'Father Goose' on Blu-ray with new bonus features

Category: Blu-ray's and DVD's


Olive Films has just released the Cary Grant film Father Goose as an Olive Signature Blu-ray with new bonus features. This 1964 movie was one of Grant’s final films. After this he made only one more movie, Walk, Don’t Run, which was produced in 1966.

Father Goose takes place during World War II. Grant stars as Walter Eckland, a bum drifting through life. He was a former teacher but is now just taking it easy and appropriating whatever he can find for his own purpose – even military supplies.

Walter is manipulated into taking a position as a coast watcher on an uninhabited South Pacific island. What he gets is more than he bargained for.

When he is sent to a nearby island to rescue the local coast watcher after a Japanese attack, he discovers a woman and a group of young girls. Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron) is chaperoning several girls from a boarding school and they ended up on this island. To keep them alive, he takes them back to his island, hoping they will be taken back to civilization the next day. What actually happens is that he is stuck with them all for the foreseeable future.

So, take one somewhat stuffy French chaperone, add seven impressionable young women, and mix in a grumpy, unkempt bum and you have the recipe for two hours of fun. From the opening scene with a catchy song to the ending credits, this is a film for Cary Grant fans and everyone else (although who isn’t a fan of the legendary actor?).

Trevor Howard plays Walter’s friend and the commander who initially blackmails Walter into being a coast watcher but then must face the sticky situation with Walter being in charge of eight females who are counting on him to keep them safe. Caron is delightful as Catherine Freneau and as the story progresses and the young women become infatuated with Mr. Eckland, she also falls under his rather gruff charm.

A bonus feature looks at the final part of Grant’s career and life. It might surprise fans to know that he was going to play Professor Higgins in the film version of My Fair Lady, but thought he would always be compared to Rex Harrison who inhabited that role on stage and ultimately reprised it in the movie.

Cary Grant wanted to go out on top. He didn’t want to be remembered as one of those Hollywood stars who kept going and going, like the Energizer bunny. This man had class and wanted to be remembered as the dashing movie star and not some old man on the screen.

This feature will definitely enlighten fans of Grant about his desires and goals. One of those goals was to get an Academy Award, which he eventually did for his body of work but not for one performance. That was fine with him.

There is a bonus feature with Ted Nelson whose father Ralph directed the film. In this feature Nelson talks about his father’s career. He comes from a show business family, with his mother being actress Celeste Holm, however Ted has earned his own place in history as the man who initially envisioned the World Wide Web – back in the 1960s!

With the new informational bonus features and the delightful movie, this edition of Father Goose is a must-have for fans of the show.

About the Author

Francine Brokaw has been covering all aspects of the entertainment industry for over 20 years. She also writes about products and travel. She has been published in national and international newspapers and magazines as well as Internet websites. She has written her own book, Beyond the Red Carpet The World of Entertainment Journalists, from Sourced Media Books.

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