Maybe if Walt Disney Studios had decided to make a real adaption of O'Henry's Ransom Of Red Chief the results might have come out better. Certainly the story had been used before most successfully by 20th Century Fox in their O'Henry anthology film O'Henry's Full House where Fred Allen and Oscar Levant played the luckless kidnappers of Lee Aaker. But this adaption, credited or not, in No Deposit, No Return is one of the Magic Kingdom's less successful family films.
I have no doubt that originally this was intended for Don Knotts to be once again teamed up with Tim Conway. If that had happened maybe the results would have been better. On the other hand you could believe Darren McGavin was a top professional safe-cracker a lot faster than Conway.
Brother and sister Brad Savage and Kim Richards are on Easter break from their boarding school in the United Kingdom and instead of being with their absentee mother Barbara Feldon, they are going to be spending time with their stuffy grandfather David Niven in Los Angeles. That's a terrific disappointment because Niven's just not a kid's person.
So after ditching chauffeur Bob Hastings sent to pick them up and falling in with crooks McGavin and Knotts, the kids hatch a scheme to stage their own kidnapping in the hopes of raising plane fare to Hong Kong where mom is and for their two accomplices to get out of a mounting gambling debt owed to Vic Tayback.
Kids under the age of 12 might approve of this film. Every adult in the film is positively clueless, including cops Herschel Bernardi and Charles Martin Smith. Having kids be the smartest ones in a film is always guaranteed to please a juvenile audience. But you've got to wonder how Bernardi and Smith ever got on the force and how McGavin, Knotts, and Tayback ever succeeded in a life of crime.
As for David Niven this was one of two films he made for the Magic Kingdom, the other being Candleshoe. That one being set in England took advantage of Niven's background. In No Deposit, No Return, Niven's considerable charm is stretched to the breaking point.
Recommended strictly for grade school kids. I'm sure William Sidney Porter is glad he wasn't given any screen credit for this.
