Watch In Search of the Castaways For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

After so many attempts by others to recapture the magic of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's own belated return to the Jules Verne genre must have been greeted with tremendous anticipation. When it did finally come however, with 1961's In Search of the Castaways, audiences can only have responded with a bewilderment bordering on stupefaction. Castaways has a scenario so bizarre and features a set of adventures so patently absurd, that it makes Journey to the Center of the Earth seem like cinema verité. The fact that the makers appear to have been perfectly aware of these illogicalities and may have been indulging in some kind of a rarified joke only makes things worse in my opinion. You tell me: The children of a marooned sea captain receive from him a message in a bottle—a bottle found in the stomach of a shark. Unlikely, you say? So do about five characters in the film itself--repeatedly. Later, the party decides to rest overnight in "The Land of Many Earthquakes." The hut they sleep in seems, nonetheless, to have been standing for hundreds of years so they feel confident it will make it through one more night--and they tell us so. An enormous tremor strikes within moments and shakes the entire building down before our eyes. During this quake, the stone ledge the party has been standing on breaks loose and becomes a bobsled hurtling down the mountainside. Do the explorers cling to it for their lives in mortal terror? No, they laugh and yodel and enjoy the ride as if nothing at all were at stake--which the audience has now begun to realize is in fact the case. Soon, they come to the broad, treeless landscape of the Argentine pampas; here, the earth is parched and cracked, the sky cloudless. In spite of this, Indians warn them to beware of floods. The Europeans take pains to point out the extreme unlikelihood of such an eventuality--and are, of course, shortly interrupted by an 8-foot wall of water that reaches from horizon to horizon. As Disney expert Leonard Maltin remarks, "There seems no earthly purpose for throwing in a giant condor or a massive flood, and the slightly off-center feeling is only amplified when Maurice Chevalier starts to sing about their troubles!" On and on it goes until about the midway point of the film, at which time the searchers learn that their whole expedition has been a wild goose chase to begin with and that they've been looking on the WRONG CONTINENT. And the audience throws up its hands. If we could write In Search of the Castaways off as a low-budget quickie like Valley of the Dragons, padded out with stock footage, the whole thing would be easier to figure. But no—-extreme care was taken with Castaways. It has lush Technicolor photography, stunning miniatures, and a non-stop parade of the most gorgeous matte paintings you ever saw (Peter Ellenshaw). The special effects are, in fact, some of the best in any Verne film and were accomplished by the very same people who did similarly magnificent work for 20,000 Leagues. Yet the situations these effects are called upon to depict are so far-out that they would have been more appropriate in something like This Island Earth or First Spaceship on Venus. The aforementioned "sleigh ride" for instance, really does play out like an attraction at Disneyland, and would probably be interpreted by today's critics as a crass send-off for the inevitable theme park tie-in. (Actually, it seems to have been the other way around, with a Disneyland ride providing inspiration for the movie; the park's Matterhorn Bobsleds attraction opened four years earlier and was based on a different film, 1958's Third Man on the Mountain). Most curious of all, however, is the way this script actually rubs your nose in each of its many improbabilities and underlines every deus ex machina. In retrospect the filmmakers do seem to have tried to warn us in advance; the title work introduces the movie as "Jules Verne's Fantasy Adventure." This might have been our cue that it was all intended as some kind of a spoof of the genre, or "live action cartoon," and ought to be taken as such. Still, the joke sails right over my head. Make no mistake: In Search of the Castaways has plenty going for it. But the screenplay (based on Verne's 1865 book Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant) ought to have been sent back down Dopey Drive to the Story Department for some heavy revision. (Incidentally, the George Sanders villain in this movie, Thomas Ayerton, reappears in Verne's L'Île mystérieuse—which happens to be a sequel to both this book and 20,000 Leagues). Director Robert Stevenson, at any rate, did get another crack at Verne-flavored adventure for Disney—-1974's Island at the Top of the World—-and he fared much better there.

Based upon Jule's Vernes 'Captain Grant's Children', In Search of Those Castaways (1962) is an incoherent yarn about Mary Grant (Haley Mills), the determined daughter of a missing sea captain (Jack Gwillim) who sets about traveling to exotic ports and hidden mysterious locales in search of dear IL' daddy. On this trip she takes family friend and confident, Jacque Paganell (the marvelous Maurice Chevalier) and meets up with the unscrupulous and hardened, Thomas Ayerton (George Sanders). The cast also includes Wilfred Hyde-White as the stuffy Lord Glenaravan and Michael Anderson Jr. as his son John. But Robert Stevenson's direction on this occasion seems to fall apart on a series of vignettes that have no coherent or driving narrative. Verne's works usually present this sort of problem for screenwriters, in that Verne himself often wrote episodic stories that later became loosely strung together as fantasy novels of their day; visionary – then; stagnant and wholly unappealing by 1960s standards; completely out of touch by today's expectations. Peter Ellenshaw's matte paintings extend the world of fantasy that Mary and company traverse to good effect. There's some great trick photography taking place during the flood sequence. There's also Chevalier warbling a very family friendly little ditty, 'Enjoy it.' In the end, it seems hard to take up Chevalier on that musical request. The end of the story is a forgone conclusion by reel two. We know Mary's going to find her father; it's a Disney film. There seems to be some discrepancy as to the proper aspect ratio for this film; 1:33:1 or 1:75:1. The theatrical prints appear to have been printed in the latter format since title credit sequences on this DVD occasionally run off the top and bottom of the screen. However, an usual practice occurred in the late 1960s and early 70s in American cinema, whereby certain films were shot in full frame for the sake of economy and then artificially cropped to 1:75:1 for theatrical presentation. Having explained this; the print for In Search of Those Castaways might very well have been one such film, with title sequences specifically formatted for the 1:75:1 theatrical engagement. Hence, when Disney remastered the DVD they forgot to format the titles for 1:33:1 to avoid confusion. At the very least, these credits have not been framed properly. At worst, Disney has given us another full frame only version of a widescreen movie. Yet, for the rest of the presentation, everything looks pretty much as it should. There is no apparent cropping to speak of and scenes appear quite natural in 1:33:1. As for the rest of the image quality: colors are quite solid, pure and rich. Blacks are deep. Whites are generally clean. Film grain is present during the matte shots but absent elsewhere for a picture that will surely not disappoint. The audio is engaging, if dated.

Theowinthrop should check the Disney Catalogue very thoroughly for the Captain Hattaras tale. We have that very movie available on DVD here in Australia. Or at least something with a similar storyline written by the same author. I'm not sure whether it is live action or cartoon though. Quite apart from the above though "In Search Of The Castaways" was in my opinion a very enjoyable movie. Hayley Mills as always is precocious in a serious way. Maybe it's me but I do not think that she was ever a good singer as I consider her voice too thin for singing. I also do not think that she really matured until after her Disney contract expired - compare her later movies to the earlier ones. From the land down under.

I recently watched this movie for the first time and found very enjoyable and it is a good old adventure movie. The only thing I didn't like about it were the songs, which seemed pointless and did not fit in with the storyline.An excellent cast, which includes Hayley Mills (Tiger Bay), Wilfred Hyde White (North West Frontier), George Sanders (Village of the Damned) and Wilfred Brambell (Steptoe and Son). All play excellent parts and they seem to be enjoying themselves. The special effects are excellent too.While searching for Hayley Mills's dad, the expedition encounters dangers such as an earthquake, volcano, tidal wave and flood, cannibals, a leopard and a rather unfriendly giant eagle. They do find him at the end, alive and well.I found this movie excellent but the songs do let it down slightly.Rating: 4 stars out of 5.