by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched Love My Dog,
a 1927 short from the original Our Gang, a.k.a. the Little Rascals, series from
Hal Roach Studios. The series lasted for over two decades and was based on the
idea that comedy shorts featuring children would clean up at the box office —
which they did. These appear to be the original cast members — Roach would
rotate the players as the originals “aged out” of their roles — including Allen
Hoskins as the Black child “Farina,” who actually got to show street smarts and
play a far more intelligent character than most African-American adults (or the
white actors who played “Black” characters) did in 1920’s films! The confusion
around the series’ title came about because in the early 1940’s Roach sold the
rights to the “Our Gang” title and concept to MGM, but kept control of the
films he’d made and in the 1950’s sold them to TV under the series title “The
Little Rascals.” This print of Love My Dog actually includes both titles, announcing we’re about to see an “Our
Gang” comedy featuring “Hal Roach’s Rascals.” Directed effectively by Robert F.
McGowan from a story by Roach himself, with titles by H. M. “Beanie” Walker
(who went on to write scripts for Laurel and Hardy’s talkies and was one of the
few silent-screen title writers who graduated to screenplays in the sound era),
Love My Dog is about the efforts
of Farina and Joe Cobb (the fat kid who was always the lead in these films, and
was replaced after he got too old for them by the legendary “Spanky” McFarland)
to save the dog they’ve found on the street and adopted from a gang of
villainous dog-catchers who, to protect the people of L.A. against hydrophobia
(the common name for rabies then) are determined to capture all the dogs in town, charge their owners $5 each for
vaccination, and gas all the dogs whose owners can’t come up with the cash.
It’s a grim story line for what’s basically a chase comedy, and given the
history of the Holocaust (the gas chamber in which the dogcatchers place the
dogs looks all too much like a miniature version of the ones the Nazis built to
dispose of humans similarly) the shots of the dogs being executed are even more
frightening now than they would have been in 1927 — and the fact that, however
loathsome their actions, the dogcatchers are responding to a genuine public-health threat adds an
odd moral ambiguity to the film which you pretty much have to put on hold to be
able to enjoy it.
Once you do that, though, it’s funny as hell, and it builds
to a bizarre ending in which Roach and Walker, their tongues obviously firmly
in their cheeks, actually cop Sir James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan gimmick of asking the audience to clap if they want
Joe’s and Farina’s dog (already locked in the gas chamber) to live — which he
does: the dog managed to stop the flow of gas by sticking his tail into the
outlet, thereby coming to no harm, though the gas has turned the end of his
tail white. There are some great gags in the movie, including one in which the
lead dog manages to open the gate of the dogcatchers’ van and free all the
other dogs the bad guys have captured, and another one in which Joe and Farina
are sitting on a large wooden box in which they’re hiding the dog, the
dogcatchers catch on when the dog’s tail (which looks almost prehensile — did
Roach have some special-effects puppeteers to help the dog do things its
real-life counterparts couldn’t?) pokes through holes in the box, and when Joe
and Farina get up the box moves, apparently by itself but really propelled by
the dog inside. The dog itself is unidentified on imdb.com but is not only
personable and charming, he’s also quite well trained — in an era that abounded
in canine stars; the first one (Teddy the Keystone Dog) had been introduced by
Mack Sennett in the teens but the 1920’s had seen first Strongheart and then
Rin Tin Tin, whose personality, well-trained tricks and moving backstory (he’d
been found on a World War I battlefield by an American soldier who adopted and
trained him) made him one of the big box-office attractions of the decade.
