A Girl and Her Dog

Poor Madeline Kahn. Her supporting roles in such films as What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles made her one of the most memorable comic actresses of the early 1970s.

Yet when she got a starring role in 1976’s Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, she had to not only share star billing with a mere dog but also star in one of the worst films of her career. She also shared billing with an ill-cast Bruce Dern, who played aspiring screenwriter Grayson Potchuck, Art Carney, who played lecherous studio head J.J. Fromberg, and Terri Garr, who played her roommate Fluffy Peters. (Ms. Garr, incidentally, gave the best performance in the film apart from Ms. Kahn and the dog.)

Granted, this film was not that bad when Ms. Kahn was on screen. Director Michael Winner did not quite seem sure what to do with her but she still managed to make a good impression even when she was forced to share screen time with the above mentioned dog.

But the film was supposed to be a comedy -- and a lot of the things that happened to Ms. Kahn’s character Estie Del Ruth just were not that funny. For example, at the beginning of the film, Estie, an aspiring actress, was so desperate for work that she was willing to sleep with a stagehand who had passed himself off as a director. And the screenwriters thought this was funny. Towards the middle of the film, she finally had a chance to meet Fromberg, who insisted on greeting her with his pants off. And the screenwriters thought this was funny. And towards the end, poor Estie was so desperate that she attempted to make a living as a prostitute. And the screenwriters -- you know…

If the director had been looking to make a dark comedy in which there was an element of social commentary to be found in the fact that a likable character like Estie kept running into problems, this might be understandable. But I was never quite sure what type of film Winner had in mind. The film was marketed as a spoof with the title character obviously meant to be a humorous take-off on the old Rin Tin Tin character (a fictional German Shepherd who routinely rescued babies and damsels in distress in the films of yesteryear.) Moreover, its trailer attempted to hype up the nostalgic appeal of this flick by boasting of the fact that there were over 70 old-time Hollywood stars in this movie‘s cast. But none of these stars were used in a way that seemed especially memorable and some of them -- such as Edgar Bergen, who was cast as a dog-abusing vaudeville performer, and Joan Blondell, who was cast as a show biz-hungry landlady -- were cast in roles that seemed more sad than entertaining. The film even attempted to mine humor from the imminent death of the title character -- not just once, but several times. Fortunately, however, it never went so far as to kill a dog in order to garner cheap laughs. But I would not be surprised to hear that that possibility was considered during production.

A running gag in the movie had Potchuck continually pitching ideas to Fromberg about a “new” concept for a movie that just happens to be based on a movie already familiar to modern-day audiences -- for example, a shark attacking a New England town, a little girl possessed by the devil, etc. -- only to be shot down. Needless to say, this gag got old fast and was based on an idea that was old even in Edgar Allan Poe’s day. (Poe once wrote a story which attempted to mine humor from the premise of having classic works of literature rejected by one of the editors of his day. Needless to say, it is not one of his more highly regarded tales.)

However, it does make me wonder how exactly the idea for this movie was pitched? Did the producers think that movie audiences would really be interested in a movie that was this lame? We all know from Shakespeare in Love that audiences in the English-speaking world tend to have a special place in their hearts for any bit with a dog. But don’t they draw the line somewhere? Or did the producers of this film believe their potential audience to be so hungry for nostalgia that they would overlook that line? After all, this film was produced after nostalgia-friendly movies like Paper Moon and The Sting had made big money at the box office. Then again it was also produced in the wake of the equally nostalgia-friendly The Great Gatsby -- which was one of the most notorious flops of its day.