[Homer_J_Simpson]

“Lassie Come Home” behind the scenes stills

“Lassie Come Home” movie posters

“Lassie Come Home” clips

[Homer_J_Simpson]

“Lassie Come Home” would be an important movie even if it wasn’t about a dog, because it is the first time Elizabeth Taylor appeared in a major Hollywood film. (She previously appeared with Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in something called “There’s One Born Every Minute” in 1942.) Surprisingly, Netflix has “Sherlock Holmes Faces Death” on DVD, but not “Lassie.”

“Lassie Come Home” original trailer

[afraidfortherepublic]

I wish that movies like Lassie were being made today. Animal planet used to run the old Lassie TV shows in the middle of the night, and I would wake up just to view them. here was a modernized Lassie called The New Lassie that had been made, or sponsored, by Little Golden Books (now out of business). It was very well done and probably originally ran on TV about 2-3 years before it was dropped.

The New Lassie was in color and was about a teen-aged boy and his widowed mom who was a veternarian who moved to a new town to set up her business. I don’t know when the series originally ran, but the boy had a cell phone.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

There's one scene in "Lassie Come Home" that gets me every time. Lassie has just swum across a river after walking across Scotland. She's nearly dead and she ends up at the doorstep of a childless old couple. They take her in, nurse her back to health, and love her. But when she recovers, she begins looking at the door. They know that she's on a mission and that they have to let her go. They open the gate and Lassie walks out, giving one last look at the old couple standing in the door.

And then there's "Courage of Lassie," also with Elizabeth Taylor, in which Lassie (actually Pal, playing a dog named Bill--they just put Lassie in the title) suffers from PTSD from WW2, hops a freight train, goes a sheep-killing rampage, has flashbacks to the war, goes on trial and is finally returned home.