Mr. Scoutmaster

Another of the movies that returned to the FXM rotation in the past few months is Mr. Scoutmaster. The last I checked, it's got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a blog post here.

Clifton Webb plays Robert Jordan, the host of a weekend afternoon TV show that's failing, largely because they've got the wrong sponsor, a breakfast cereal company that wants a show more kid-friendly. Robert has a wife Helen (Frances Dee), but no kids. Robert tries to learn about how boys think by buying a bunch of comic books, while Helen has decided to do her part for kids by donating to the Boy Scouts' coat drive.

This ticks Robert off because Helen donated one of Robert's favorite old coats that he didn't want donated. When he tries to get it back, he meets the sponsor of the troop, Dr. Stone (Edmund Gwenn), the minister at one of the local churches. This is a bit of a rowdy Boy Scout troop that has driven off several scoutmasters in the past year. The troop also has to deal with a Cub Scout, Mike (George "Foghorn" Winslow), who seems to crash the party and tell the most blatantly obvious lies about his family.

Anyhow, Mr. Jordan becomes the titular Mr. Scoutmaster, thinking this will help him learn about boys, not that he really cares for scouting. Robert and Helen both realize that Mike is lying but somehow can't learn the truth about him until much later in the movie; you'd think somebody in the Scouting organization would have his address and other such information on file.

Mike is so obnoxious that when Jordan takes the Boy Scouts on a hike for one of their merit badges, Mike runs away from whatever his home is to join up with the troop several hours later. And then after Jordan learns the real truth about Mike's family, such as it is, Mike runs away from home, seemingly for good. That's definitely going to bollix up Jordan's TV show.

There's more than a kernel of a good idea behind Mr. Scoutmaster, but I felt like the material wasn't handled very well. Mike was a completely unrealistic character, for one. Further, a lot of the material seemed derivative of a movie from a few years earlier, Room for One More, which coincidentally had Winslow in the cast and dealt with a scout striking out on his own for a hike. Both movies, but even more so Mr. Scoutmaster, have an ending that's almost hagiolatrous in its reverence for Scouting.

So all of this is definitely lesser Clifton Webb, even though it's still a modestly capable programmer. I'm guessing it's going to show up in the FXM rotation a few more times before going back in the vault, and if it does, watch it then. I don't think I'd pay MOD prices for the DVD.