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I will have to admit I never actually saw this film, only the trailer, which ran in a theater in Knoxville, Tennessee back in the mid-70s. The title then was "Rockey's Style." It was quite obvious from the trailer that this was an independent amateur "vanity" project. It was shown in the theater where I saw the trailer (but not during any of the peak movie-going hours) and I am sure the producer of the film paid for the privilege. I can't even say what kind of a film it was, there was no spoken dialog in the trailer, but I think it was meant to be a comedy based on what the characters seemed to be doing. If you ever get a chance to see it, I wouldn't recommend it if you have any better ways to spend the time.

I had always wanted to see this movie as it was based on one of my favorite books, the historical novel "A Journey to Matecumbe" by Robert Lewis Taylor, who also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Travels of Jamie McPheeters." The book is a wonderful exciting and funny tale of a post-Civil War journey by a young boy and his uncle from Kentucky to the Florida Keys being pursued by the Ku Klux Klan and a vengeful southern aristocrat, with lots of great adventures in between.

I spent $10 for this movie and now wish I hadn't. The names of a few characters from the book are retained, but almost everything else is changed. It is neither particularly exciting or funny and it wastes the talents of a number of excellent character actors like Peter Ustinov, Dub Taylor, George Lindsay and Joan Hackett. It was also made on the cheap with lots of stock footage of the exotic locales that the characters are supposed to visit and lots of process shots filmed in front of blue screens. I suppose very young children MIGHT like it, but there are some violent scenes that make it problematic even for them. It's a probably eternal mystery why Hollywood buys the rights to film wonderful books and then doesn't put on the screen anything of what made the books wonderful in the first place.