Monday, October 3, 2011

Rin Tin Tin - True Life Tale Of The Hollywood Superdog

Review of the new book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean (via Q3D):

The tale begins with Lee Duncan, a boy who spent his formative years in an orphanage in Oakland. "He was always deeply alone, always had the aloneness to retreat to, as if it were a room in his house," Orlean explains in a typically deft image. "The only companion to his loneliness he would ever find would be his dog, and for the rest of his life, his attachment to animals was deeper than his attachment to any person."

That dog, Rin Tin Tin, was born on a World War I battlefield in eastern France in September 1918. It always seemed to American soldier Duncan an amazing stroke of good fortune that he found this animal, a dog that so obsessed him from the get-go that he cut short leave in Paris because being without the puppy was more than he could handle. "He believed the dog was destined for greatness," Orlean writes, "and he was lucky to be his human guide and companion."

That greatness didn't begin to manifest itself until 1921, when a friend of Duncan's who'd developed a slow-motion camera shot footage of Rinty jumping over an obstacle almost 12 feet high. The footage made its way into newsreels and eventually landed the dog a contract at Warner Bros., where he made nearly two dozen silent features that earned him fans ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Carl Sandburg.



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