Westbrook Pegler
El Paso Herald
March 8, 1961
The best moving pictures ever made were Walt Disney’s fairy tales in color such as “Barnyard Symphony,” “The Country Mouse,” and “Snow White” in which countless drawings were strung together so smoothly that these graduations seemed to be photographs of actual creatures from out of this world. The music was consistent as in “Barnyard Symphony” where horses whickered and fowl expressed themselves in cackles and clucks of superb absurdity, all of it loyal to an operatic theme.
There came a week, just before Christmas a quarter of a century ago, when someone barely dusted out the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd street, the scene of the great Ziegfeld Follies, and installed half a dozen spools of this great American art, a form which no other people on earth has ever approached and no other genius but Disney had the gift and patience to create.
I was then slave to a young friend now six feet two and nudging 30 who wanted to see Santa Claus not only at Macy’s but at Gimbel’s and Wanamaker’s and on all the corners thereabout. I did my duty loyally until 4 o’clock, when lights were coming on and reminded him that he had promised, on his part, to sit through my kind of show.
He trudged along in slush, often lost in a wilderness of hurrying trouser legs and skirts, and up the stairs to second balcony, for the festival had captivated many others who may have had a faint intimation that this might be their last hour of such beauty on this more and more evil earth.
I remember with longing scene in which the country mouse fell into a champagne glass at a great table after the party and drank his way out, emerging so belligerent that he blethered a challenge to his own dancing image reflected in a tremulous mold of jelly.
The masters drew and painted that scene in the drunken vision of a hilarious little giant who squared off to fight through adventures which I will not attempt to relate further lest memory betray me. I want to believe the country mouse licked the resident cat, but the actual ensuings probably were much more poetic.
Disney was not yet fully appreciated as he came to be, not with “Snow White,” his first great full-length production, but later, with an unworthy incoherence from the floor of his cutting room called “Fantasia.” Disney then got into the hands of the condescending patrons who had seen the Moscow Ballet, and went arty.
I sat through the whole program at the New Amsterdam with a twinge for Marilyn Miller, who had sung “Silver Lining” on that stage, and was longing indescribably to see it all again when my young friend reminded me that they were expecting us home up the country.
One year I hurt my spine playing softball for a fund for crippled children and barely escaped fusion operation. Hearing this, Disney sent to my home at Pound Ridge, N. Y., his entire production for the coming year, six or seven of his best films of “feature” length, as I believe they call shows that run about an hour.
The living room was 14 feet high and my bedroom had a window giving onto this in which Disney’s crew established their machinery to throw the pictures on a big screen rigged across the massive chimney.
We invited, perhaps, 30 people and commandeered folding chairs from an undertaker in New Canaan.
There were sandwiches and so forth in proportion, but nearer 60 than 30 showed up, including Gene Tunney, who, when all was said and done, clamored for some detail that he had liked most and started the carnival over gain.
And now, heaven pity us, we have “Exodus” and glandular enormities of impersonal females named, for example, Monroe, and the rat pack’s evil interpretations of the soul of the American GI on foreign service.
I pity myself as I face the New Frontier, which I wot not, and venture, memories of “The Pled Piper” where the little crippled boy on his crutches barely hobbled over the threshold of the enchanted mountain as the massive doors swung shut and trapped him in realm of endless joy.
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