People who like Disney's live action comedies and find Dick Van Dyke funny will enjoy this film. Van Dyke carries over half the movie with no one else to play off except a monkey. He then meets a group of island girls and organizes them against a tyrannical chief. It's extremely light hearted and very silly, but it's charm is that it's a product of a different time. No one is making comedies this straightforward in the age of irony.
Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.
1966
Action / Adventure / Comedy / Family
Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.
1966
Action / Adventure / Comedy / Family
Plot summary
Lt. Robin Crusoe is a navy pilot who bails out of his plane after engine trouble. He reaches a deserted island paradise where he builds a house, finds an abandoned submarine with lots of gadgets that he can use, and also finds a marooned chimp from the US Space program and a native girl named Wednesday who was exiled by her father. Wednesday thinks Crusoe wants to marry her, and when her father arrives on the island to collect her and Crusoe refused to marry her, chaos ensues.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
Director
Top cast
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Charming Disney Comedy
Too slow paced and uninteresting
Odd, not in a good way.
In a lot of parts, 'Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N.' does feel like a retread of 1960's 'Swiss Family Robinson' - the plot has differences, but you could possibly make a case for it being a paint job on that aforementioned film. Too cynical? Probably.
For a comedy, there's a real lack of entertainment and humour. I don't think I laughed once. As for the cast, Dick Van Dyke is the best part of this film, though his character is rather forgettable. Nancy Kwan is decent but hardly gets to show off any of her acting abilities to be honest.
I'm not sure I entirely get the message, either. Women's rights? The ending, which kinda comes out of nowhere, goes against that. As a whole, this is too slow paced and uninteresting for me.
If It's Wednesday, This Must Be Heaven
As I've said before, I will go just about anywhere, cinematically, for a chance to hear Nancy Kwan's charming Hong Kong accent and to see her fabulous zygomatic bones. Case in point: "Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.," a silly but entertaining Disney flick from 1966. In this one, the titular Navy fighter pilot, played by the ever-likable Dick van Dyke, is forced down into the drink of the South Pacific and, like his namesake, washes ashore on a deserted island. In the film's first half, Robin builds himself a house, discovers a decades-old Japanese submarine wreck and finds another castaway: the astro chimp Floyd! In the latter half, he finds an island mate of a more toothsome nature, a native girl who he dubs Wednesday (even though her pidgin English is perfectly fine and she's quite capable of revealing her true name),played by our Nancy, natch. And then Crusoe gets embroiled in a battle between Wednesday and dozens of her gal pals, versus her headhunter father and the devil god Kabuna. Anyway, van Dyke gives a broadly comedic performance, Floyd offers up some of the best simian thesping that I've ever seen (just look at his reaction shots during a poker game!),and Akim Tamiroff, in his role of headhunter Tanamashu, is a caricatured embarrassment. And Nancy? She is just adorable, never cuter than when playing charades in one segment; van Dyke's desire to leave his island paradise with Wednesday as his bride really does stretch the viewer's credulity past the breaking point. Six years after her yummy "Suzie Wong" debut, Nancy Kwan, a gorgeous Eurasian, was still one of the sexiest actresses that ANY continent had to offer; heck, she's still a looker today, at the age of 71! Besides some good performances, the picture provides some situations that are so very stoopid they're actually pretty funny (such as when Robin laboriously builds a sextant to determine his bearings, only to have it report that he's somewhere between Elmira, New York and Muncie, Indiana!),as well as some very attractive scenery (it was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kauai). The fifth-highest-grossing picture of 1966, the film was nonetheless critically drubbed but remains fun escapism 45 years later. It is an absolute must for all fans of Nancy Kwan and a perfect film to watch with your favorite 8-year-old....