Just watched this wonderful (inadequate adjective – I was truly awed) movie and have been thinking about it all day. Stupendous. The acting (by everyone, not just the young stars), the lighting, design, the humor in the script – what a great movie.
But the dog’s death has been bugging me. At IMDB, someone posted that it was faked, using electrodes to make the dog’s legs twitch.
Does anyone know for certain? I don’t think the SPCA was overseeing animal actors in 1952.
(If it was faked, they did an excellent job, but I hesitate to praise the effects people.)
It’s been ages since I’ve seen the film, but it’s possible they drugged the dog. In Bela Tarr’s Satantango, we witness a little girl pouring poison into a kitty’s saucer, which then proceeds to lap it up and then die (all essentially in a single shot). They put a sedative of some type in the bowl to drug the cat, so I suspect something similar happened in the film (it seems unlikely that Rene Clement would’ve killed a dog, given the message of the film).
Those rabbits in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, though? Definitely dead.
The problem is, I’m not sure of any sedative that is taken orally and works as quickly as you’re making it sound. Not any sedative that would be safe to give a kitten at the very least.
Well, the kitten doesn’t just drop “dead”. It laps it up, walks around a bit, plays with the girl, stumbles some more, slowly sits down, gradually closes its eyes, and then eventually “stops breathing”. FWIW, Satantango is 7.5 hours long ( :eek: ), so the movie takes its time in all of its setpieces.
It’s hard to figure how they could have made it look so real.
The twitching back legs were shocking, and it was also a shock when the old woman tossed his body into the river. The dog’s body was limp and his head was lolling like his neck was broken. If it was fake, they did an excellent job.
I watched the Fossey-Clement interview, and Brigitte mentioned some things Clement did to frighten her into doing what the scene demanded. I suppose if the dog was dead, she would have mentioned it.