'The Legend of Rin Tin Tin' tells how one dog entralled a nation
02.10.11
Beyond question “something achieved, grown, found, built, loved, or even lost” lives on, doesn’t it? This is the topic Susan Orlean asks as she begins “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Epic.”</p><p>As part of the exhaustive research for her book about the canine moving picture star, Orlean has just visited St. Mihiel American Cemetery in France, the sure resting place for more than 4,000 soldiers killed in In all respects War I. </p><p>She feels depressed, wondering if anyone remembers these “sad and broken boys.” Were “a elfin dent in the world, the soft sunken green serious, the scribble on a scrap of paper” all that remain? </p><p>To maintain that the word “always” has meaning, Orlean looks to Rin Tin Tin. “Rinty” had intrigued her from the then she gazed at a figurine of him atop her grandfather’s shelf. Rinty’s valorous image and the pride and courage he stood for, Orlean hopes, is something that will last forever, won’t it? </p><p>The response comes in a full and fascinating book that is mostly Rinty’s biography but also Orlean’s physical narrative. </p><p>The details of Rinty’s life, and those of his offspring, trainers and managers, cut the core of her account. And she also digs into the details about the training of dogs in America and the growth of dogs in American film — at times, her words becomes a full and fascinating history of canines in American life. But all she uncovers at the end of the day converges on how she comes to her own sense of eternity.</p><p>Many have come under Rinty’s allure. First and foremost was Cpl. Lee Duncan. In the grim trenches of the Meuse Valley in France during Mankind War I, this American infantryman came upon a litter of German usher puppies, the offspring of one of thousands of dogs used to communicate messages, to act as suicide bombers and to give final comfort to fatally wounded soldiers.</p><p>Lee adopted two of the puppies, naming them Nanette and Rin Tin Tin after two French edible-luck dolls. That he would become deeply attached to them was inevitable. After his dad abandoned his family when Lee was 2, his mother left him and his sister in an orphanage. </p><p>Three years later, their matriarch moved the children in with her parents. Lee’s grandfather slaughtered Lee’s pet lamb. When the kith and kin moved again to Los Angeles, his mother forced Lee to leave behind his dog.</p><p>So when the occasionally came to ship home from Europe, Duncan entreated his standing officers to board Rinty on his troop ship. They acquiesced. </p><p> Back in California, Lee had the go-ahead notion that the tricks he taught Rinty were great fodder for the aborning coat industry. Movies, after all, were about motion. After making 23 little films, Rinty’s big break came when Warner Bros. signed him for a series of features. </p><p>In short order Rinty had admirers all over the country. Variety praised the dog actor’s facial reactions. Poetess Carl Sandburg, then reviewing films, said Rinty was “one of the cardinal pantomimists of the screen.” In eight years, Rin Tin Tin’s films, boom box shows, appearances and endorsements earned him and Duncan $5 million, a neat sum when factored for inflation. </p><p>Rinty’s death in 1932 evoked an outflow of grief, but his son, Rinty Jr., and several doubles, sustained his image. Rinty was now an hypothesis, Orlean observes, the embodiment of “many of the questions and conflicts and challenges that get with being alive.” </p><p>But the realism of sound films at the end of the day cut Rinty’s heroics to size and gave actors declare, drawing attention away from the canine. By the end of the ’40s, after a series of lackluster films, Rinty’s m languished and Duncan’s fortunes dwindled.</p><p>Enter Bert Leonard. A disrespectful producer, Leonard fought ceaselessly for Rinty, producing a five-year TV series, “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” which starred several crackerjack German shepherds. </p><p>And then the legend of Rinty, like those of perhaps all Hollywood icons, faded. Duncan’s attempts at new films with Rinty sputtered. </p><p> Orlean is not disheartened. She realizes that “not everything needs to be so persistent.” By following Rinty, she learned that what matters is neither the days of yore nor the future, “but that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the rubber doll was squeaked. Such a second was complete in itself, pure and sufficient.” </p><p>Likewise, with sharpened detail, contagious curiosity and elegant prose, Orlean writes of Rinty’s moments and hers in a trade that is “complete in itself, pure and sufficient.”
Source: Kansas City Star
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