Carradine in the featurette From Zen Master to Shipmaster: The Life and Career of David Carradine, whose title is not terribly accurate
David Carradine, Rip Torn, and Bruce Dern are retired sea captain roommates looking for a housekeeper. I must have missed the reason why, but one of them has to marry this lady so that two of them can live for free. I replayed the opening minutes of the movie to try to figure this out and gave up. Did I mention the movie is set on Cape Cod in the days of horse-drawn carriages? It may read like a sketch slotted in the closing half hour of Saturday Night Live, but if you trust the quote on the front cover of The Golden Boys, it's apparently "a cross between Grumpy Old Men and Three Men and a Baby." It's not really either one.
The first half hour of the movie just blows by, and it feels like nothing of consequence has happened. By the time it was completely over, I wasn't sure if I'd taken a nap or not. Everyone tried their damnedest to give the script as much as they could, but you can only be so exciting when playing crusty old sailors. To be completely honest, I would probably not have sat through all of it had David Carradine not died. Peter Boyle was cast in this movie (then called Chatham) just before he died. I'm convinced that cursed it even more than the lousy script.
The picture itself wasn't nearly as interesting or entertaining as From Zen Master to Shipmaster: The Life and Career of David Carradine [40:07], which is more a Making-of/Behind the Scenes featurette than a Carradine career tribute. The bits with David telling stories are indisputably the most tolerable parts of the whole disc.
As an avowed Grumpy Old Men fan, I take great offense when a lazy comparison is made like the one on this movie's cover (admittedly by a critic, not the studio). I'm sure if I were a fan of Three Men and a Baby, I'd be offended there too, since this movie has nothing in common with it. It'd have been accurate to put the following on the front: "Do you love the afternoon special at Luby's? Do you hate when those damn kids carry on with their jibber-jabber and damn fool music? You'll love this here movie, by golly!"
I must note that I really do dislike slagging off the months and months of work people put into making a feature, but this is a great example of how to not write or complete a period film. The reason to touch this disc is to sift through that featurette if you have an interest in Carradine.