Did the filmmakers really need to kill off Ben? I tried finding any information that could suggest perhaps the actor wanted to be written off, but was unsuccessful. So the only conclusion left for now is that this is just simply what the filmmaker wanted to do. The decision creates another story where the “white savior” comes in to take over what could easily have been Ben’s role (if nothing else, he could have joined the rest of the cast).
Kevin: Although I would say it’s not nearly as awful as The Castaway Cowboy, the white savior complex is still noticeable. I mentioned the KKK scene before, and this scene is made worse when remembering how calm and collected Uncle Jim was. For one thing, I really just do not understand why they were included in this film. Megan and I both discussed afterwards that the Klan seemed to be added for shock value. It was like the filmmakers were sitting around trying to come up with a way to introduce Uncle Jim and landed on having him be in some kind of trouble. When deciding what kind of trouble, perhaps the writers suggested a lynching by the KKK because, well, why not? The setting makes sense and it’s an easy solution. But the problem with this is that, like Ben’s death, the KKK have zero impact on the story. As said earlier, Uncle Jim’s relatively calm demeanor completely negates the serious tone of the scene. I’m not saying he should be begging for mercy here; in fact, I applaud his mocking of the Klansmen. However, I just did not get any sense at all that Uncle Jim felt he was in real trouble. He looked more like he was mildly inconvenienced. I wonder if the writers decided to do this as a way to mock the KKK, but if that’s true then it falls flat. While it is true that the KKK did lynch white people if they were Union-sympathizers, the way this film depicts it just reeks of insensitivity after how it treated Ben. If Disney really wanted a racist, white-supremacist group hanging around in the movie, I think there ought to have been a lesson to take away here. There should be a strong message sent to the characters and the audience that what happens in this scene is obviously wrong, but the movie doesn’t really do that. All it does is mildly present a situation where a man is saved from death, but the deep racial connections are missed. The closest we get to it is when Thad tries to help rescue Jim, but Snodgrass holds him back, saying “No, no! This is no place for you, Thad.” Snodgrass’s implication is obvious, but it’s still nothing more than a passing mention. This is why adding the KKK feels like nothing more than shock value. They add nothing to the story except to introduce Jim, even though there could have easily been so many other ways to do it. The KKK is not just a plot device; their views and their actions have had serious impact on the black community. Throwing them in here for a single scene feels like a cheap attempt at creating drama that ultimately goes nowhere. The only good thing about this scene is when Dr. Snodgrass and Thad toss fire bombs made from the doctor’s elixirs at the Klansmen and frighten them off. Now that is a completely appropriate way to deal with the Klan.
Kevin: Whereas the inclusion of the KKK and the death of Ben seemed to be forms of unintentional racism, the depiction of Native Americans in this film is just as on the nose as it has been in previous films. Disney, you really need to get it together on this. Nowhere is this more obvious than when Dr. Snodgrass, Davie, and Thad all dress in stereotypical Native American clothing and headdresses while the doctor attempts to sell his elixirs to some townsfolk. Snodgrass claims that Davie and Thad can only speak the native tongue, but Thad accidentally slips up when he speaks English to a man in the crowd. Later, Thad comes running over to the same group of people in his regular clothing, “begging” Snodgrass to fix Davie’s back after he’s pretended to fall. How none of the townsfolk realize Thad and Davie were the same two boys in costume is beyond me. Either the townsfolk are just that gullible, or they somehow see Native Americans as not worth their time to pay much attention to and thus miss the obvious. This is where the film starts to “other” the Native American cultures. It gets worse later when we meet Charlie (Valentin de Vargas) and members of the Cougar tribe toward the climax. There’s this constant insistence with Native Americans that they speak in broken English or are depicted as savages, a treatment that would unfortunately keep going for a long time. The film wins no points for continuing this trend.
Megan: Also, why name a Seminole man Charlie? I’m pretty sure that’s not the name his parents gave him. Did the white men Charlie regularly encounters insist on giving him an “Americanized” name because they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce his true name? Did Charlie choose the name himself because everyone was mispronouncing his name? Also, if he goes by Charlie and that was his choice, why would he speak in such broken English? It seems to me that the answer to these questions is “because the white male filmmakers said so.” Like Kevin said, the blatant othering of Native Americans in these earlier films is hard to watch as an audience in today’s culture.
Lazy storytelling
Megan: Tying in what Kevin mentioned above, the crux of this film’s problems seem to stem from lazy writing and storytelling. Not enough effort was made to fully construct the characters or the world they’re in, so we in the audience are left wondering what genre this is and why in the world the KKK show up in the middle. Now, this film is based on a book: A Journey to Matecumbe by Robert Lewis Taylor. I have not read the book, so it’s hard to say if the writer of the novel or the writer of the screenplay adaptation is to blame here, but the end result still leaves us with a film that hasn’t been fully developed. Exhibit A: the KKK. Now I’m not saying that films are not allowed to reflect on the horrors of our nation’s past, but if a writer is going to make a bold choice to include a group as diabolical as the KKK, they had better have a good reason to do so. Treasure of Matecumbe does not seem to have any reason for including the group. As Kevin mentioned before, their only purpose in the film is to create an interesting introduction to Uncle Jim’s character, yet this introduction tells us absolutely nothing about Jim. Why was he in that situation in the first place? What did he do to anger the KKK? Why were the KKK trying to lynch him? Are we supposed to immediately like Jim simply because a group we know to be villainous is after him (in essence, the enemy of my enemy is my friend)? (If that was the intention, it didn’t work.) From a purely story-focused perspective, the scene doesn’t work because it doesn’t really give us a solid introduction to Jim. From a broader, thematic perspective, the scene fails because within the context of the film it doesn’t make any judgment regarding the KKK. Heck, it doesn’t even make a statement. It feels like the writer merely needed an obstacle to present to his characters, and he just pulled something historical out of a hat. You just can’t do that. (Well, clearly they could and they did, but they definitely shouldn’t have.)
The other evidence of lazy storytelling? The emotional character arc is entirely lacking, which leaves this story without a central theme to hold it together. Davie is our protagonist, yet while his story has loads of external conflict, there’s not much internal conflict. We don’t get any sense of what his character flaw might be. We only know that if he and his aunts don’t come up with enough money soon, they’ll lose their property. That’s enough reason to set out on a treasure hunt, perhaps, but not enough to carry the story. At the climax of the film, when it seems as though Dr. Snodgrass has been lost to the hurricane, the film seems to hint at what could have been an emotional arc for Davie: he has the treasure (what he thought he wanted), but he didn’t get what he needed—perhaps the love of a father-like figure, i.e. Snodgrass, and a mother-like figure (Lauriette). At several points in the film the story seems to hint at Lauriette, Dr. Snodgrass, and even Uncle Jim being stand-in parents for Davie and Thad, but then it veers off into the opposite direction with, for example, Lauriette being a strangely inappropriate love interest for Davie. This constant thematic and tonal whiplash ultimately leaves us with a rather unsatisfying film full of forgettable characters.
And of course, don’t forget sexism…
Megan: When we finished watching the film, my immediate thought was “Well, that failed the Bechdel test” because I was thinking the film only had one named female character: Lauriette. However, Kevin actually was the one to remind me of Davie’s aunts at the beginning of the film. I’d completely forgotten about them! I actually had to go back and rewatch the opening of the film to check their dialogue. The only exchange between the two women that is not technically about a male character is this:
AUNT LOU: Did you hear anything, Effie?
AUNT EFFIE: Oh, it’s just the wind.
Of course, we in the audience know the sound is Spangler and his men breaking into the house, so they’re still kind of talking about male characters. That’s as close as we get to passing the Bechdel test. Every other line of dialogue between the aunts has to do with either Davie, Ben, Davie’s father, Uncle Jim, the sheriff, Mr. Catrell, Thad, or Spangler and his men. The two aunts never meet Lauriette, and Lauriette never holds a conversation with another named female character, so really only the first ten minutes of the film pass the Bechdel test, and nothing else. It’s pretty disappointing.
There are some small moments where the women of the film get to shine, like when Aunt Effie confronts Spangler about breaking into their home, or when Lauriette rescues Davie from Spangler and his men by forcing them to jump into the river at gunpoint. However, it’s clear that the world these women live in is still a sexist one. The aunts are close to losing Grassy—presumably because they are unmarried women who either aren’t allowed to hold a job or aren’t allowed to own property (or both). Ben lays it out pretty clearly that Davie’s father hid the gold “so Davie wouldn’t lose Grassy.” Not the aunts. Davie. His aunts are pretty much stuck, and the men around them (as evidenced by the sheriff) know this. Like vultures, they’re waiting for the property to become available so they can take it for themselves.
Lauriette is in a similar situation, though she seems much better equipped to navigate this sexist world. She succeeds in escaping a marriage to a man she doesn’t love by sneaking aboard a steamboat without paying. She then manages to con a conman into giving her $500 when she beats him at his own game, and immediately uses the funds to “upgrade” her accommodations (though she had no previous accommodations to speak of). Her ruse would have continued to work, too, if she hadn’t tried to help Davie and Thad stop a thief aboard the ship. As the film continues, Lauriette slips from one ruse to the next, using her femininity to her advantage to trade the ring she won for a horse and cart, and then again to persuade several sheriffs to chase after Davie and Thad. The only time her tactics don’t seem to work is when Jim is involved. It would appear she tries to poison or medicate Jim by offering him a tainted soup, only for Jim to see through the ruse and suggest Davie try the soup instead (to which, of course, Lauriette storms off and disposes of the soup). When Jim warns her not to dance with the men on the dock, Lauriette decides to dance with them anyway to spite Jim, but she soon finds herself being manhandled as the men roughly pass her from one dance partner to the next and start trying to kiss her. Lauriette’s character quickly falls into yet another Taming of the Shrew situation. This head-strong woman who, at the start of the film, is able to navigate this sexist world like a pro, suddenly meets a male love interest (which admittedly seems largely one-sided with Jim being the one showing any feelings between them), and then suddenly turns into the damsel who needs rescuing. The first time she seems to show romantic interest in Jim is after he tells her she looks pretty when she’s wet and angry. We’ve talked about this before, but that is definitely not the line that’s going to make me fall for a guy, and I certainly wouldn’t be kissing him for it. (More evidence this film was written by a man…) By the end of the film, Lauriette is “tamed” and we guess that she and Jim will end up together, though I for one don’t imagine it would be a terribly happy pairing. I could go on about the sexist language within the film, but I think you get the gist.
Good acting is the best thing about this film
Kevin: If there’s any redeeming quality about the film, it’s the acting. Davie and Thad, played by Johnny Doran and Billy Atmore, respectively, are both charming young boys in this film. Johnny Doran had some acting roles prior to this, so he looks fairly natural. Billy Atmore was still fairly new, so while he’s not nearly as polished, he gave the role his all and looks like he’s having fun. The friendship between Davie and Thad is reminiscent of Lonnie and Text from The Biscuit Eater, and I’m glad that Thad doesn’t appear to be a token black character in a movie filled with white people. Robert Foxworth as Uncle Jim is also good, I won’t deny that. However, I’m just not as interested in his character as I am the others, so there are no real highlights for him. But the best performances were from Joan Hackett as Lauriette and Peter Ustinov as Dr. Snodgrass. I had heard of Joan Hackett before, but either I had never seen her in a role or I had forgotten, because after a few great opening scenes with Lauriette I was curious about the actress and looked her up. Although she died young from cancer, a very interesting tidbit I learned about her is that her crypt includes an epitaph that reads: “Go Away—I’m Asleep.” I love this, and this wit shines in her role as Lauriette from just about every moment she is on screen (although I sadly think she loses some of that charm toward the end of the movie). As for Peter Ustinov, he’s fabulous in his role. For some reason I didn’t realize it was him when he first appeared (I actually confused him for John Rhys-Davies until I remembered he’d be much younger). Once Dr. Snodgrass let out a little giggle I instantly remembered this was Peter. Although Dr. Snodgrass is a snake oil salesman, Peter is just so good at selling his performance that I can understand why all those folks buy into Snodgrass’s total B.S.… and, y’know, not just because the script calls for it. Honestly, this film would have been a lot less entertaining without Joan and Peter, so I’m glad that we at least had them to keep the movie somewhat fun.
Kevin: When we finished watching this, I told Megan this was “interesting” because it was the first word that popped in my head. After writing this, I think a more apt word is “weird.” That’s what this film is. I can’t exactly recommend anyone watch this, what with the racist elements and the messy plot. On the other hand, Joan Hackett and Peter Ustinov are so entertaining that it might be worth watching it at least once. From what I’ve researched, Treasure of Matecumbe is one of the most forgotten about films in Disney’s entire catalog, let alone their live-action theatrical lineup. The characters may be looking for hidden treasure, but the film is certainly no treasure of its own.