One of the movie genres that I haven't done many posts on are animal movies. I'm not certain how many Lassie movies MGM put out in the 1940s, but I think the first one I did a post on was The Sun Comes Out and that was only early in 2025. In any case, when Son of Lassie aired on TCM, I recorded it and finally got around to watching it to be able to do this post.
Son of Lassie is, apparently, my not having paid attention to the first movie, based on the same characters as in the first movie, although not all played by the same actors. Nigel Bruce plays the Duke of Radling, a wealthy landowner in England who does his part for the war effort by giving over some of his hunting dogs to the British military to be trained for war purposes. Those dogs have been raised and trained by Sam Carraclough (Donald Crisp), whose son Joe (Peter Lawford) is in the British military, although currently back home on a few days' leave.
This gives Joe time to spend with his favorite dog, Lassie's son Laddie, who is unfortunately completely ill-suited to doing any sort of hunting work and certainly not for any military duty. In fact, Laddie completely screws things up around the estate unlike Lassie, except that one of Laddie's escapades brings Joe in contact with the Duke's granddaughter Priscilla (June Lockhart). Despite the class differences, Priscilla and Joe like each other.
Joe goes back to the military base where he's stationed doing flight duty, and Laddie is such a blankety-blank that he follows Joe all the way to the base, which is a good 30 or 40 miles away. You'd think this alone would have gotten Laddie killed in a road accident or a scrape with a wild animal, but since this is a feel-good movie of course that's not going to happen. Worse for Joe is that the dog gets out on the runway which you'd really think would be dangerous and would result in Laddie getting put down, but again, Hollywood.
The final straw is that Laddie somehow gets into the cockpit of a plane where Joe is the co-pilot on a reconnaissance mission over Norway which, as you'll recall, was occupied by the Nazis at the time. The plane gets shot down, and Joe has to bail out, Laddie in his arms, as he parachutes to the ground somewhere in the fjords of a Norwegian village.
Now, Laddie turns out to be bright, but it isn't to be expected that he already knows the difference between a British military uniform or a Nazi uniform. So when he tries to bark for help, he winds up barking at the Nazis. At this point of the movie, the Nazis aren't yet stupid so they follow the dog and get the impression that somebody unauthorized has been here. The rest of the movie is Joe trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, Laddie trying to find Joe, and the mostly good people of Norway, especially a bunch of movie kids, trying to help out as best they can.
On reading about Son of Lassie, I noticed that it didn't get as good reviews as the first movie, which frankly doesn't surprise me. Son of Lassie is mawkish and full of just-so coincidences to keep Joe and the dog safe, most of which would never have happened in real life. But the movie was released late in World War II, when audiences on the homefront wanted stuff that would make them feel good. I think Son of Lassie would have done that in 1945, even if it might seem eyeroll-inducing to audiences of 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment