The Sunday Intertitle: Dogs of War

TRACKED BY THE POLICE, directed by enthusiastic 30s Warners hack Ray Enright in his early days, stars Jason Robards Snr (looking just like Jnr) and, much more importantly, Rin Tin Tin, the world’s best dog, in the role of Satan. (Don’t worry, that’s just his name.) The drama revolves around the building of a massive damn, the sort of engineering project for which you might normally think German shepherds aren’t particularly well equipped, but how wrong you would be.

Jason and Rinty. Trust me, Snr really does look just like his son. So does Rinty!

We also get a flashback to Rinty’s days as a Red Cross Dog in the trenches of WWI (waitaminute — Red Cross Dog?), which seems like a deliberate echo of the showbiz hound’s true-life story (read Sunnyside for an imaginative retelling by Glen David Gold) —  Robards gets shot, and then Rin Tin Tin cralws on his belly through No Dog’s Land, finds the wounded soldier, and applies pressure. Throughout the movie, we have to accept that RTT is a dog of human intelligence and supercanine ability. His love interest, Nanette, being just a regular dog, must be pretty hard for him to put up with.

My copy stems from an old Grapevine Video release, which means it looks like it was telecined off somebody’s kitchen door during a thunderstorm, but even through eighty years of accumulated print damage and technological incompetence, Rinty’s star charisma shines through.

The pooch and the pendulum.

At the film’s climax, our heroic mutt, already wounded in the paw, must choose between love and duty — to rescue Nanette, who has been wrapped in chains and thrown in the river by BAD MEN, or to rescue the leading lady Virginia Brown Faire, whose been blinded with pepper and is dangling from a rope. After already subjecting my strained emotions to TOY STORY 3, I was far from sure of being able to bear the tension.

I told Fiona about it afterwards. “And did he choose duty?” she asked. “Yes.” “And did he get love anyway?” “Yes.” And she nodded, like she knew all along.

Rin Tin Tin — friend of children…

Protector of women…

MORTAL ENEMY of the disabled!

Sunnyside (Vintage)

Press for Time

PRESS FOR TIME is the name of a Norman Wisdom comedy from 1966 in which he’s a journalist. “Press”, you see. I always remember that because the title has to be the lamest non-pun in the history of English-speaking cinema. The only comparably lousy title is the ’90s thriller OUT OF DEPTH, which vanished without a trace. While the Wisdom flick attempts to be a sort of innocent double entendre but doesn’t actually achieve a singly functioning entendre, the crime movie is only trying to mean one thing, and fails. Did nobody point out, “You know, that isn’t actually a phrase…“?

I mention all this irrelevance because I’m apparently getting a press pass to the Edinburgh Film Festival in its new June incarnation, so I will be live-blogging the fest like a man possessed, during the run-up, when they start the press shows, then all through the event proper, until I drop to the ground, exhausted, spasming and barking with pain. It’ll be great.

I did offer to be their Official Blogger, saying only nice things (integrity is my middle name — I never use it), but they’re quite happy to have me as a rogue element saying whatever the hell I feel like. Which is even better.

Back to Sir Norman. He was HUGE in the UK through the ’50s and ’60s. A sort of sub-Jerry Lewis gump-clown. His stuff hasn’t worn that well, I find, but he still has loyal fans. Animator Nick Park (WALLACE AND GROMMIT) loves those tatty movies. Norm made a stab at a Hollywood career, appearing in THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S for William Friedkin (makes a great trivia question: what film has Jason Robards, Britt Ekland, Norman Wisdom and Bert Lahr?) and when that didn’t work out, came back to the UK and appeared in WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE? a sex comedy that shows Norman romping naked with a rather young Sally Geeson (19). Directed by Z-list hack Menahem Golem, who became a serious movie mogul before falling from “grace” and winding up a Z-list hack again, produced by Tony Tenser’s Tigon pictures, a low point for everybody — even Golan, and that’s LOW. Actor Stevie McNicoll watched the film and was appalled. I asked if it was worse than NOT NOW DARLING, for me the low-water-mark in awful British sex farce. “It makes NOT NOW DARLING look like the fucking Mahabharata,” he replied.

But Norman had a strange renaissance in the ’90s, when it emerged that old prints of his films were doing the rounds in Albania, and he was a major star there. I guess the Wisdom-Albania thing is equivalent to the Jerry Lewis-France paradigm, only this one is true, and it’s rather lovely. And anyway, those French critics who admire Lewis are RIGHT.

Our Norm is now 93 and afflicted with Altzheimer’s, which has had the rather strange effect of turning him into his own movie persona. He seems fantastically lively and fit, but with a childlike intellect and sense of mischief. In a recent TV profile, he turned to the documentary camera and attempted a greeting which seems to encapsulate the essence of all actors:

“Thanks… awfully… for looking at me.”