Fred M Wilcox (1943)
It was on television a few days after I saw War Horse and I was keen to compare them. It’s basically the same plot – boy and animal separated, finally reunited after a physically arduous journey (though in this case arduous for the animal only). The separation comes about in a similar way too: the story is set during the Depression and unemployed Sam Carraclough has to sell his son Joe’s collie Lassie to the Duke of somewhere in Yorkshire to pay the rent on the family’s cottage and keep food on their table. Lassie Come Home is easier to enjoy than War Horse because you don’t feel guilty about resenting the Great War getting in the way of the central love story. That’s not to say the film isn’t tough to watch at times. In the slightly comical early stages, the heroine’s repeated escapes from the Duke’s kennels make it look as if Lassie’s going to come home every five minutes but, once she’s been taken by the Duke and his nasty-piece-of-work dog handler to show in Scotland, and decides to make her way back to Yorkshire from there, this ‘picturization’ (as the opening titles call it) of a book by Eric Knight becomes emotionally involving. En route, Lassie is at the mercy of spectacularly adverse weather and terrain and more than once injured. In a truly upsetting scene, Toots, another dog she pals up with, is killed by two men who are trying to rob Toots’ owner, a travelling pedlar. When Lassie eventually gets back home and goes to meet Joe from school on the stroke of four, as she always used to do, she has a bad limp after a fall escaping from a high window. I was relieved that Fred M Wilcox and Hugo Butler, who did the screenplay, appended a short postscript, in which we see Joe and the Duke’s little granddaughter Priscilla riding bicycles together, followed by not only Lassie in fine fettle but also a litter of her puppies. (By this point, Sam Carraclough has taken over as the Duke’s right-hand man at the kennels.)
Needless to say, Lassie Come Home is technically primitive compared with War Horse. The landscape is more Monument Valley than the Yorkshire moors and the water Lassie swims across to get back into England suggests the Everglades as much as the Tweed. But I think the action sequences are more exciting than in Spielberg’s film and the people Lassie meets on the way back are more taking. They include an elderly couple played by the real- life husband and wife Ben Webster and Dame May Whitty, and Edmund Gwenn, who is superb as the tinker, Rowlie. There’s depth, as well as warmth and humour, in Gwenn’s playing and he engages with the dogs particularly fully and easily. He also has the most convincing Yorkshire accent, even though, as a travelling man, he needs one less than most. Donald Crisp’s voice as Sam is all-purpose Celtic – vaguely Scottish at first, then a bit of Irish, eventually more Welsh than anything (as if he’d not quite got How Green Was My Valley out of his system). But if his accent isn’t authentic everything else this fine actor does is: Sam often has to struggle to keep his feelings under cover and Crisp does this with a quiet power. Elsa Lanchester is Sam’s wife and Roddy McDowall as young Joe is appealingly serious. (There’s one bit when Joe’s crying and you can see not just tears running down his cheeks but a skein of mucus dripping from his face.) Nigel Bruce is the Duke, J Pat O’Malley the bad dog handler who gets the push, and the eleven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor is Priscilla. She’s incredibly witty and assured, as well as beautiful, but not in the least a precocious pain. Even at this age she knew how to wear costumes.
The Patsy Awards weren’t properly up and running in 1943 but Pal, the three-year-old male dog who plays Lassie, would clearly have won if they had been. Pal starred in all six subsequent Lassie films of the era and, according to Wikipedia:
‘… then appeared briefly in shows, fairs, and rodeos around the United States before starring in the two pilots filmed in 1954 for the television series, Lassie. Pal retired after filming the television pilots, and died in 1958. He sired a line of descendants who continued to play the fictional character he originated. The Saturday Evening Post said Pal had “the most spectacular canine career in film history”.’
Yorkshire-born Eric Knight, whose Lassie Come-Home was published in 1940, died in action fighting for US forces in January 1943 and the film, released in October that year, is dedicated to him.
10 March 2012
