Movies: Old Dog, New Tricks

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Peter O'Toole has faced down some acting challenges in his day. (Lawrence of Arabia springs to mind.) But the movie he is making now is particularly treacherous. "What's the old cliché?" he asks. "Don't act with children and dogs? Well, try children, dogs, horses and hounds, coal miners, a motor car formerly the property of the late George Raft, and a fox. Try acting with that lot, which I did the other day. Verrrrry tricky." O'Toole, 72, knew when he signed up for the remake of Lassie that there would be a collie, a massive hunt scene in which his character would chase a fox down a coal mine in an old Duesenberg and two 9-year-old co-stars. "I'm not complaining," he says, sitting in his trailer and munching on licorice jujubes, "just amazed. Strange old business, film is. Strange old business."

That anyone would decide to remake Lassie is in itself not so odd. Far worse properties have been rehashed, and at least director Charles Sturridge (Brideshead Revisited, Shackleton) will be classing up the old dog a bit, not only by casting O'Toole, Samantha Morton and Peter Dinklage in major roles but also by taking the story back to its pre--Timmy's-trapped-in-a-well roots. "I never saw the TV show, and I can't recall any of the films," says Sturridge, who hopes to have his movie ready for a Christmas release. "But the original novel"--Lassie Come-Home, written by Eric Knight in 1940--"was set in Yorkshire, and it had a certain prewar British integrity about it. In current children's films, you have to be ironic to reach the parents in the audience. It's a profitable formula, but this film won't appeal to one audience over the heads of another. It looks the whole audience in the eye."

The production itself is a little less straightforward. For tax reasons, the Isle of Man is standing in for Yorkshire, while, for reasons clear only to Classic Media, holder of the rights to Lassie, everyone on the set is required to stick to the fiction that Lassie is being played by a single dog named Lassie. Actually, three collies named Carter, Mason and Dakota share the part. "We have the stunt dog, the running dog and the picture dog," trainer Mathilde de Cagny whispers. "We do a little bit of makeup on the picture dog to darken him up. He's lighter than the others, so we had a special dog colorist from Los Angeles come in. She has vegetable dyes that do the trick." No makeup can disguise the fact that all three Lassies are male. "We count on the fur to hide that," says de Cagny. A strange business indeed.