I have no idea if this is the most faithful of the many adaptations of The Hardy Boys mystery books, but it’s the best I’ve seen. Produced in serial form as a segment on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club, it has young brothers Frank and Joe Hardy searching for pirate treasure on the property of a neighborhood eccentric. It’s also better written and directed than most TV shows of the day, at least on a par with the feature films from the Disney studio during the same period. People always bellyache about the insipid conventionality of 50s popular entertainment, but I am struck by the elements – (as in the contemporaneous Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and even I Love Lucy) – that directly challenge the diversity-phobic white-bread Eisenhower-era Norman Rockwell small-town Americana mentality that, according to doctrine, was never critiqued without consequent blackballing. Frank and Joe are the sons of a single-parent family, looked over by an aunt as their father is always out-of-town on business. The boys lie, meddle and snoop regardless of adult admonitions to behave. Joe, the youngest brother, talks back to his father and calls the police “stupid.” The girl on the street is not a blonde goody-goody but a smart-mouthed busybody. Their friend on the street is an orphan threatened with being taken away to juvenile hall. When a shout is heard from down the street, the aunt immediately assumes it is the neighbors who’ve been fighting a lot lately. In this idyllic American town, it is remarkably easy for children to be alternately ignored and punished for things they didn’t do, and for citizens to invade and ransack a neighbor’s home at the first rumor of gold hidden in its walls. Besides all this, Disney’s protégé stars Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk happen to be quite good actors who exude a kind of confidence, warmth and intelligence that you never see in child actors of recent years.
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