Not to be confused with Tintin

I mentioned briefly a week ago that April's schedule on TCM was being devoted to the films of Warner Bros. and its subsidiaries. I didn't know that they had signed the famous canine star Rin Tin Tin, a name I think even people who aren't movie fans have heard of even if they'd never seen any of the movies. To be honest, I hadn't seen any of the films either, but TCM ran one of them as part of the salute to Warner Bros.: Clash of the Wolves.

Rinty, a German Shepherd who had been rescued in World War I as a puppy, here plays Lobo, which as you may know comes from the word for "wolf". In fact, in a shameless bit of cultural appropriation, or maybe wolfface, a Canis familiaris playing Canis lupus, but then a real wolf would have been too dangerous for filming and wouldn't have had the name recognition that Rin Tin Tin had. Lobo and his mate live with the rest of the wolf pack up in the mountains. But a forest fire forces them to abandon the mountains and live in the desert flatlands.

The flatlands also bring people, in the form of Dave Weston (Charles Farrell), a man who's prospecting for borax. His eventual girlfriend is May (June Marlowe), while he has an enemy in "Borax" Horton, a man who wants to jump everybody else's claims and get the borax for himself, as there's money in it. It's a pedestrian human story of the sort that you could see in any Poverty Row western, although the more formulaic westerns were still several years away in the sound era. And the humans aren't the stars here anyhow.

Lobo is threatened by a couple of things. One is that the ranchers see wolves, and they immediately fear, not without reason, that the wolves might be a danger to their cattle. Kill the leader and you may be able to get the wolf pack to disperse. The other problem is that the wolves aren't used to the things in the flatlands, which include such dangers as cacti and their thorns. Lobo gets a thorn in one of his paw pads, and isn't able to get it out, leaving him with a noticeable limp if he isn't careful. And if the other wolves notice it, well, there goes his status as the alpha male. And as a pack animal that's aged out of being the alpha male, that's a big problem.

Of course the human and wolf story lines are going to merge, in the form of Dave finding Lobo and, like Androcles, removing the thorn. Lobo then becomes man's new best friend, although the rest of the humans still know what Lobo looks like, putting his life in danger even if they see him with Dave. There's only so much you can take the wildness out of the wolf.

Clash of the Wolves is the sort of material that if it were a talking picture, would probably be great for kids. The human storyline isn't particularly exciting, but there's no denying that Rin Tin Tin was a very skilled performer and shines every time he's on the screen. The movie being silent, however, I wonder how much the kids of today would be able to get into it.