Financially struggling scientist Albert Dooley (Dean Jones) is in a constant state of keeping his head barely above with water while his incompetent, spendthrift, and clueless wife, Katie (Sandy Duncan), and whiny manipulative son, Jimmy (Lee Montgomery) keep blissfully unaware. When through a series of mishaps, one of Dooley's reject test animals, a duck, attains the ability to lay golden eggs Albert's sure he's found his path to easy success, but a nosey Treasury agent named Hooper (Joe Flynn) and his family's quirks and a lesson straight out of Aesop's fables lead to hijinks and chaos aplenty.
Released in 1971, The Million Dollar Duck was yet another high concept gimmick film that had sadly become the primary staple of the Walt Disney Company after its founder's death. While not all of these gimmick comedies were bad with some such as Snowball Express, No Deposit No Return, The Barefoot Executive, and even Now You See Him Now You Don't being enjoyable if not particularly memorable, most of these film's were cheaply produced mostly interchangeable products that basically amounted to feature length sitcom rehashes using material that had been abandoned by TV airwaves with the Rural Purge. While I do have a soft spot for many of those pre-70s gimmick sitcoms, The Million Dollar Duck is less in line with the likes of Betwitched, Get Smart, and I Dream of Jeanie, and more in the company of buried embarrassments like My Mother the Car.
A very loose an uncredited remake of forgotten 1951 Biritish comedy Mr. Drake's Duck starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Mixing in elements of the fable The Goose who Laid the Golden Eggs, the screenplay written by Father Knows Best staff writer, Roswell Rogers is horrendous with no character having more than two braincells to rub together. That's basically the main problem with this film, every, and I do mean EVERY, character is an idiot who is so bereft of basic logic or common sense that it's nothing short of astounding these characters aren't drinking lead paint through their eyes. Sandy Duncan plays a character who's sole defining characteristic is she's clueless about the outside world and also a terrible homemaker with the "joke" lacking in any established logic with a scene of her misreading a recipe for applesauce in a cookbook with the wind changes the pages resulting in her using Garlic, Mustard, and Curry Powder sadly setting the expectations for the movie's bar of humor not even on the bottom rung but nowhere near the ladder. Vincent McEveety amps up the mugging, whining, and shrill deliveries of his cast to punishing degrees which results in a cast of talented performers that I know for a fact to be good giving some abysmal work. Film critic Gene Siskel famously stated this film was one of only THREE movies he had EVER walked out on in his entire career (the others being Maniac and Black Sheep) and while I don't know when he gave up on the movie, the fact he didn't finish it alone makes him smarter than I because I watched every single frame of this movie. Every idiotic gag, every second of a punishingly long chase sequence climax with confused motivations, and every second of a schmaltzy saccharine courtroom set epilogue that gives our idiot characters a happily ever after none of them deserve.
If the Million Dollar Duck isn't the nadir of Ron Miller era Disney, it's definitely sharing the same space. With a hackneyed set-up populated by characters that are both unlikable and stupid, the movie takes a premise too thin for even a 24 minute sitcom episode and punishing stretches it past the point of tolerance with every gag slowly delivered and telegraphed in advance, and a plot that lacks cohesion, stakes or logic, even by the loose standards of gimmick comedies. While I was rather lukewarm in my reception of 2 of the three Dexter Riley films, I may need to reevaluate my opinion because at least they weren't.....THIS!
Released in 1971, The Million Dollar Duck was yet another high concept gimmick film that had sadly become the primary staple of the Walt Disney Company after its founder's death. While not all of these gimmick comedies were bad with some such as Snowball Express, No Deposit No Return, The Barefoot Executive, and even Now You See Him Now You Don't being enjoyable if not particularly memorable, most of these film's were cheaply produced mostly interchangeable products that basically amounted to feature length sitcom rehashes using material that had been abandoned by TV airwaves with the Rural Purge. While I do have a soft spot for many of those pre-70s gimmick sitcoms, The Million Dollar Duck is less in line with the likes of Betwitched, Get Smart, and I Dream of Jeanie, and more in the company of buried embarrassments like My Mother the Car.
A very loose an uncredited remake of forgotten 1951 Biritish comedy Mr. Drake's Duck starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Mixing in elements of the fable The Goose who Laid the Golden Eggs, the screenplay written by Father Knows Best staff writer, Roswell Rogers is horrendous with no character having more than two braincells to rub together. That's basically the main problem with this film, every, and I do mean EVERY, character is an idiot who is so bereft of basic logic or common sense that it's nothing short of astounding these characters aren't drinking lead paint through their eyes. Sandy Duncan plays a character who's sole defining characteristic is she's clueless about the outside world and also a terrible homemaker with the "joke" lacking in any established logic with a scene of her misreading a recipe for applesauce in a cookbook with the wind changes the pages resulting in her using Garlic, Mustard, and Curry Powder sadly setting the expectations for the movie's bar of humor not even on the bottom rung but nowhere near the ladder. Vincent McEveety amps up the mugging, whining, and shrill deliveries of his cast to punishing degrees which results in a cast of talented performers that I know for a fact to be good giving some abysmal work. Film critic Gene Siskel famously stated this film was one of only THREE movies he had EVER walked out on in his entire career (the others being Maniac and Black Sheep) and while I don't know when he gave up on the movie, the fact he didn't finish it alone makes him smarter than I because I watched every single frame of this movie. Every idiotic gag, every second of a punishingly long chase sequence climax with confused motivations, and every second of a schmaltzy saccharine courtroom set epilogue that gives our idiot characters a happily ever after none of them deserve.
If the Million Dollar Duck isn't the nadir of Ron Miller era Disney, it's definitely sharing the same space. With a hackneyed set-up populated by characters that are both unlikable and stupid, the movie takes a premise too thin for even a 24 minute sitcom episode and punishing stretches it past the point of tolerance with every gag slowly delivered and telegraphed in advance, and a plot that lacks cohesion, stakes or logic, even by the loose standards of gimmick comedies. While I was rather lukewarm in my reception of 2 of the three Dexter Riley films, I may need to reevaluate my opinion because at least they weren't.....THIS!