MYERS AND WHITE, WHO THEMSELVES
provided wisecracking voices for the dogs, intended to milk their newly minted phenomenon for all it was worth. In the end, though, the Dogville Comedies were forced to come to heel just three years after they began. Despite the flood of praise for the shorts, there were naysayers even at the time, with Variety particularly discomforted by the World War I hijinks and others perturbed by such plot elements as murder, attempted rape and a dog in blackface. But more than the content, many people were perturbed by the sight of dogs performing on their hind legs, seemingly trussed up with piano wire into unnatural poses. In his book A Song In The Dark: The Birth Of The Musical Film, Richard Barrios describes the Barkies as “nightmarish” and singles out The Dogway Melody, with its high-kicking stars, for particular attention. “It’s enough,” he writes, “to turn the most apathetic cinephile into an animal-rights activist.”
Renfro insisted that his troupe of stars were well looked after. “A dog that has been beaten into tricks can’t be depended upon,” he said. “Dogs get to be very proud when they learn to do something and they love to show off.” But the whiff of scandal was enough to prompt a complaint from the Performing And Captive Animals’ Defence League, a ban of several of the films in Britain and a visit to one of the productions from LA humane commissioner Bill Hershfield. He found nothing disturbing — Buster, Jiggs et al even had their own air-conditioned dressing rooms and a 50-foot “doggie run” to blow off steam — but by that point the rumours of animal cruelty, combined with diminishing box-office receipts, were enough to make MGM pull the plug. With three films from a six-film contract never to be made, the series wrapped up with Trader Hound and the dubious sight of cannibal canines with bones through their noses, plus a dog riding a lion. “The series just ran its course,” says Arnold. “They may have run out of peanut butter.”
White and Myers moved on, the former to Columbia to run the shorts department there, the latter going to RKO. White ended up directing films for the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton, who bristled at White’s tendency to issue endless instructions, a holdover from his time spent working with dog trainers. At the end of his career, he would say his favourite of his own projects were “the dog things”. His brother, Jack White, imitated Jules’ success, creating a series of chimp comedies in the 1930s.
As for Buster and friends, whose work proved the antecedent of such fur-filled films as Homeward Bound, Air Bud and Snow Dogs, they went to live on a farm in the country. Which in this case, fortunately, did not mean a one-way trip to the vet’s, but to Renfro’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. While Oscar, Jiggs, Laddie and the rest settled into happy retirement, Buster continued to work. His last recorded credit is 1937’s Flying Fist, in which he played lumberjack-turned-prizefighter Bruce Bennett’s faithful friend Fella. It was a role he performed with all four paws on the ground, his ears in thrall to the laws of gravity, and proudly tackle out.