Jasper, Jacob Elordi’s best friend in Ridley Scott’s vast new film about survival in a world where everything human no longer works, is the latest in a long line of dog stars that goes back to the very beginning of cinema.
Well before the Talkies – or should that be the Woofies? – Charlie Chaplin wrung maximum poignancy from his Tramp character’s predicament by foregrounding his co-star Mut, a rescue dog of uncertain breed but undeniable talent. As Scraps in A Dog’s Life (1918), Mut was the canine match for the Tramp, adept at stealing sausages. A few years later, German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin was the first action star, able to run up trees. He earned more than human actors and, as the headliner in 26 films, received 50,000 fan letters a month.
“Something about the dog on screen really heightens emotions for people, I think,” says Wendy Mitchell, who dug into the doggy archives to find out these and other fun facts for her cheerful little book Citizen Canine: Dogs in the Movies. Citizen Canine features 60 of cinema’s top dogs, ranging from the feisty chihuahua Bruiser in Legally Blonde 2 at the effete end of doggery to Koko as our own bushwhacking Koko in Red Dog (2011). Mitchell’s main criterion was finding dogs who were proactive characters.
“Not just a dog lying on a sofa. One of my favourites is My Dog Skip (2000) because it really shows the boy growing up with his dog and how their bond changes – and we’re seeing it partly from the dog’s point of view.”
Toby Rose, a Paris-based British journalist, has been running the beloved Palm Dog competition at the Cannes Film Festival for 21 years; he also convenes the Fido awards in London, now held in the week between the BAFTAs and the Oscars. He was inspired to carry the torch for our canine friends by the late Mutley, a fox terrier he bought in a French country market that became so much a part of his professional life as an entertainment journalist that Mutley had his own column in Elle magazine.
He also starred in a short film, shown at Cannes’ Short Film Corner. “But we realised in the midst of all the showboating and prize giving that Mutley would never have got a look-in for a prize that he so richly deserved,” says Rose. On the way home with Mutley on the train, a phrase popped into his head: the Palm Dog. “The awards started the following year.”
The Palm Dog has yet to achieve official status, but it has had some red-letter years, including 2023, when the remarkable Messi in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the Palm and the film itself went on to win the festival’s Palme D’Or the following day. The next year, the Palm Dog jury prize went to the Chinese film Black Dog, which starred dozens of stray dogs found in shelters. “For me, to have the dog from China in Cannes, with the very handsome star Eddie Peng, was wonderful,” says Rose.
Any film released in the United Kingdom may be eligible for a Fido. “The Fidos are an award celebrating – and this is a word we need to repeat a thousand times – dogrisma!” Rose says. That is the special quality we look for in the big-screen four-legged.” The Fidos’ top award is Best in World, “equivalent to a Crufts champion”. An early winner was the ensemble of corgis in The Queen, a moment that Helen Mirren was happy to commemorate some years later when she was at the Berlin Film Festival to collect a lifetime achievement award, posing for a photograph with a prize collar.
Both Rose and Mitchell are keen to emphasise the value of seeing a real dog doing real things, as opposed to a CGI dog doing the impossible. “You get so much more from a real dog,” says Mitchell. She was disappointed by the fact that the most recent version of Call of the Wild – among all literary IP, surely expected to be a beacon of authenticity – used a largely CGI dog. “We’re all sick of AI junk and if I know there’s a real person bonding with a real dog on screen, I’m going to lean into that.”
So she is excited for The Heart of the Beast, a forthcoming film for all the dog-lovers out there with Brad Pitt as a former Marine whose faithful friend Odin, suffering from PTSD, still manages to rescue him from drowning. “My gosh, yes, I need this in my life,” she says.
“My loyalties will be divided. I mean, I love Mr Pitt – but let’s see what happens.”
The Dog Stars is now showing. Heart of The Beast opens nationally September 24.
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Stephanie Bunbury is a film and culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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