Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (

1955

) ½

Disney had no idea how popular their Davy Crockett miniseries was going to be; they certainly didn't think that every boy in North America was going to be running around in a coonskin cap for the remainder of the decade. Otherwise, they wouldn't have killed off their hero after only three episodes. The problem was that those three episodes they planned had already summed up Crockett's whole career from backwoods Indian fighter, to his time as a congressman, to his heroic death at the Alamo. So it's with surprising honestly that this movie begins with what amounts to a concession that none of the events of this film are in any way historically accurate and that all the contents contained within should be regarded as a “tall tale.” In a way, it's a bit of a shame that we didn't get anymore Crockett, with Disney opting to try its luck recapturing the Crockett magic with a series of other semi-historical shows about old-west gunslingers and revolutionary war heroes instead. The notion of a whole bunch of shamelessly fictional adventures starring America's favorite frontiersman is one that is deeply appealing to me. The book is irrevocably closed on this one too, as in the last 6 decades America has come to loathe her own history seeing in it a long chronicle of atrocities rather than a source of national pride. Of course, American history (like all history) is both but Americans are singularly bad at understanding this. American exceptionalism has a nasty tendency to convince Americans that they are either the absolute best people in history of the absolute worst, when the truth is they are just regular people with unusually well-designed institutions.

The film begins with Davy Crockett and his good buddy Georgie planning to bring a load of furs up from the countryside into town for sale. Their relationship is the classic hero-sidekick model. Georgie is no slouch when it comes to heroics, but he's always a just a less capable than Crockett (sometimes by a whole lot), and usually winds up being saved by him. If someone needs to do something stupid to advance the plot, or provide some comic relief than Georgie is on hand to do that. The advantages of this relationship, from a film-making perspective at least, are obvious. You have a character that can be funny and incompetent without tarnishing the main hero's prestige in the audience's eyes. The presence of Georgie not only makes us laugh but enhances Crockett's appeal. That's why the first thing that happens in the movie is a joke where a skunk wanders into Georgie's bedroll, for no other reason than to establish the two characters and their dynamic and maybe provide us with a quick laugh. It's a model of character development that has fallen out of favor in modern film-making where it's demanded that every character be the “funny” one, lest a few minutes of screen time elapse without some lame joke or quip. Certainly, the last few Star Wars films could have benefited from having some more sober characters mixed in with their zany comic relief.

This was before filmmakers felt the need to give every male hero a love interest to signal to the audience that he is “not gay,” So neither Davy Crockett nor Georgie has a special lady. Indeed, I don't think there is even a single woman with a speaking role in the entire movie (unless you count some river pirates disguised as women). As a result, to someone watching it in 2020 where every male interaction in media more intimate than a handshake is seen as proof that the characters are madly in love with each other, their relationship comes across as homoerotic. Maybe the filmmakers were aware of these implications and just felt they were safe because the real-life Davy Crockett wasn't gay, as he married twice and had a total of six children. That's not just on the down-low, that's fucking subterranean.

To sell their furs Crockett and Georgie need to travel down the Mississippi River to a port where they will fetch a fair price. The first boat they try to hire though is run by Mike Fink, the self-styled King of the River (and another semi-historical American folk character), who wants a thousand dollars for a ride on “his river.” Naturally, Crockett tells him to take a hike and goes to hire the broken-down old riverboat captain who has the only other keelboat in town. He even hires a few local yokels to crew the ship, it won't be the fastest or the best keelboat but it should get them where they need to go. In the meantime, Georgie lives up to his narrative purpose as sidekick and goes off to get drunk and bet Mike Fink that Davy and him will reach New Orleans before Fink and his crew. Georgie even stakes the whole load of furs on it!

Crockett is not the sort who will welch on a bet though, so he and his hastily conscripted crew head south on the Mississippi, and, against all odds, they actually manage to keep pace with Fink. Mike Fink is about as gallant as you would expect such a blustering windbag to be, and he sends Crockett and his crew down a dangerous channel that nearly sinks their boat. Crockett takes it all in stride though, and when he narrowly beats Fink to New Orleans he doesn't even usurp Fink's title as King of the River. I guess one title of nobility was already a bit much for Crockett, ever the patriotic American. Fink for his part, once the competition is over, is not an altogether bad fellow either. Sure he's a blustering blowhard who's quick to anger and quicker to get drunk but he's also quick to make amends and having been beaten fair and square by Crockett he's happy to count Davy as his friend.

In the second episode/second half of this movie, Fink and Crockett team up and take on a group of bandits that have disguised themselves as Indians and are preying on unsuspecting river traffic. The bandits figure that if they look like Indians, then the native tribes will get the blame for their misdeeds and they can slip off in the chaos with their ill-gotten loot. The Crockett/Fink collaboration is a good one, with Fink providing an arrogant blustering foil to Crockett's calm courage. With minimal fanfare, they charge off to take on the bandits head-on. Obviously, you'd be foolish to expect a thrilling fight scene from a 1950s TV show but the ensuing battle between Crockett and the bandits is far from the dullest that I've ever seen. On the whole, though the second half drags a bit more than the first, with the exception of it's interesting, albeit brief, portrayal of the Native Americans.

Modern film historians have a nasty habit of assuming that every depiction of Native Americans onscreen before the year 2000 or so is nothing more than a racist caricature. Yet the second half of Davy Crockett and the River Pirates shows this was not always the case. The natives here are not only morally sound, but they're also courageous, reasonable, and damn decent towards any halfway sensible white man they run into. The natives are in a bind, no doubt, and if the white settlers want a fight they will not find the Indians lacking in martial valor. However, they understand the situation and would rather exhaust all peaceful options before they go on the warpath. Best of all, the depiction here completely sidesteps the usual “noble savage” malarkey that pollutes most modern cinematic depictions of Native Americans. They aren't some superior culture untouched by the blight of civilization; no their just people the same as anyone else. This film is more than sixty years old, and it handles the question of Native American representation better than any movies I've seen except for The Last of the Mohicans (1992). About the worst thing you can say about is that the Natives here don't have a very large role or much screen time.

In a world full of villain protagonists, anti-heroes, and jerks who we're supposed to love for reasons I can neither understand nor articulate, seeing an old fashioned straight-arrow as the hero in a film is quite refreshing. Is it realistic? Certainly not. Real-life is full of imperfect men doing the best they can under trying circumstances, making sacrifices that will haunt them, and living with consequences that they had no way of predicting. I do not doubt that the historical Davy Crockett was, at times, less gallant, less prudent, and less kind than his cinematic representation because how could he be anything but? However, realism is overrated, especially when you're constructing a fable. It's a lesson I wish more modern movies would take to heart, yet it seems they are determined to do just the opposite. Time and again we've been treated to modern reworkings of classic films that re-imagine the clean-cut heroic figures of yesteryear as secret assholes and villains in their own right. The recent Star Wars trilogy is only the most blatant and high profile example of this tendency, which I find somewhat distressing. If we're not even permitted to have heroes in fiction, how are we ever going to get them in real life? Thankfully there are at least some artifacts of Americana that remain un-ravaged, at least for the time being.