The Moviegoer

Out in sunny California directors and producers have acquired a nasty reputation for the criminal way in which they are wont to treat old, well-loved fiction from the pen of artists. This criminal tendency, it seems, is something which the very atmosphere of a film colony induces, for, if the treatment of "Bob, Son of Battle" is any indication, Gaumont-British are also rank offenders.

Very little of Alfred Ollivant's famous story has survived this latest script writers' spree. Bob, Son of Battle, has become an incidental character who manages, much to the audience's disappointment, to win the sheep-herding cup from McAdam's Black (not Red) Wull. David Moore has been transformed into a handsome young cavelier who wins the heart of McAdam's pretty daughter (his son has also been discarded) as well as the coveted cup. At times Will Fyffe's characterization of the vicious drunkard is superlative, but at other times--notably when he hands the precious cup over to Moore casually, as if it were a drink of scotch--it is very weak. The celebrated race is well-handled, and portrays the extraordinary intelligence of the shepherd dogs, but even here Wull loses only because his master has taken one drink too many, and not because Bob is the superior strategist. In place of the original author's dramatic conclusion, doubtless because it involved a dog-fight abhorrent to the S.P.C.A., a weak and insipidly sentimental one has been created; and, all in all, the fundamental power of "the greatest dog story ever filmed" has been lost.