by Susan Orlean
By contemporary standards, the movies are melodramatic—every situation in them dire, every story arc as obvious as daylight. But they engage you anyway. It is almost like watching slow-motion choreography; the actions and reactions are rhythmically coupled and then unwound just as elegantly. What seems most old-fashioned about the movies is the way Rin Tin Tin figures in the story: without irony, he is treated as an equal player. He is not a pet or a utility animal but rather another fully realized character with his own storyline. Maybe what marks these films as relics from a long-gone period is that sincerity, the earnestness that imagines a dog outwitting a dozen gangsters against a score that might mix Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, and thirty-two bars of “What Do You Mean, You Lost Your Dog?”
In these silent films, Rin Tin Tin was always the hero, but like any hero, he encounters the struggles of the hero’s journey. He was always tested—usually by being wrongly accused or doubted or mistrusted. Many of the films, including Where the North Begins, The Night Cry, and Clash of the Wolves, revisit Lee’s favorite story of Prince Llewellyn. But unlike that story, the films didn’t end with the dog’s death. Rather, Rinty always prevailed over the evildoer, proving himself and his loyalty—being recognized for, and redeemed by, his strength of character.
A hero who is questioned and then is able to answer is more compelling than a figure who is so powerful that he is never doubted. The war had made that even more real. Even though many men performed heroically in World War I, many of them, like Lee, were terrified, shell-shocked, numbed, or simply not able to be as brave as they thought they might be, but they managed to make it through. In these movies, Rin Tin Tin was just that sort of character: a hero built from little bits, some bent and some broken, who still manages to gather himself together and fly.
Of the six Rin Tin Tin silent films still in existence, the most memorable is Clash of the Wolves, which was released in 1925. Rin Tin Tin plays a half-dog, half-wolf named Lobo, who is living in the wild as the leader of a wolf pack. The film begins with a disturbing scene of a forest fire, which drives Lobo and his pack, including Nanette and their pups, from their forest home to the desert ranchlands, where they are forced to prey on cattle to survive. The ranchers hate the wolves, and especially Lobo; a bounty of $100 is offered as a reward for his hide. In the meantime, a young mineral prospector named Dave arrives in town. A claim jumper who lusts after Dave’s mineral discovery (and Dave’s girlfriend, Mae) soon schemes against him. Mae happens to be the daughter of the rancher who is most determined to kill Lobo and who also, for some reason, doesn’t like Dave.
The wolves, led by Lobo, attack a steer, and the ranchers set out after them. The chase is fast and frightening, and when Rin Tin Tin weaves through the horses’ churning legs it looks like he’s about to be trampled. He runs faster and for longer than seems possible. He outruns the horses, his body flattened and stretched as he bullets along the desert floor, and if you didn’t see the little puffs of dust when his feet touch the ground, you’d swear he was floating. He scrambles up a tree—a stunt so startling that I had to replay it a few times to believe it. Can dogs climb trees? Evidently. At least certain dogs can. And they can climb down, too, and then tear along a rock ridge, and then come to a halt at the narrow crest of the ridge. The other side of the gorge is miles away. Rin Tin Tin stops, pivots; you feel him calculating his options; then he crouches and leaps, and the half second before he lands safely feels very long and fraught. His feet touch ground and he scrambles on, but a moment later he somersaults off the edge of another cliff, slamming through the branches of a cactus, collapsing in a heap, with a cactus needle skewered through the pad of his foot.
The action is thrilling, and it would have been even more exciting on a huge screen, in an elegant movie palace, with hundreds of people cheering and the orchestra pounding out the score. But the best part of the movie is the quieter section, after Rin Tin Tin falls. He limps home, stopping every few steps to lick his injured paw; his bearing is so abject and afflicted that it is easy to understand why Lee felt the need to explain he was just acting. Rin Tin Tin hobbles into his den and collapses next to Nanette, in terrible pain.
Do the wolves of his pack gather around and help pull the cactus thorn out of their leader’s paw? No, they don’t. In an earlier scene in the movie, one of the wolves is injured and the pack musters around him. At first, it looks like they are coming to his aid, but suddenly, their action seems more agitated than soothing, and just then an intertitle card flashes up, saying simply “Law of the Pack. Death to the wounded wolf.” This establishes the fact that the other wolves will kill Rin Tin Tin if they realize he’s injured. Rinty and Nanette try to work on the cactus needle in his paw surreptitiously. But the pack (which is played by an assortment of German shepherds, huskies, coyotes, and wolves) senses that something is wrong. Finally, one of them approaches, a black look on his face, ready to attack. Rinty draws himself up and snarls. The two animals freeze, and then, very subtly, Rinty snarls again, almost sotto voce, as if he were saying, “I don’t care what you think you know about my condition. I am still the leader here.” The murderous wolf backs off.
The rest of the plot is a crosshatch of misperception and treachery. Rinty, fearing he will still be killed by his pack and attract harm to Nanette and their pups, decides to leave so that he might die alone; his wobbling, wincing departure is masterful acting. The humans in the movie, all flawed to varying degrees by either greed or naïveté or prejudice or stupidity—except for Mae, who is played by June Marlowe—stumble around double-crossing one another. Dave comes upon Rinty as he is on his death walk. Knowing there is a $100 bounty for the animal, he pulls out his gun, but then gives in to his sympathy for the suffering animal and removes the cactus thorn. (Actor Charles Farrell must have been a brave man; Rinty was required to snap and snarl at him in the scene when Farrell is tending to his paw, and there are a few snaps when Rinty looks like he’s not kidding.)
Dave’s decision to save Lobo is of great consequence because, of course, according to the perfect circular arc of life within a film, Lobo ends up saving Dave’s life. He chooses to be a dog—a guardian—and protect Dave, rather than give in to his wolf impulse to be a killer.
The film doesn’t just set good against bad; it raises the questions of natural versus domesticated, and needs versus wants, and even the triumph of subtle thinking over unilateralism, since the characters who can ignore a narrow rule and make an independent decision (as Dave does with Lobo) prevail. Even wolfishness, in the movie, isn’t a simple evil. The forest fire in the opening scene establishes that the wolves are reluctant cattle killers; they are forced into it not because they are vicious but because they have been driven from their home and have no other option.
The film has its share of silliness—a scene in which Rinty wears a fake beard as a disguise to avoid being identified as Lobo, for example—and the human acting, to the modern eye, is stilted. But Clash of the Wolves made me understand why so many millions of people fell in love with Rin Tin Tin and were moved by the way he wordlessly embodied many of the questions and conflicts and challenges that come with being alive.
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11.
By the middle of the 1920s, the movie business had grown into one of the ten biggest industries in the United States. Almost 100 million movie tickets were sold each week, to a population of only 115 million. Warner Bros., thanks largely to Rin Tin Tin, was prospering. In 1928 the studio was worth $16 million; just two years later, $200 million. It still had the reputation of being a bit mingy and second-rate compared to Paramount or MGM, but it was expanding and innovating. It launched a chain of movie palaces, with orchestras and elaborate, thematic decor—Arabian nights in one theater, Egyptian days or Beaux Arts Paris in another—and, best of all, air-conditioning, which was rare in public buildings and even rarer in private homes.
The year 1927 was busy for Lee and Rinty: they shot four films, back to back, and during any break in the producti
on schedule, they were on the road doing stage appearances. Lee hardly had a life at home. In the middle of that year, Charlotte Anderson filed for divorce. She said she didn’t like Rin Tin Tin and didn’t like competing with him. In the proceedings, Charlotte testified that Lee didn’t love her or her horses. “All he cared for was Rin Tin Tin,” she told the Los Angeles Times, in an article about the trial headlined “Dog Film Star May Be an Orphan.” The story continued, “Evidently, Rin Tin Tin’s company was so much pleasure to Duncan that he considered Mrs. Duncan’s presence rather secondary.” Rinty was named as a corespondent in the divorce, a role usually reserved for mistresses.
The divorce came at what was otherwise a high point for Lee. That year, Rin Tin Tin was designated the most popular performer in the United States, and his four films—A Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, Tracked by the Police, and Hills of Kentucky—were box office hits as well as critical successes. The Academy Awards were presented for the first time, and Rinty received the most votes for Best Actor. But members of the Academy, anxious to establish the new awards as serious and important, decided that giving an Oscar to a dog did not serve that end, so the votes were recalculated, and the award was diverted to Emil Jannings, for his performances in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command.
Even without winning the Oscar, Rinty was in the news all the time. He was variously referred to as Rin, Rinty, Rin Tin Tin, and, more often, the hyphenated Rin-Tin-Tin. He was frequently given an honorific—the King of Pets, the Famous Police Dog of the Movies, the Dog Wonder, the Wonder Dog of the Screen, the Wonder Dog of All Creation, the Mastermind Dog, the Marvelous Dog of the Movies, and America’s Greatest Movie Dog. By 1927, he was clearly surpassing Strongheart. A review of Rin Tin Tin’s film A Race for Life even began with the haunting question, “Strongheart who?”
In his way, Rin Tin Tin had come to represent something essentially American. He wasn’t born in the United States, and neither were his parents, but those facts only made him more quintessentially American: he was an immigrant in a country of immigrants. He was everything Americans wanted to think they were—brave, enterprising, bold, and most of all, individual. In a dog, even more than in a human, individuality is exceptional; after all, dogs are pack animals, and many of Rinty’s plots revolved around him making choices between pack mentality and individual judgment, an almost impossible feat for a dog.
In the 1920s, this was still a new country, still something of an experiment, trying out the notion that a society could reconcile private desires and ambitions with the demands of community. The American identity was still pliable, still taking shape. Many Americans had left ancient cultures of permanence and constraints and ethnic identities to join a society where identities were exploded and recombined—who can know how many different religions and backgrounds were represented in audiences at Rinty’s films in New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles? People watching Clash of the Wolves might not have talked after the movie about how Rinty played out the founding principles of the nation, but his popularity came from the emotions he inspired, including pride in the dog’s stubborn, resilient, complex character and an appreciation of his struggles—not just with the bad guys, but with himself.
At the same time, he was absolutely universal. Rin Tin Tin’s movies went all over the world. Silent films were easy to distribute internationally. There was no dialogue to dub or need for subtitles—only the intertitle cards had to be replaced. In 1927, Jack Warner attended a dinner in Vienna and was seated next to a countess. He introduced himself as a producer. The countess asked which actors he worked with. Warner mentioned such luminaries as John Barrymore, but the countess seemed unimpressed. Warner was exasperated. Finally he said that he produced all of Rin Tin Tin’s films. From that moment on, Warner recalled, “the name ‘Jack Warner’ meant something in Vienna.”
The fact that the films were distributed around the world had some unanticipated benefits. In 1975, nitrate projection prints of Clash of the Wolves, Jaws of Steel, and The Night Cry were found in South Africa. Warner Bros. had distributed the films to South Africa in the 1920s, and these copies were apparently not sent back at the appointed time. Until these films were found, it was believed that there were no copies of Clash of the Wolves left in existence—like 80 percent of all silent films ever produced, it was thought to be just another one that vanished, with not a single copy to be found anywhere, including the studio vaults.
The National Film Preservation Foundation has restored the South African print of Clash of the Wolves, and the new copy of the film is beautiful. The tones, in black and white, are rich and deep; the black almost looks like velvet. You can also understand how Rin Tin Tin—with his dark eyes and dark face—was hard to light properly for a black-and-white film, and why, in the next generation of dogs, Lee looked for a light-colored animal who would be easier to see. Still, this Rin Tin Tin, the first, is a wonder. He’s not a particularly pretty dog, but he is magnetic and engaging. His performance always looks natural—a credit to Lee’s training. One advantage of silent films was that Lee could direct the dog by voice command, but still, Rinty’s capacity for learning had to be exceptional. So many of the scenes involve long takes of the dog performing a complicated sequence of actions. Even with voice commands, it’s amazing that you could train a dog to do all that.
Before I looked through the Warner Bros. archives, which included ledgers recording the studio’s international sales, it had never occurred to me that films of this era—a time when most people in the world never traveled beyond their hometown—were distributed overseas. But they were. People all over the world were getting a look—a filmy, imaginary look, but still a look—at life in the United States. It must have been electrifying. To people in the crowded old cities in Europe and beyond, the spaciousness of those scenes in the American West in particular, with their endless horizon line and infinite sky, must have seemed like a glimpse of eternity.
My grandfather grew up in Hungary but came to the United States in his twenties, eventually settling in Ohio. His family was well established in Hungary, but something had spurred him to leave and try to make his own way alone. It was a pivotal choice, one that ended up being a matter of life and death. The figurine of Rin Tin Tin that he kept on his desk was such a puzzle to me, but the one thing I took for granted was that he had it because he knew of and enjoyed the Rin Tin Tin television show, since as a kid I had no idea that Rin Tin Tin existed in any form except for his presence on television. I saw the figurine as some evidence that my starchy, old-fashioned, European grandfather had become American, going so far as to embrace the popular culture of this new place. But as I unwound the story of Rin Tin Tin I began to see the dog on his desk in a different way. Although the plastic figurine was definitely merchandise from the television show, I now think that my grandfather’s fascination with Rin Tin Tin began much earlier in his life. I believe the fascination took hold in some dark little theater in eastern Hungary when he first saw Rinty race across the screen in one of these 1920s melodramas—the huge western landscape stretching in the background, the sky like an unfurling banner—and that the dog’s image, with its great promise, even had something to do with his finding the courage to leave home.
12.
Throughout the 1920s, Rin Tin Tin was photographed constantly. Besides his studio headshot, which catches Rinty’s moody gaze in three-quarters profile, his most popular picture was one of him posing with Nanette on a large rock by a lake. He was frequently photographed with celebrities—Ed Sullivan, Jackie Cooper, Myrna Loy, director Mervyn LeRoy, showgirl Evelyn Knapp—and with prominent citizens, such as members of the Beverly Hills police department or mayors of various large cities. Lee appears in some of these pictures, but more often he does not.
In some photographs, Rin Tin Tin posed doing human things. He pretended to sign for a ticket at an airline counter, operate a movie camera, receive a manicure, and work as a hotel clerk. He was photographed playing golf, snowshoeing
, waterskiing, and swinging in a hammock. In one popular picture he sits in William McGann’s director’s chair—it has WILLIAM MCGANN stenciled across the back; McGann is seated next to him in a director’s chair that says RIN TIN TIN. Another photo, from a Ken-L-Ration ad, shows Rinty with Nanette and two of their puppies. The two adult dogs are sitting upright in chairs at a kitchen table, as if they are about to eat a meal, and the puppies are sitting on their parents’ dinner plates; in the center of the table is a gigantic can of Ken-L-Ration.
Much was made of the grand style in which Rin Tin Tin supposedly lived. He snacked on steak served to him in silver bowls while classical music played over his kennel’s sound system, or so the press releases from Warner Bros. claimed. His puppies had their own lavishly appointed kindergarten. The screens over the kennel windows were made of copper, or perhaps bronze. By some accounts, he wore a diamond collar. None of this is likely to be true; Lee loved the dog and made sure the kennel was comfortable, but he never lost the rancher’s view that a dog was a dog was a dog. At the same time, it is true that Rin Tin Tin’s name and phone number were listed in the Los Angeles phone book, and that he had an open invitation to the Warner Bros. commissary and was welcomed there like a star. He got his own salary, separate from Lee’s salary as his trainer, and he earned more than most of his costars; in Lighthouse by the Sea, for instance, he was paid $1,000 per week, while the lead human actor, William Collier Jr., was paid only $150.
The press treated Rin Tin Tin like a celebrity, writing and gossiping about him, without irony, never acknowledging that he was, after all, just a dog. “Famous Movie Dog in City; Thrills Kiddies” was the headline in a Wisconsin newspaper during one of his publicity tours. The story went on: “Rin Tin Tin, wife, occupy a doggy suite at hotel but canine actors left babies in West because of heat.” A 1927 issue of Movie Magazine—which included a lineup of stories such as “When Will We Really Have Talking Movies?” “Are Actors People?” and “Is the World Tired of Children?”—ran a four-page feature called “The Rin-Tin-Tins,” about Rin Tin Tin and Nanette’s family life. “Nanette, like so many of the stars, is going to combine motherhood with a career,” the writer noted. “The puppies are coming along beautifully, so she will play with Rin-Tin-Tin again in ‘Trapped by the Police.’” Even Rin Tin Tin stand-ins were regarded as celebrities. The New York Times ran an obituary for Ginger, a German shepherd that performed under the name Lightning, with the headline, “Double for Rin Tin Tin Is Dead.”