Raymie – 1960

Ike (John Agar) "You know for a gal who only lets a guy hold her hand, you expect an awful lot from him."

Helen (Julie Adams) "That's because I quit training Octopuses when I was a teenager."

Raymie features a young boy (David Ladd) who lives in a world where fishing, mostly in the company of other much older hard-core fishing enthusiasts, is a world all of its own, taking place on a long pier that juts out over the Pacific ocean. Day after day these same people gather to fish, which for them is just about the most important thing in the world, and their lives and in some cases their professions depend upon it.

The nine-year old Raymie, though, has more than just one reason for being on the pier day after day. His widowed mother (Julie Adams) waitresses in a nearby cafe and is using the private pier (fishermen must pay to use it) as a way to keep tabs on her child when he is not in school. Another reason is that fishing is one of the few things that keeps the boy in a kind of contact with his dead father, who was also a fisherman. This is particularly highlighted in the film by the valuable fishing knife Raymie uses to clean fish which had been his father's, a knife that the other fishermen regularly are offering to buy or trade for.

Raymie isn't particularly subtle about the trials the main character has to pass through, which is the way children's films are usually told, but there is a sub-story about the adults on the pier that fills out the movie and gives it a more graceful and expansive story. John Agar went from a nearly A-list Hollywood star during his career to a being the prince of a legion of B and sub-B films, and Raymie is in the former, not because of subject, but because of the limited budget on hand. But a certain maudlin tonality hampers the film, just as sentimentality hampers a lot of kid's movies, but on the other hand Raymie is populated with a cast of great character actors (Frank Ferguson, Jester Hairston, John Damler, Ray Kellogg) and even if the story of coming to terms with death (and life) is mostly on a child's level, all of the other talent on screen gives that simplicity a fine edge.

Directed by Frank McDonald, written by Mark Hanna with David Ladd, Julie Adams, John Agar.

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Original Page December 12, 2024