A new, old “Lassie” comes home to U.S. theaters &mdash one that resembles the original story:
“Lassie” comes home to another generation of U.S. children this week in a new film that hews closely to the original, dark tale of the loyal collie and her boy in wartime England, instead of the sunny California of the long-running television series.The sable-and-white collie, Lassie, and her young owner, Joe, first appeared in a 1938 short story in the Saturday Evening Post by Eric Knight, a British-American journalist and writer who spun the story into a 1940 book, “Lassie Come-Home.”
[...]
Like many fans, Sturridge had never read Knight’s book or seen the 1943 film it spawned, and initially assumed from watching the TV show that Knight had created Lassie as an American dog living on a ranch in California with her owner, Timmy.In fact, the story grew out of a trip Knight took during the Great Depression to England, where he saw people selling belongings to survive, according to “Lassie” historian Ace Collins.
“The prized possession of these people were their collie dogs,” Collins said. “A lot of people were having to sell those dogs to put food on the table.”
“Lassie Come-Home” became the story of a Yorkshire boy whose coal miner father sells the family’s unusually beautiful collie to a nobleman when he loses his job. The duke takes the dog to Scotland, where she escapes and returns to the boy.