204. Throw Out the Anchor!

204. Throw Out the Anchor! (1974)
Director: John Hugh
Writer: John Hugh
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A man travels to Florida with his children to rent a boat for two months, but learns that the only boat available is a rotting tub. He, along with the ragtag group that lives in the surrounding swamp, makes the boat seaworthy and joins the group in an effort to save their homes from developers.

Johnathon visits a marina asking if it’s Cuppler’s Corner and is turned away. The man running the marina calls our eventual kind-of villain on a nearby boat to alert him to Johnathon’s question. That night, Johnathon arrives at Cuppler’s Corner where he meets Cap, a drunk that took the deposit for a boat via mail. Johnathon has traveled all the way from New York with his two children to rent the boat for two months. Unfortunately, Cap has drunk away the deposit and there are no boats available. All the boats are homes for the people living in the swamp—the black priest who’s initially shirtless, the maybe Indian foreign exchange student, and Cap’s housedress-and-curler-wearing wife that’s always berating him over his drinking. Johnathon threatens legal action, but Cap responds, “I got just one thing to say: I got a Jewish lawyer.”

Head::desk.

Before anyone calls on Mr. Katz the lawyer, Stevie, Johnathon’s daughter (and initiator of every dues ex machina), finds him and tells him their sob story. She says, basically, that her dad is always screwing up, but this time it’s not his fault. The lawyer tells her a story about how he got screwed over as a kid, but someone stood up for him. He then engineers a plan to get the family a boat and keep them from suing.

I want to linger on this moment because it’s pretty odd. Mr. Katz’s story is kind of affecting and undercuts any sense of this being a comedy. Instead, it makes it feel like a bit of a Hallmark movie-style feelgood family film. It draws attention to his late wife and his feelings about the area and lays out his moral compass in that he sees the opportunity to do right by someone as an obligation to do so. At the same time, it establishes Johnathon as a bumbler and screw-up which nothing else in the movie speaks to. He comes off as an angry, entitled white guy—the sheriff yelling at the hotel clerk in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He’s not the goofball Stevie’s plea implies that he is. At this point in the film, he reads as the villain, the guy the ragtag group has to convince not to seize their homes to turn into a parking lot.

They find him a boat, but it needs extensive repairs. In the course of repairing it, the ragtag group wins him over and he starts to fall in love with Lindy, a woman who won’t discuss her life outside of the swamp. As this is happening, the deputy sheriff keeps trying to serve Cap with papers and Cap keeps dodging him. The boat is finally finished and Johnathon strikes out to show his family all the beautiful nature, only there’s too much pollution and everything’s dead.

Yeah. Suddenly it’s an environmental film. The guy from the beginning pops back up here because he’s trying to get a highway built through the Corner and the county commissioner is running a scheme to buy up the land surrounding the forthcoming highway so his buddies can build condos. We find this out because Lindy is married to the head schemer.

Cap gets served, everyone has 30 days to clear out, and Johnathon comes back ready to fight. There’s a dredge sitting in the swamp so they come up with a plan to seize it. They take the dredge hostage, the Lt. Gov. comes down to talk with them, and there’s a bunch of attention on the situation because Stevie wrote a letter to the editor about how sad her daddy was that he couldn’t show her the nature. All the shady deals get revealed, the planned road is canceled saving everyone’s homes, and the dredge is accidentally blown up. Lindy goes home to divorce her husband and everyone has a happy ending. THE END.

I think I can sum up how misjudged this movie is with one phrase: unnecessary blackface. Blackface is, outside of stories about blackface, always unnecessary, but some movies that use it at least provide a narrative reason for it to happen. Here, in the (limp, unimpressive, unaffecting) climax, the son has his face blacked so that he “can act as the scout,” and then doesn’t scout anything. And doesn’t wash the makeup off for the rest of the movie. So, yeah.

Oh, oh no. Did you think you were funny?

That sums up the entire thing—it’s a comedy that’s wholly unaware of what it’s about or what’s funny. I wasn’t initially, and still am not 100%, convinced that it was even supposed to be a comedy despite the parody of the MGM logo at the start.

The movie never settles down into one plot. I mean, it takes twenty minutes for Johnathan to see the boat for the first time. Everything is a lead-up to him starting to work on the boat and getting to know everyone. And, really, that should be the plot. It should be this calm, Mary Poppins-esque story about a job-obsessed guy trying to hold his family together learning that a simpler life in the bayou is what they need. Instead it tries to be an environmental drama, a screwball comedy, and a “kids saving the rec center” plot, each in turn. And none of them are done well. The movie has the feel of Gilligan’s Island with an exploitation movie look, and that should be more fun than it is.

In the end, it’s just a bad movie—not funny-bad or good-bad, but just a boring, uninspired lump. The one thing to say in its favor is that it’s in the public domain, but there’s no real point in hunting it down—it’s not entertaining, it doesn’t invite much riffing, and doesn’t have good enough visuals to use in other projects. On top of that, both my copies have Mill Creek bugs on them so I can’t upload them to the Internet Archive. No big loss.