1975 - THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG, another questionable Disney family film

 Hovering around in that rock bottom pile of Disney family films which include, The Boatniks, Snowball Express, No Deposit, No Return and The Cat From Outer Space, sits The Apple Dumpling Gang.

This is really bottom of the barrel stuff for the Disney studios probably made just to keep people working at the studio.  The director is Norman Tokar who I can safely say is not much of a stylist, he films everything very conventionally to put it mildly.

The plot what there is of it has something to do with 3 cute orphans who end up living with a gambler who slowly learns to become their parent.  Bill Bixby plays the gambler and he had done enough comedy to know how to milk a laugh or two.  Susan Clark is his "tom boy" love interest and you just know they will get together in the end.  Throw in Tim Conway and Don Knotts who play a couple of inept robbers who call themselves The Apple Dumpling Gang and away we go with lots of silly slapstick, a lame chase or two filmed against a process screen and a film which was for the most part clearly filmed on Disney's back lot.

 

Well the best you can say for the film is it gave a lot of work to a number of character actors such as Slim Pickens, John McGiver, Harry Morgan, and David Wayne a chance to grab a paycheck so they could at least make their mortgage payments.

 

This is the kind of crap that was heavily marketed by Disney as a film you could bring the whole family to.  The problem was that nobody put in the work to actually make this a fun or entertaining film.  As it is the damn thing made money and actually prompted a sequel which I suppose I'll have to eventually sit through to be a completest.

Written by Don Tait, the running time is 100 minutes.