The Apple Dumpling Gang

This comic Disney Western is at its best when Don Knotts and Tim Conway are onscreen as the bumbling bandits who try to steal from a bunch of orphans. Few people remember anything about this movie apart from the hilarity generated by this scene-stealing duo.

The story is simple and obvious, but it's told with a lot of energy, and the cast is jammed, with character actors doing their things.

The traditional ingredients of homely moralising, sentimentality and raucous slapstick are used sparingly, the dialogue is fairly bright, some visual gags are neatly executed, even Knotts is bearable, and Susan Clark makes an auspicious Disney debut as the Calamity Jane-type heroine.

A rather pleasant period comedy that made quite a sum of money for the studio in its economically weak post-Walt period. A delightful cast of character actors helps the childish story, with Conway and Knotts beginning what would become a somewhat famous, but very simple-minded, film comedy duo.

Walt Disney started by making movies in which animated drawings played the parts of people or animals who stood for people. Later he turned to making movies in which people or animals play the parts of animated drawings. They bound, they double-take, they simper when moved and quack when angry. Their disasters—crashes, plunges through space, explosions—are weightless. The Apple Dumpling Gang is a fair example.