The Barefoot Executive (1971)

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I could never give a truly bad review to a film with as talented a cast as this one. One of the things I liked about the Walt Disney Studios is that they gave employment to a lot of familiar faces from the big studio era when they were finding it hard to get work. But this was not one of the better efforts from the Magic Kingdom.Disney's All American hero in films at this time was Kurt Russell who plays a kid who is a mail delivery clerk at the UBC network by day and a night school student looking to better himself. By accident he discovers that the chimpanzee his girlfriend Heather North has can pick winning television shows. His taste mirrors that of the American public which is a proposition a lot might agree with.Russell is promoted to a Vice Presidency in charge of programming keeping the chimp's participation a closely guarded secret. But a whole lot of vested interests want to find out. They stop at nothing as you will see.Some might call this film cute and innocuous as most of the Russell Disney flicks were, but I think The Barefoot Executive is the worst of what he did for that studio. To me the whole thing was so dopey and even a cast that has Harry Morgan, Wally Cox, Alan Hewitt, Joe Flynn, and Iris Adrian in it can't sell this one. I will say that Adrian has only a small bit, but it is memorable.John Ritter is also in The Barefoot Executive playing a role that might have led him to be cast as Jack Tripper in Three's Company. Maybe the film did his career some good.I'd see The Barefoot Executive should be seen for the marvelous cast, but I think you'll agree with me when you see how silly it is.

It'll be fun to see how David Duchovny & Jake Kasdan's excellent new film "The TV Set" compares to this film of 35 years ago. Lila Garrett, Robert Butler & the others involved in "The Rating Game" aka "The Barefoot Executive" had done nothing but live through pilot hell for most of their careers. The people involved in "The TV Set" have jumped from pilot hell to feature hell and back enough times. And both sets of film makers manage to make us laugh and laugh a lot. Even the two casts are interchangeable. The cast of one would be equally brilliant in the other film. The intervening years teach us there's still great pain that goes along with the politics of television, and there is great talent.

Although not part of the Dexter Riley series (in fact made just after the first one), it carries Russell where Dexter might have gone after college. The same type of humor skims the surface of this movie but, it is the biting satire that is it's heart. Playing to the pretentious attitudes of people who cater to each other more than their clients, in this case the TV audience, they are completely stumped when an outsider successfully predicts the new favorite shows. But Russell holds a secret that would completely demoralize everyone in charge. Never mind a young mail clerk seems smarter than seasoned pros, but what about a monkey! This movie showed a maturity the Riley series never did, although the concept of a bunch of college slackers was ahead of it's time, and stood out from the rest of the Disney fare at that time. Well worth viewing as it shows Russell at the beginning of his adult career. His comedic timing and relaxed, natural acting talent are quite evident here.

Nice, safe family comedy featuring a television network, a cute/funny chimp, and a young Kurt Russell in the prime of his Disney phase. Kurt is a low-level employee with a big television network with high-level ideas. By shear chance, he discovers that his neighbor's pet chimp is able to correctly predict the big ratings winners for each week's programs, and surreptitiously uses the animal to move up within the organization.The chimp demonstrating his disdain for poor programming (clearly enunciated raspberries, followed by screams of displeasure, and culminating in his throwing some destructive object at the screen) sent me into fits of laughter.But it also gave me (as a seven year old) an inkling into how the television industry works, and thereby planted the seeds of a life-long interest in the boob tube. And to this day, I am still wondering what the subject matter of "Devil Dan" is, and why it was so much more of a winner program than "The Happy Harringtons"...Get the kids away from "Nickelodeon" for a couple of hours with this campy treat...