UK Release Date: 19-06-2008
Price: £15.99
UK Certificate: U
Director: Fred M Wilcox, S Sylvan Simon
Country: US
Distributor: Warner Home Video

Lassie is a dog after Rupert Sheldrake’s own heart, one who always knows when her owner is coming home – or, in Lassie’s case, when the young Roddy McDowell will emerge from the local schoolhouse (cue whining, scratching at doors etc; actually, given that school is always out at 4pm, perhaps it’s not so clever). The famous collie’s talents extend beyond this, though, as Lassie Come Home (1943) demonstrates: her poor Yorkshire family are forced to sell her to the local Duke, who promptly carts the unhappy mutt off to the Scottish Highlands to be abused by horrid kennel-man Heinz (an evil Cockney with a bizarrely German name; but I suppose there was a war on). From here, she makes her escape, travelling hundreds of miles across hill, dale, a mangrove swamp and what is clearly the Rockies to reach her old home on the Moors and be reunited with her boy. (Frankly, while an impressive trip, it doesn’t hold a candle to the epic trek made by the two dogs and their feline pal in Disney’s charming The Incredible Journey – which remains top dog (ahem) of this admittedly small genre). Full of British ex-pat Holly­wood stalwarts (Nigel Bruce, Elsa Lanchester, Edmund Gwenn) sporting a bizarre variety of accents all a good way from Yorkshire, shot in glorious Technicolor and swept along by an emotive score, this remains a classic of its kind, although children may be severely traumatised by the fate of the travelling pot-and-pan salesman’s dog, Toots.

Things get weirder in the two follow-ups. Son of Lassie (1945) sees dim-witted pup and reluctant war-dog Laddie stranded behind enemy lines in Norway, overcoming any isolationist scruples when his British master is threatened by a luger-packing Jerry. Courage of Lassie (1946), on the other hand, concerns another of Lassie’s offspring, Bill, who grows up wild in a pre-lapsarian woodland world straight out of Mahler’s 4th Symphony before meeting Elizabeth Taylor and being plunged into the hell of WWII in the Philippines (don’t ask how). This is an astonishingly odd film, simultaneously a Lawrentian meditation on nature and culture and men and women, a propaganda piece about the plight of returning veterans (Bill comes back from war a changed dog) and a peculiarly American account of Man’s fall from grace and redemption.