New Picture

Lassie Come Home (M.S.M.), as written by the late Major Eric Knight, was one of the best children's books in years. M.G.M.'s version will delight not only children, but any adult with a healthy childhood memory. Lassie celebrates nothing more profound than the simple and timeworn relationship of a boy and a dog. It dramatizes the uncomplicated goodness of an animal in a complicated human world.

The core of the story is the irreducible faithfulness of Lassie, a fine female collie, for young Roddy McDowall. Lassie is sold by the boy's father, a dole-starved Yorkshireman, to a dog-fancying Duke. She is mistreated by a vicious kennel flunkey and twice breaks out of her kennel to come home. Then Lassie is taken far north into Scotland, escapes again and heads south with the homing infallibility of a pigeon. Starving, drenched, flinching at thunder, her feet bleeding, Lassie beats her homeward trail through some of the most pleasing Technicolored landscapes of the year. She has a run-in with two shepherds and their ferocious coal-black dog. She performs the supercanine feat of swimming the River Tweed and reaches English ground, half dead, to drop at the doorsill of two aged, lonely cottagers. They nurse her, realize she is on her way somewhere, sorrowfully let her go. She takes up with a traveling peddler and his charming little trick dog, Toots. She fights off a pair of robbers, escapes some dog-catchers by a crippling leap from an upstairs window, completes her hundreds of miles of faithful cross-country just in time to greet her young master just as he gets out of school. The meeting is an unusually valid bit of tear jerking.

A cast as solidly British as Yorkshire pudding understands perfectly the naive glamor which should invest the characters in a story for children and lends the dogs excellent support. That the shabby, endearing little dog named Toots fails to run away with the show and bury it like a bone is due only to the startling magnificence of Pal, who plays Lassie, and to the remarkable abilities of Rudd Weatherwax, who trained and directed her.

Lassie is the Mei Lan-fang of dog actors. She is a he. The name used to be Pal. Pal was born the runt of his litter. For a while, Trainer Rudd Weatherwax, who readies quite a few dogs and cats for the screen, had given Pal up as histrionically hopeless. But when M.G.M. saw the first rushes for Lassie, they immediately upped Pal's salary from $90 to $250 per week. Even Pal's stand-in got $100 a week.

Lassie's remarkable portrayal of exhaustion, fear, resolution were produced simply by Trainer Weatherwax's verbal commands. Roddy McDowall and Lassie had nothing to do with each other, off the set, until it was time to shoot the home-coming scene. In preparation for that, Lassie spent a week with Roddy at his home, then was taken away and isolated the night before. Since Roddy was the first human being Lassie was allowed to see the next day, the dog was delighted to greet Roddy and the scene was strictly a one-take affair. Some ice cream smeared on Roddy's cheeks helped intensify Lassie's emotions.

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