Rinty’s career took a hit when sound films came in and Warner Bros. In fact, an animal acting without words looked natural and didn’t fall into pantomime and exaggeration the way human actors in silent film often did.” The footage made its way into newsreels and eventually landed the dog a contract at Warner Bros., where he made nearly two dozen silent features that earned him fans ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Carl Sandburg.Īs Orlean insightfully explains, “A dog was at no disadvantage to a human in silent film both species had the same set of tools for telling a story - action, expression, gesture. That greatness didn’t begin to manifest itself until 1921, when a friend of Duncan’s who’d developed a slow-motion camera shot footage of Rinty jumping over an obstacle almost 12 feet high. “He believed the dog was destined for greatness,” Orlean writes, “and he was lucky to be his human guide and companion.” It always seemed to American soldier Duncan an amazing stroke of good fortune that he found this animal, a dog that so obsessed him from the get-go that he cut short leave in Paris because being without the puppy was more than he could handle. That dog, Rin Tin Tin, was born on a World War I battlefield in eastern France in September 1918.

“The only companion to his loneliness he would ever find would be his dog, and for the rest of his life, his attachment to animals was deeper than his attachment to any person.”

“He was always deeply alone, always had the aloneness to retreat to, as if it were a room in his house,” Orlean explains in a typically deft image. The tale begins with Lee Duncan, a boy who spent his formative years in an orphanage in Oakland. That would be Strongheart, who was promoted as “More Human Than Human.” But Rin Tin Tin was bigger than them all, and he had a story so unlikely it would have made a movie in itself. Rin Tin Tin (Rinty to his intimates) was not the first dog on film that honor went to 1905’s “Rescued by Rover.” He wasn’t even the first Hollywood dog star. Nearly a decade in the making, combining worldwide research with personal connection, it offers the kind of satisfactions you only get when an impeccable writer gets hold of one heck of a story. “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend” is New Yorker writer Orlean’s first original work since the celebrated “The Orchid Thief,” and like that book, it’s a story of magnificent obsession. He could leap twelve feet, and he could leap through time.” He was Rin Tin Tin and, as Susan Orlean puts it, “He was something you could dream about.

He was listed in the Los Angeles phone book, made more money than his human costars and actually came unnervingly close to winning the first Academy Award for actor. They called him the Dog Wonder, the Mastermind Dog, America’s Greatest Movie Dog.

Rin tin tin book review