At the Saturday Afternoon Matinee at the Empress Theatre in Prahran, you saw something that seemed to you to be amazing—although it seems to have amazed everyone else a whole lot less. There was a movie, in color, filmed beautifully in the Painted Hills of Oregon. The story concerned three prospectors who strike it rich, one of whom gets overwhelmed by greed. He kills the old man and tries to kill the third partner as well, but the third partner escapes, though badly wounded. Near death, the third partner is found by friendly Indians and nursed back to health, and then launches a reign of terror upon the murderer, and in an ironic final scene, symbolically transforms the murderer into the old man before driving him to death by the same means as the original crime.
    Now this sounds like a fairly routine revenge movie, and would have been, had that third partner been played by James Stewart, or Clark Gable maybe. But in fact the role was played by a dog. In 1951, it must have made Walt Disney’s eyes pop wide open as well. The dog was Lassie, and the movie The Painted Hills.
Now Lassie was really a whole bunch of identical collies—a sort of cinematic cloning—and they were always males, which were apparently more responsive to training. It’s hard to think of another instance where an animal played a serious human dramatic role, and it was certainly disillusioning to realise that movie heroes didn’t do anything that couldn’t be done by a well-trained dog. The Painted Hills was the last of seven Lassie movies—although he/she/it continued on in television and spin-offs—but it was the first (Lassie Come Home) of that original series that was the best of them—both film and the book on which it was based.

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