LASSIE COME HOME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 289, 5 January 1945, Page 17

LASSIE COME HOME

(M-G-M)

F box-office success is the test, it is likely that we are in for a cycle of animal pictures starring Roddy MacDowall and a succession of

dumb friends. But if they are all as genial and colourful and as ‘innocuously sentimental as My Friend Flicka and now Lassie Come Home (from the story by the late Eric Knight), then I can contemplate with equanimity and even with pleasure the prospect of seeing the saga of Timmy the office cat, who refused to be bombed out, or of Leonard the lama from the London Zoo, who joined the Land Army. I shall certainly take the children to see them. Lassie, the more-than-human collie bitch, does no war work: she belongs to an era when unemployment and the dole were the chief enemies of the British people. As a result, she is sold for 15 guineas by a Yorkshire couple (Donald Crisp and Elsa Lanchester) to the rich Duke of Rutling (Nigel Bruce), even though this breaks the heart of their young son (Roddy MacDowall). Lassie is also heart-broken, and refuses to recognise the sale. When taken to Scotland by the duke she heads for home again to the accompaniment of rain, thunder and M-G-M’s celestial choir, swims the Tweed, joins forces with a travelling tinker, and, after many doggy adventures, gets back to the humble cottage on the Yorkshire moors in time for the happy ending. "Dogs are really more intelligent than humans," philosophises Edmund Gwenn, the tinker, "because they seem to know what we are thinking, but we don’t know what goes on inside their heads." And the uncanny performance by the canine star of this picture would’ appear to bear out the theory, particularly as it is, I suspect, a female impersonation. The colour is not as good as in Flicka (for one thing the human characters all suffer from badly sunburnt necks), but it enhances the attraction of a film that I can heartily recommend as "family entertainment."