Big Red

Generations of school children have learned about grief from A Boy And His Animal books. This is what you get. There’s the boy. He befriends the animal. It dies. There are Valuable Life Lessons all around. Suck it up; that’s life. What I’ve learned, however, is that there are a surprising number of versions that buck the trope, where no one dies at all. However, the animal is pretty well certain to be Teaching Us Valuable Life Lessons anyway. Hardly anyone just kind of has a pet in fiction.

That said, the eponymous Big Red is not a pet. He is, in fact, Champion Redcoat Reilly of Wintapi (Champion Red Aye Scraps). James Haggin (Walter Pidgeon) sees him at a Montreal dog show and buys him, convinced he will win the Westminster Kennel Club championship and set up Haggin’s Wintapi Kennels. A young Quebecois boy named Rene Dumont (Gilles Payant) is sneaking across Haggin’s property on his way to make a place for himself in the world when Red catches a paw on the chainlink fence of his kennel. Rene releases it; he is checking on the dog’s paw when Red runs off, and Rene chases him. This ends up with Rene’s getting a job for Haggin.

Haggin doesn’t seem to like dogs much; he tells Rene that dogs don’t need kindness and the way to get them to do what you want is a firm voice and a tight lead. Rene, on the other hand, loves Red, and Red responds to Rene’s love. However, if the dog is to be a champion, he’s got to do what Haggin wants from him, so he forbids the boy from having anything to do with the dog. Rene works in the kennel with the lesser dogs, but he sneaks up to the big house for a glimpse of Red. Who breaks out to be with Rene.

One of the best parts of the movie is Therese Fornet (Janette Bertrand), wife of Emile (Émile Genest), the handler. Their relationship is sweet and charming and loving. She works on the property as the housekeeper/cook, and she’s immediately a mother figure to Rene, an orphan who had been living with a trapper uncle until the uncle died. She’s willing to stretch the boundaries of what she’s permitted to tell Haggin that he’s wrong. She is also why we are given the clue that perhaps Haggin had a son who died in the War, as we see her moving a picture of someone in uniform and observing that there are several closed subjects in the house.

What war? Ah. That’s an excellent question. Probably World War II, based on the cars we see at the beginning, but we’ll never know. Almost the entire movie takes place on Haggin’s property or in the wilderness, and there is little there to pin a time to anything. There are definitely trains. But we even see Haggin driving a small buggy, and he rides a horse, and I’m not sure we ever see his own car. There’s neither radio nor television. The clothing is not fashionable enough to suggest a decade, and the clothing of an upper class rural gentleman doesn’t change much.

Also, Rene has been failed. He was homeschooled by his uncle, and he’s teaching himself English out of a book. But Payant was fifteen at the time, and it’s reasonable to assume that Rene was a similar age. He has never in his life set foot in a classroom, and who knows what his uncle’s educational level is? And now that the uncle is dead, Rene is alone and is searching for a job because he needs to survive. There is no suggestion that maybe that’s not something a fifteen-year-old should have to do. Apparently there’s no further family, or at least Rene never mentions any, but it’s only at the end that anyone suggests a life for Rene that doesn’t involve self-sufficiency before he’s a legal adult.

I’m not a dog person and definitely not a show dog person. Oh, I can tell you that Red is beautiful, but the idea that a dog shouldn’t be allowed to run free or help a hunter hunt because it makes the dog unfit for a show bewilders me, because what’s the point? I praise my cat extravagantly when she catches and eats flies, because who’s a mighty hunter? She is! Also, cats have resisted breeding a lot more than dogs have, so “breed characteristics” for most cats are just not a thing. What kinds of cat do I have? One big sweet boy and one tiny enthusiastic girl. What do you mean, kind?

This movie features a lot of old Disney hands, mostly early in their association with the studio. This is the first of fifteen movies Norman Tokar directed for them, not to mention Walt Disney’s 50^th Anniversary Show and a dozen or so episodes of Disneyland beyond episodes that were just, you know, the movies airing on TV. Screenwriter Louis Pelletier wrote seven movies and two or three episodes. It’s even the first movie with songs by the Sherman Brothers. Even Walter Pidgeon would go on to do Rascal with various of the others. (A boy and his raccoon!) Most of them did better stuff for Disney. Still, it’s better than The Castaway Cowboy at least. Yes, I rented it.