Challenge to Lassie

This is a major character role for the movies' best-loved pre-Beethoven pooch, as the famed collie retreats to late-19th-century Edinburgh from the great American outdoors to play a faithful dog who keeps returning to a churchyard where her master is buried. If that sounds familiar, it's Disney's 1960 film Greyfriars Bobby, which was an uncredited remake of this 1949 MGM film, also featuring Donald Crisp. In the later version Crisp starred as the cemetery keeper, whereas here he's Lassie's master. Lassie is utterly splendid in the lead, and the late 1940s Technicolor is ravishing. Humans Crisp, Edmund Gwenn and Hollywood's British colony all do sterling work, but it's the dog's movie and rightly so.