Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend - review

Melanie McGrath10 April 2012

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
by Susan Orlean
(Atlantic, £16.99)

Two of the biggest movie stars of early 2012 are likely to be left out of the toothy parade of self-congratulation that is the movie awards season.

The first, Finder, plays equine hero Joey in Stephen Spielberg's film adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's acclaimed stage show War Horse. The second is Uggie, a Jack Russell, whose performance in hotly tipped Oscar contender The Artist has won so many hearts that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had gently to remind its members that critters are currently ineligible for acting gongs. His trainer has been quoted as saying that Uggie "deserves an Oscar more than anyone I know", though that may say more about the company the man keeps.

It was not ever thus. In 1929, the very first Oscar for Best Actor went to a German Shepherd. His name was Rin Tin Tin, and though he was subsequently disqualified - a decision which still rankles with Susan Orlean, the author of this glorious biography of the world's original canine superstar - Rinty, as he was more usually known, racked up performances in 27 films from 1922 to 1931, becoming a household name and an inspiration to millions around the world for more than half a century.

The dog-cum-global phenomenon started life as an abandoned puppy on a First World War battlefield. Rescued by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, on his way back from fighting, Rin Tin Tin (named after a toy doll beloved of French children) immediately repaid his saviour with a loyal devotion extraordinary even for a dog. Smuggling his new animal companion across the pond with him, Duncan found himself in California just as the movie business was taking off. The man had no talent for acting, directing or producing. What he did have, though, was Rin Tin Tin.

Audiences fell in love with the dog, or, rather, they cleaved to what Rinty symbolised: a kind of noble independence and unstinting sense of purpose which in turn expressed all that was best in America, or, rather, in what America symbolised. Dog and dream conflated into one very powerful package.

This book has been 10 years in the making and you can see why. With extraordinary deftness and consummate skill, Orlean weaves from the story of Lee Duncan and Rin Tin Tin a shimmering, complex fabric of worlds entered and left, of dreams glimpsed, then grasped at, of friendships disappointed, ambitions thwarted, legacies clung to, betrayals endured, values restated. Through the narrow lens of one man and his dog, this subtle, erudite and good-humoured part narrative history, part personal memoir and part non-fiction novel moves the reader through the early Hollywood period of the silents to the birth of TV and the rise of celebrity culture, stopping off along the way to marvel at what remains unchanged. Rin Tin Tin is a tremendous achievement, not so much the biography of a dog - albeit an exceptional dog - as a fully realised exploration of 20th-century America - its dreams, its vanities, its often preposterous genius for reckless reinvention.

Several years ago I came across a bumper sticker in a parking lot in Las Vegas, that read, "I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am". The lingering power of this book lies in the light it casts on the collective longing of the human spirit to become the creature our real or imagined canine companions are generous enough to suppose we might be. Fun, engaging, informative, passionate and authoritative and mercifully unsentimental, Rin Tin Tin is the very best kind of narrative non-fiction. One hundred per cent pure reading bliss.

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