Lassie Come Home

 Yesterday, with the Lichfield grandchildren (who, like the Canadian grandchildren, have pleasingly retro tastes), we watched Lassie Come Home – the 1943 feature film that spawned a succession of inferior sequels and corny TV series. The original is surprisingly impressive and hard-edged, and set not in America but Yorkshire and Scotland (filmed in Washington State and California) in the Depression years of the 1930s. It tells a gripping, emotionally involving story, and tells it well. The source was a novel, Lassie Come-Home, by Eric Knight, a Yorkshire-born writer who spent some of his boyhood in St Petersburg*, where his mother was a governess in the imperial family. He served in the Canadian infantry in WWI and died in WWII, serving in the US Army Special Services.
  In the film, Roddy McDowall gives a fine performance as Joe, the Yorkshire lad whose beloved collie dog, Lassie, has to be sold by his impoverished parents, and is eventually taken all the way to Scotland – from where (spoiler alert) he makes his arduous way back, after many perilous adventures and near-death experiences, all quite starkly portrayed. Elsa Lanchester plays Joe's mother, and his father is played by the character actor Donald Crisp, born a cockney but claiming all his life to be Scottish – and maintaining his assumed Scottish accent even while playing this doughty Yorkshireman. Nigel Bruce, fondly remembered for his numerous portrayals of Holmes's Dr Watson, plays the local landowner, the Duke of Rudling, and an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, looking weirdly like a miniaturised woman rather than a little girl, plays his granddaughter. As for Pal, the dog who plays Lassie, he (playing a she) is clearly star material. The storyline might be predictable, but, by golly, it draws you in and makes you care; resistance is futile. I probably enjoyed this as much as the grandchildren. Even the critic James Agate was won over, writing that 'Those who made it seem to have had a pretty fair sense of the square naïveté which most good stories for children have, or affect; they also manipulate some surprisingly acute emotions out of the head dog. Whether from private remembrance or from the show, I got several reverberations of that strangely pure, half-magical tone which certain books ... have for many children.' If you haven't seen it, and think of Lassie purely in terms of those feeble TV series, seek it out – you should be pleasantly surprised.   

* He would have been there at the same time as the young Nabokov and George Sanders.