Thrills, Spills & Pola Negri

The Moon-Spinners. The mere notion of a juvenile suspense thriller by Walt Disney is apt to give moviegoers the heebie-jeebies. It calls up unnerving images. Seven stray cats finding their way home to a haunted castle. Donald Duck meeting Frankenstein. Hordes of psychotic chipmunks slaughtering each other for nuts. But The Moon-Spinners, filmed in picture-book color on the island of Crete, turns out to be daft and breezy escapism assigned to a cast of flesh-and-blood actors headed by Hayley Mills. Given a plot that might fit snugly into the Nancy Drew mystery series, Hayley plays it with the knowing air of a junior-miss James Bond.

Hayley and her aunt (Joan Greenwood), vacationing at a sunny village inn, meet a spirited young English compatriot (Peter McEnery). Enter Eli Wallach, as the swarthy Greek villain who knows that Peter knows too much about a jewel theft back in London, and the plot begins to fizz. Peter turns up, with a bullet wound, in an ancient spooky crypt. Hayley skips to the rescue. Showing an appetite for danger that 007 himself might envy, she is bound and gagged in a rat-infested granary, makes a wild leap to freedom on the rotating vanes of a windmill, cracks a rifle butt over a thug's skull, commandeers a speedboat and belts down a couple of drinks--all to help recover a fabulous emerald necklace.

The film's choicest surprise occurs in the last reel or so, when Hayley blithely outwits 69-year-old Pola Negri, femme fatale of the silent era. In her first film since 1943, Temptress Negri, coddling her pet cheetah aboard an improbable yacht, plays an eccentric millionairess with a passion for jewels. Her bizarre, spoofing comeback points up a new worldliness in Disney, who has obviously decided that what was grand passion for Grandpa is just good clean fun for the kids.

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