Lassie Come Home (1971)

Storyline

Hard times came for Carraclough family and they are forced to sell their dog to the rich Duke of Rudling. However, Lassie, the dog, is unwilling to leave the young Carraclough boy and sets out on the long and dangerous journey in order to rejoin him. Lassie Come Home, the classic 1943 Fred M. Wilcox collie canine dog family melodrama (“The picture that’s true to life!”; “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Technicolor Triumph!”; “Based on the novel by Eric Knight, author of ‘This Above All'”; “Eric Knight’s great dog story ‘Lassie Come Home'”) starring Roddy McDowall (child star who successfully made a transition to playing adult roles), Donald Crisp (in an unusual twist, Crisp started out as an actor in 1908 and appeared in around 75 movies over the next six years, and then became a director; over the next 15 years, he directed 72 movies, and only appeared as an actor in around a dozen; but then in 1930, at the age of 50, he resumed his acting career, and made 75 more movies as an actor!; he was very much in demand for all sorts of “older man” parts, and he stayed in remarkable physical condition, playing an ordinary seaman in the 1935 “Mutiny on the Bounty” at the age of 56, and playing Elizabeth Taylor’s father in “National Velvet” at the age of 65; he continued acting all the way until 1963, playing “Grandpa Spencer” in “Spencer’s Mountain”, at the age of 84, and he lived another 11 years!), Dame May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce (best remembered as Doctor Watson in the long-running Sherlock Holmes movie series), Elsa Lanchester, Lassie (the most famous celluloid canine, a collie in both movies and television, portrayed by both lassies and laddies), and Elizabeth Taylor (who is unbilled on the posters)