One evening in 1931
at a usually peaceful movie theatre in Petersburg, Indiana, pandemonium erupted. The manager had not seen it coming: his programme consisted of main feature Sin Takes A Holiday, a “spicy and daring love drama” according to the poster, preceded by a short, The Dogway Melody. It was the latter that had caused the crowd to go wild. In fact, the 17-minute comedy — a spoof of 1929 Oscar-winning musical Broadway Melody with an all-dog cast, climaxing with a canine chorus line high-kicking to Singin’ In The Rain — elicited such a strong reaction that audience members rose to their feet and loudly demanded it be played again. Fearing a riot if he refused, the manager rewound the two reels. “This was the first time in 11 years that a comedy has stopped my show,” he grumbled later to a reporter.
Dogway Melody was no one-off. In fact, it was the sixth of a wave of films known officially as the ‘Dogville Comedies’, and unofficially as the ‘Barkies’, which stormed America over a three-year period, from 1929 to 1931. American cinema exhibitors voted them Best Short Subject Comedies of 1930, over the works of slapstick supremo Mack Sennett, the Little Rascals and even the immortal Laurel and Hardy. Reviews, meanwhile, were ecstatic. “The most original offering since talking pictures began,” thrilled The Cumberland Sunday Times of 1929’s Hot Dog, the first of MGM’S nine-film series. “A pip of a novelty!” chortled Variety over College Hounds (1929). “A wonderful burlesque,” opined The Motion Picture Herald of So Quiet On The Canine Front (1931), a pastiche of World War I epic All Quiet On The Western Front. One Philadelphia critic even proclaimed them “the funniest comedies that have been produced since the birth of the talkies”.
Once MGM realised what they had, the studio’s marketing department roared into overdrive. There were glitzy premieres, with the movies’ four-legged stars padding up and down the red carpet and local mutts given seats in the audience. There were major spreads in showbiz magazines, with faux interviews with the hounds, plus raucous live performances on the vaudeville circuit. A special brand of dog food, called MGM Barkies, was licensed by the studio. Fans couldn’t get enough.
Then, in 1931, after the release of Trader Hound, a more than slightly racist send-up of African adventure flick Trader Horn, the Barkies were sent to the kennel for good. As quickly as they had blown up, they became forgotten — a one-time phenomenon that now exists only as a bizarre footnote in the annals of film history. But the story of how they came about remains as compellingly unlikely as, well, a dog dancing to Singin’ In The Rain.
TIMING-WISE, THE
conditions were exactly right. With the stock market recently collapsed, the Great Depression had begun rocking the United States, making times tough and audiences desperate for light entertainment. And the advent of sound films with 1927’s The Jazz Singer had got the big studios jonesing for novelty material with which to wow the crowds. Into this landscape of opportunity stepped two men: Jules White and Zion Myers.
White, a tall and heavyset man, had played an uncredited role in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation, before working his way from camera operator to stuntman to editor, eventually directing a series of shorts with long-forgotten comedian Lloyd Hamilton. His motto was, “If it ain’t funny, make it move so fast that nobody notices.” Myers, the son of an Australian rabbi, and whose sister Carmel was an actress who specialised in silent-movie vamps, had scored a secretary job on the Universal lot. The two were boyhood friends, and one day started brainstorming ideas for movies of their own. The first they pitched to the MGM shorts department — a series of two-reelers starring ‘talking’ horses — was rejected. They went back to the drawing board and decided just to switch animals. “I said to them, ‘Dress dogs up as people,’” White explained to an interviewer of their eureka moment. “The most beloved thing on Earth, next to a baby, is a pet dog. All these women that have cute little dogs — you see those dogs dressed up and cavorting and doing their stuff — are a ready-made audience.”
This time, MGM bit. To maximise the Dogville Comedies’ appeal, it was decided that each one should be a parody of a different popular movie. And in an attempt to draw in men as well as women, Myers and White determined to lampoon some tough, serious genres as well as fluffy ones. Hence Hot Dog, the first Barkie, a noir murder mystery set in a seedy cabaret and featuring a jealous husband, an adulterous wife and a slick playboy. All of them, of course, played
by dogs in miniature human clothing. The weirdly dark Who Killed Rover? (1930), a satire on Basil Rathbone vehicle The Bishop Murder Case, ends with a kidnapped pooch being killed as a punchline. The Big Dog House (1931) was a prison drama in which a riot kicks off. And So Quiet On The Canine Front would be their most ambitious project of all, with vast sets, big set-pieces and the aim of making light of the worst war in human history, which had concluded only a decade and a bit before.
Their chutzpah was impressive — nothing like this had been attempted before. “I know of no other films that dressed animals up and made them walk around and talk like human beings,” says film historian Jeremy Arnold. “And the Dogville movies not only parodied well-known features but talking pictures themselves, which were still very new.” Still, it seemed like a safe investment to MGM: dogs had been wowing cinema audiences since 1895, when the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory In Lyon featured a small mutt wandering into frame. There were even instances of dogs becoming stars, such as collie Blair, the star of seven-minute thriller Rescued By Rover (1905), and the legendary Rin Tin Tin, a heroic German Shepherd whose box-office clout (and fan mail) rivalled that of Valentino, Chaplin or Mary Pickford.
What must have also occurred to White and Myers, and in turn to the MGM brass, was that dogs were in plentiful supply, were easy to train (unlike some human actors), didn’t demand a paycheck and were unlikely to develop an opium habit or get the script girl pregnant. The Dogville Comedies may have been a step up from even Rin Tin Tin’s most vaulting project — a self-contained universe populated only by animals, into which human beings would never be allowed to intrude. But with cinema technology advancing in leaps and bounds, this was a time of great experiments and fearless risk-taking. The Barkies were unleashed.