So Dear to My Heart (1948)
Directors: Harold D Schuster (live action), Hamilton Luske (animation)
Honors:
Walt Disney Pictures, the animation Studio that brought to
the world Mickey Mouse, Silly Symphonies, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs attempts to bring in more profits by
entering new territory as it presents the studio’s first venture into a full
length live action feature. A wholesome boyhood story set on an ideal small
Mid-Western farm, this picture attempts to capture the nostalgia of childhood with
inspirations of the studio head’s own juvenile years. Of course, it would not
be a Disney product without a few short animated sequences thrown in. However,
being the studio’s first non-animated centric commercial picture, and the overall
lacking of the usual Disney flare the film would become one of the lesser known
productions of their library, especially during this period of their history.
So Dear to My Heart
is a live action Disney family picture about a young farm boy who adopts a
mischievous black sheep, learning valuable life lessons along the way. A young Indiana
farm boy, Jeremiah Kincaid (Bobby Driscoll), comes adopt at rejected black lamb
at the reluctance of his stern yet loving Grandmother (Beulah Bondi). As the
lamb, whom he named Danny, begins matures into a sheep it causes a good deal of
trouble for farm and others around town. It takes kind lessons and moral encouraging
from his Uncle Hiram (Burl Ives) and inspirational lessons demonstrated through
a series of animated daydreams to inspire Jeremiah to do his best to raise
Danny with hopes to enter his prized pet into the Country Fair for a cash prize
that could help his Grandmother. Through trails and hardships Jeremiah’s
determination raises the money to travel to and enter at the Fair where Danny
fails to win the win simply due to the color of his wool being black. However, the
Head Judge (Harry Carey) in seeing what a fine specimen is to the discouraged
Jeremiah rewards the young boy for the hard work and love he has give to his
beloved pet with a special prize, justifying his all that he has done.
At this time for Disney a live action picture was a new
direction at the studio, and for the most part the film shared many qualities wholesale,
family qualities that would be considered common delivered in their live action
movies for years to come. It shared a typical story of a young, innocent hero in
a sugar coated coming of age story in an idyllic setting of the past that truly
never was. What this Disney picture lacked during its time was the overall “magic”
or whimsy usually provided in their animated features, either from their great
classics or even their more rushed package features. It attempts to make up for
the lack of centricity on animation by adding
a handful of brief cartoon segments, but as an overall picture with the studios’
expectations it can come across as flat despite its overall decent quality family
product.
Quintessentially looking back on So Dear to My Heart, the picture is a typical Disney fluff live
action family picture filled with the values and lessons the studio would come
to preach over and over under the eyes of Walt Disney through the decades. The quality
of it is not bad, but it is stale, predicable, with mannequin-like acting, presented
with an all too squeaky clean ending where the main character that learns those
important life lessons a predicable family feature usually tells.
What the picture did package in this production is a sense
of nostalgia for childhood memories especially for middle aged audiences of the
1940s, while still being appealing enough for children to enjoy. With a slight
hint of Mark Twain inspired innocence to childhood and a place and time that
harkened to the Walt Disney’s own childhood on a Mid Western farm this feature
captures what Walt believed childhood should have been like for the common American
growing up. The careful presentation of wonderment and imagination was what
inspired Walt a young boy and was what he would commonly like to share to all
young people through his career. The timelessness of his presentation helps to
deliver a product that transcend through the decades for those hooked on
nostalgia, but its polished up writing, set decorating, and sometimes
candy-sweet acting tend to dissuade many that look for more serious material in
their motion pictures. It really is a picture for those in touch with an
imaginative inner child use to running around freely in fields and perhaps with
animals.
So Dear to My Heart
came to be by way of the Sterling North book “Midnight and Jeremiah,” which
grabbed the attention of Walt in the mid 1940s. Looking to help his studio come
out of a massive recession experienced during the war years Disney was toying
with the idea of producing less costlier live action pictures to quickly bring
in profits for the studio, seeing this material as a good source for one of his
first features.
Production began in 1946, shortly after work completed on
Song of the South, a feature that was roughly half live action, half animated,
manifesting to the studio how much faster and more cost effective it was to cut
out animation. Disney would task directorial duties to a 20th
Century-Fox director Harold Schuster for the job with his experience of rolling
out pictures with ease and his experience in Technicolor. Bobby Driscoll and Laura
Patten, the two young stars of Song of
the South would roll right into the new feature, establishing the two as
the studios’ first face stars. Establishing legitimacy to the quality of acting
in the picture are veteran actors Beulah Bondi as Granny and a brief appearance
of Harry Carey in his final role as the county fair judge that awards Jeremiah
at the end of the picture. Singer and radio talent Burl Ives makes his motion
picture debut delivering the down home charm his voice was known for, opening
new doors to his career as he serenades the picture with a couple of tunes, including
the Academy Award nominated song “Lavender Blue.”
Keeping a watch on his new investment Walt Disney made a
number of personal trips to the set of the film which shot on location in
Northern California sitting in for countryside of Indiana. Much of the setting
within the feature was inspired by Walt’s own memories of the small Missouri
town of Marceline where he spent just a handful of formative years on a family
farm in between mostly living in Chicago and Kansas City. It was these few
years in the small town that would impact his life the most as he looked back
on them with great fondness as a time of imagination for a young boy. Complete
with the family farm, a small downtown, and a town train station, this film
allowed Walt to recapture a piece of his childhood with its production. All of
these qualities would continue to bounce around in his head for years,
eventually inspiring him to create his theme park, Disneyland, a few years
later.
Initially the picture was planned completely void of animation and upon completion of the film RKO, Disney’s distributor, was uneasy
that the picture lacked the core Disney attraction. RKO demanded that Disney
add cartoon segments to the feature, insisting that if audiences arrived to see
a Disney picture and did not experience any animation it would upset movie
goers, driving down sales. Disney relented to the requests adding pick up
scenes with Bobby Driscoll looking at colorful, inspirational cards with
colorful characters that would lead to animated daydreams for the young lad.
These animated segments edited into the film are rather seamless, but closer
look reveals their shoehorned in nature. The cut scenes consist of only
Driscoll before flowing into his animated imagination and have little to do
with the surrounding story, but it appeased RKO, becoming part of the film as
we see it today.
Like Song of the South,
So Dear to My Heart experienced a location
premiere where the location of the movie took place, in Indiana. In reality the
film was premiering in suburban Chicago, obviously the biggest city in the
Midwest, not a bad place for some publicity for such a humble film. The film
was not a grand success of any kind, receiving the expected criticisms of the
lack of Disney animation, but for those looking for a simple family picture, it
did the job. It did reasonably well at the box office earning Disney profits.
At the Academy Awards the film received the nomination for Best Original Song while
also seeing young Bobby Driscoll honored with a special Juvenile Academy Award
for his work. Re-releasing the feature years later would lead to further
profits, but the picture eventually faded into the background of Disney’s vast
feature film library filled with countless family films.
So Dear to My Heart
is not a picture many would recommend as it provides nothing more than a piece
of history for the Walt Disney Company. Outside of a couple of theatrical re-releases
the film nearly didn’t see a home distribution out of the lack of interest for
the film. Those looking for it can find it, but you will be hard pressed to
find any celebration over Disney’s first live action feature (with a couple of
cartoons mixed in). Now it is more of a footnote as a wholesome feature of Walt
Disney’s past.
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