Retrospective: A Dog of Flanders (1960)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                        A DOG OF FLANDERS
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: A rare but truly fine family film has
     finally made it to DVD.  A Flemish boy is held
     back from his dream of becoming an artist by his
     extreme poverty.  But then he makes two friends.
     He finds a dog, beaten and abandoned, and adopts
     the dog even less fortunate than him.  But more
     important is the relationship he forms with the
     artist in town who tries to teach the boy the
     meaning of being an artist.  The story has been
     adapted to silent films and to Japanese anime,
     but a standout performance by Theodore Bikel makes
     this the best of the three sound and live-action
     adaptations.  This film is a personal favorite of
     mine.  Rating: +3 (-4 to +4) or 9/10

One of the great double features of my youth was 20th Century Fox's
pairing of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH with James B. Clark's
A DOG OF FLANDERS.  I came away liking the co-feature as much as
the film I had gone to see.  (Okay, almost as much, but I was a
*real* science fiction fan.)  Over the years I have looked several
times to find it on video.  It was available only on a rare VHS
tape.  Finally it has been released to DVD, digitally re-mastered,
and I could not be more pleased.

So why would a film that outwardly looks like it is just a boy-and-
his-dog story set in Belgium be such a find?  First of all, the dog
story is just a sub-plot.  The film is more about the struggles of
an impoverished boy to dedicate his life to creating art.  But
there is something more about it that is very unusual.  It is
honest in a way that very few family films ever are.  Life is very
hard for its main character and the film does not pull its punches.
This film is not sugarcoated.  (Admittedly the ending is not as
grim as the ending of the book.)  There are themes in this film of
cruelty, of loss, but also of love and of the redemptive power of
art.  Does that sound like a lot to put into a single film, a
family film?  It is there and it all works.

Nello Daas (played by David Ladd, son of Alan Ladd) lives with his
grandfather (Donald Crisp), the town milk deliveryman in a Belgian
town.  Nello's one obsession is art.  He is fascinated by the local
painter Piet van Gelder (played by the wonderful Theodore Bikel).
The boy has tried doing his own art using what little he has--
iodine and charcoal, which are far from ideal materials.  Nello
knows that there is supposed to be a magnificent painting in the
local cathedral, a work of Peter Paul Rubens, but the painting is
behind a curtain and the cathedral charges a franc to see the
painting.  Grandfather knows how unlikely it is that Nello could be
a successful artist and has planned a very different career for his
grandson.  One day Nello and his grandfather find a dog that had
pulled a cart, but is now collapsed from overwork and mistreatment.
Nello adopts the dog in spite of the fact that he and his
grandfather barely have enough food to keep themselves alive.  But
the heart of the film is in the relationship that Nello forms with
the self-doubting artist van Gelder.

This is a classic, and I consider it one of the best family films ever
made.  It is moving and says a very great deal about life and about art.
Some major changes were made from the original story, but it does
not tell children that life is never hard.  I rate the 1960 version
of A DOG OF FLANDERS a +3 on the -4 to +4 scale or 9/10.

Though never said, the town is really the City of Antwerp and the
cathedral is the Cathedral of Our Lady.  The great Rubens painting
the boy wants to see is Rubens's The Elevation of the Cross:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Paul_Rubens_068.jpg>

We see the actual city, cathedral, and painting in the film.

The title dog, named in the film Patrasche, is played by Spike, who
also played the title role in OLD YELLER.  The screenplay was
written by Ted Sherdeman who co-wrote the screenplay for another
famous animal film, THEM!

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0052745>



					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper