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Best in show

No bones about it, moviegoers love Lassie. Now the beloved collie comes home again in a big-screen remake.

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

August 27, 2006

Jonathon Mason stars with Lassie in the new "Lassie," opening Friday (Samuel Goldwyn Films Photo)

LOS ANGELES - In 1958, when actress June Lockhart replaced Cloris Leachman as the mother on the Sunday night CBS television series "Lassie," the producers went barking mad.

"They were very, very apprehensive about what the fans were going to think," said Ace Collins, author of "Lassie: A Dog's Life." "The character was still 'Ruth Martin,' but suddenly Timmy was going to have different parents."

There was no announcement; the show simply switched actresses. And the network got about 10 letters.

However: When one Lassie was replaced with another that same year, 1,000 letters arrived, demanding to know where the "real Lassie" was.

Despite the public's rabid response, life wasn't always a walk in the park for Lassie - the dog or the show: In the early '60s, Collins said, cosmetics guru Max Factor was brought in to make a toupee, because the dog had developed a skin disease. "And the hair loss made it all too clear that Lassie was a boy."

Lassie has, in fact, always been a boy, despite the feminine appellation, just as she/he has always been a source of unabashed emotion, tears, grins and dog love. What Lassie doesn't evoke is doubt: If there's a sure thing in the entertainment world, Lassie seems to be it.

The latest test of America's 60-year-love affair with Lassie is "Lassie," the British-Irish production that opens in theaters Friday. Directed by Charles Sturridge, whose credits include "Shackleton" and the miniseries "Brideshead Revisited," "Lassie" is prime, not kibble: The stars are Peter O'Toole, Samantha Morton, Peter Dinklage and the celebrated canine, whose career has now included 11 features and 20 years of television. (Three different dogs - named Dakota, Mason and Carter - play the part in this new outing). As critic Frank Scheck wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, "Bring plenty of hankies."

Given what has passed as cinema among the many animal-oriented films of recent years, one approaches them with trepidation. "Believe me," Sturridge said, "so do directors. To be honest, I think if you really knew how difficult it was, you wouldn't do it. A certain amount of innocence is required."

A three-dog shoot

Sturridge insisted that the production have three dogs on hand, but Carter was discovered to have a spinal condition that rendered him too delicate for the work, so Dakota and Mason did the bulk of the work. And while Sturridge had worked with animals before - notably on the 1996 TV miniseries "Gulliver's Travels" - he had never made a movie where the animal was the key element of the story.

"It does require an enormously complicated change of mental language," he said. "The job of a director is to find a language with which you can talk to your actors - actors need certain kinds of language to get where they need to be. And you adapt.

"But in the case of working with an animal," he said, "it's a totally transforming adaptation, because you don't have language. You can't say, "The guy chasing you down the hall doesn't really mean it, he's being paid to do it, he's not a threat.' You have to reimagine every sequence from the animal's point of view and re-explain it in a way that's not scary. You have to construct a scenario - in the simplest sense, 'You're not being chased. You're running after something you want to get...."

Oddly, perhaps, the Sturridge film marks the first time a big-screen remake has been made of "Lassie Come Home," the 1943 weeper starring Roddy

McDowall, Donald Crisp, Nigel Bruce and an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.

Based on Eric Knight's 1940 novel (which had appeared in shorter form in a 1938 Saturday Evening Post), "Lassie Come Home" was - like the new film - set in a Yorkshire mining town on the eve of World War II. Forced by poverty to sell the beloved collie to the imperious and somewhat oblivious Duke (Bruce then, O'Toole now), the Carraclough family has to keep returning the habitual-runaway pup to its rightful owner, until the Duke takes the dog to northern Scotland. She escapes, and we experience her arduous trek home to her real family and a happy ending.

Several sequels were sired by "Lassie Come Home": the World War II-themed "Son of Lassie" (1945) starred Peter Lawford and Lockhart (who later played the mother on TV); "Courage of Lassie" (1946) saw the return of Taylor. That same year, a Lassie show premiered on American radio. Much barking ensued.

A dog has his day

"Lassie Come Home" - and the sequels, and even, in part, the TV series - had starred Pal, the collie owned by Rudd Weatherwax, who, with his two brothers, trained virtually the entire Hollywood kennel: Asta, Old Yeller, Big Red, Benji and, of course (as they used to say on the TV show), Lassie. Pal, a beautiful, feisty little actor (smaller than his descendants, who have been bred for size, and have acquired stature), got the role in what was intended as a B picture because he did what the starring collie could not: perform the now-celebrated river scene, in which Lassie nearly drowns, drags herself to the shoreline and collapses, exhausted.

As the story goes, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer saw the rushes, and said, "Fire the lead, hire Pal, and bump this up to an A picture."

What ensued has been one of the true phenomenons of the entertainment business. "There's definitely a cult out there," Sturridge said of what might be called Lassie World. "I'm sure there are a group of people out there crossing their fingers that some of Elizabeth Taylor's DNA was used in making [this] film, and that Roddy McDowall's great-great-great-great grandchild, had there been such a thing, could have been cast."