One topic to which I seem to keep on returning (quite inadvertently) here on The Spirochaete Trail is that of giving canine actors their due. Obviously, Benji is a creature near and dear to my heart, so I'll routinely tip my hat to Benjean, the dog who played Benji for the better part of the character's career. I recently did short pieces covering Honey Tree Evil Eye (better known as Spuds MacKenzie) and Gidget the chihuahua, quirky canines whose unique talents were utilised for shilling booze and tacos, respectively. Nice cute dogs who won us over by doing everything right (the occasional controversy with regard to the advertising dogs' campaigns notwithstanding). For nothing captures our hearts like a celebrity dog who exemplifies everything we revere in man's best friend. We all know that Hollywood has a fine tradition of championing heroic canine leads, from Lassie to Rin Tin Tin, and doggedly devoted companions like Asta from The Thin Man (1934) and Toto from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Every now and then a new canine actor will appear who takes us by storm and reminds us of why their appeal is so evergreen. Look how crazy the world went for Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier who played Jack in The Artist (2011) and became the subject of a popular social media campaign, "Consider Uggie", to net the dog awards recognition. Again, nice cute dogs who did everything right. What we don't see enough of is praise for dogs who specialised in playing complete and utter psychopaths. Harry the Labrador mix was one such dog. The highlight of his career was nearly devouring William Hurt in the 1981 thriller Eyewitness. And you were happy settling for tacos, Gidget?
Eyewitness was released under the alternate title The Janitor in the UK (even though, as film historian Marcus Heam points out in the film's Blu-Ray commentary, "janitor" is not a term commonly used in the UK, where "caretaker" is much preferred). This was closer to the film's full working title, The Janitor Can't Dance, only Twentieth Century Fox desired something snappier and had the title shortened for its UK release and altered altogether into the more generic Eyewitness for its US distribution (director Peter Yates is quite upfront about his dissatisfaction with the US title in the Blu-Ray commentary, stating that it sounds slicker but conveys nothing of the film's real character). The film involves William Hurt's chorophobic janitor, Daryll Deever, obsessing over a local TV news anchor Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), who in turn takes an interest in him on the mistaken belief that he has information about a murder that occurred in the building where he works. Then Daryll lands himself in hot water when some dangerous individuals likewise assume that he must be hiding something. Truthfully, the film isn't particularly plot-orientated (the basis of the film apparently came from combining two half-finished scripts by screenwriter Steve Tesich, which accounts for how haphazardly the narrative hangs together) and you don't get too involved in the central mystery. If you remember this film at all, it's likely because of Harry's input. Harry has only a minor role in Eyewitness, but he's easily the heart and soul of the film.
Harry's appearances make up a running gag whereby Daryll returns to his apartment and is "attacked" by his dog, Ralph, who has a somewhat peculiar means of greeting any and all entrants to the abode. Ralph's eccentricities come up three times over the course of the film; the first provides the film with one of its big jump scares, since the viewer presumably isn't expecting a large black dog to appear out of nowhere and to wrestle Daryll to the ground. On the second occasion, when Daryll has returned to the apartment with Tony, Ralph's sudden, aggressive appearance might again take the viewer by surprise, but this time around there's an air of comedy at the expense of Weaver's character, who is totally unprepared for the dog's salutations. Come the third and final encounter, when Daryll again returns to the apartment with Tony in tow, the audience has been primed to expect an appearance from Ralph the dog, so we know something is wrong when he initially appears to give the humans a wide berth. Finally, when Ralph does make himself seen, we get the dark, depraved punchline that this entire running gag has been building up to. For on this occasion Ralph does mean business and Daryll's accustomedness toward the dog's regular displays of pseudo-aggression results in him not seeing the danger until Ralph is right on top of him and all poised to maul him to death. This time, the viewer is actually slightly ahead of Daryll, for we recognise right away that something is off about Ralph and that Daryll is walking into a death trap in allowing the dog to approach him. It it is an extraordinarily well-constructed sequence, with lots of close-ups and rapid editing used to emphasise the intensity of the attack. Compared to Ralph's previous tussles with Daryll, the blood lust in Ralph's eyes seems entirely genuine this time, and his increase in ferocity is downright startling. Despite Tony's valiant efforts to defend Daryll, Ralph looks to be winning the struggle...until he suddenly shuts down, keels over and all of the life drains out of him. Sorry folks, but the dog does die in this one.* Which is very bad news, as we still have half an hour's worth of running time left to go, and the film just bumped off its best character. (Still, it's not as bad as Kevin Costner's 1997 post-apocalyptic drama The Postman, which kills its best character - Bill the mule - twenty minutes into the film. The Postman is three hours long!)
The confrontation between Daryll and Ralph isn't fantastically central to the story, but it is by far the film's most gripping and memorable set-piece, and I think you can tell that from how eagerly the marketing campaign latched onto it. A still of Ralph attacking Daryll was used as one of key promotional images for the film and was used as the VHS cover for the film's home video release in the UK. In fact, Ralph's final attack left such an impression that they even made him the focus of the film's promotional poster in Turkey. Check this beauty out:
Honestly, if I had seen the above poster before watching the movie, I'd have been pissed off when I discovered that Ralph isn't actually all that integral to the plot, let alone that the film isn't about William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver being chased around New York by a giant dog (although arguably the Turkish poster is attempting to make Ralph into a metaphor for the savagery/treachery of the city?). The above poster does make it look as if we're in for some kind of animal attack picture along the lines of Jaws, only the title Eyewitness is a bit of a giveaway to the contrary. It doesn't quite fit with the genre. Too bad. I would have dug a picture in which Ralph's eccentricities were main focus.
On the film's Blu-Ray commentary, Yates and Heam talk about Ralph a couple of times. At one point, Yates provides an illuminating glimpse into the dog's behind-the-scenes character, revealing that he was wonderful to work with but low on stamina, which did create friction with one of his human co-stars:
Yates: This dog was extraordinary. I usually fire dogs. I fired dogs out of The Deep. I fired dogs out of For Pete's Sake. But this one was so well-trained and so good that one could only, sort of, thank God and keep him on. Mind you, he did used to get tired. We were told by his trainer that one had to be very careful or he'd get too tired. And there was one occasion when I had to put Christopher Plummer...on a standby and tell him he was on standby because the dog might get tired. He wasn't exactly pleased. He said, "What happens if I get tired?" I said, "Well, that's just tough."
Later on, during Ralph's infamous final attack, Yates is unable to supply much information on how the dog's ferocity was simulated:
Heam: How on earth did you get the dog to appear so rabid?
Yates: I've forgotten. I think maybe they put something in his eyes, I don't know.
Heam: He's even foaming at the mouth at one point.
Yates: Yeah, oh well, that was easy, that was Enos or something like that.
Later, on observing Ralph frothing at the mouth:
Yates: I've forgotten what that was. But it was something like, I don't know, Enos or something that didn't do him any harm. But it was really a marvelously trained dog.
Heam: And using a jet black dog must have given your lighting cameraman a few headaches, I would have thought.
Yates: I think you're probably right.
And finally, on Sigourney Weaver's tenacity in doing her own stunts:
Yates: Sigourney insists on playing these scenes herself. And though of course the dog isn't really rabid, it's still quite, quite...it's still frightening to be in there.
Despite what's indicated in the commentary, it transpires that Ralph's behavioral changes are not rabies-related; rather, he was fed a toxic substance that made him high as a kite, in the hopes that he would kill Daryll before the poison took its toll. In other words, that was Ralph's brain on drugs.
Harry with trainer Karl Lewis Miller in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera.
Ralph's real name, Harry, is not revealed in the commentary, much as his trainer, the legendary Karl Lewis Miller, is also not identified by name. Happily, we do have some behind-the-scenes insight into the dog in question by way of his appearance in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera. An installment in the long-running Canadian investigative series Fifth Estate, Cruel Camera was presented by Bobby McKeown and looked at Hollywood's surreptitious history of abusing animals in the name of spectacle, largely in response to the then-recent controversies that had surfaced surrounding the treatment of horses during the production of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Among other things, Cruel Camera was responsible for bringing the disturbing fakery behind the so-called lemming "suicide" in the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness to the public's attention. Harry was featured, alongside Miller, as one of the more positive representations of an animal working within the industry, and was used to demonstrate how a non-aggressive animal could be trained to feign aggressive behaviour. Miller described Harry's specialty as "Jekyll/Hyde", stating that, "He always has roles where he's the nicest dog in the world, but [at] one point in the story the devil, like, possesses him and he becomes the most aggressive animal you ever saw." Miller gave McKeown a demonstration of Harry's uncanny ability to go from loving to lethal in the blink of an eye, but when Harry finally lunges at Miller and "bites" his hand, it's clear that there's no genuine blood lust in his soul. As part of this demonstration, it was revealed that Harry's "attacks" were, in actuality, in response to a band concealed on his target's arm, which Harry had been conditioned to want to remove. Miller also gave some indication as to Harry's heritage, stating that, "He's a mixed Labrador; he probably has Great Dane in him as well."
Eyewitness is the only example of Harry's acting credentials cited in Cruel Camera, but I was intrigued by Miller's references to Harry's having appeared in multiple roles and making a specialty of this kind of behaviour. Awed by Harry's feigned ferocity and touched by the evident tenderness between the dog and his trainer, I decided to have a go at tracking down the rest of Harry's filmography - no small task, given that Harry doesn't receive an official credit in Eyewitness and has no IMDb page, so I had to study Miller's filmography instead and look at probable titles. My detective work yielded only one positive result - The Amityville Horror (1979), which features a black Labrador mix who looks exactly like Harry. I should be upfront about the fact that I have unfortunately not been to uncover any confirmation that the dog who appears in The Amityville Horror is definitively the Harry we're looking for. But until I get confirmation to the contrary, I'm satisfied enough in assuming that it is the same dog. It is the spitting image of Ralph from Eyewitness. There was only a two year gap between the films in question, which is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for the same dog to still be in the business. Also intriguing is that the dog from The Amityville Horror is actually called Harry, leading me to wonder if he acquired the name from the role he was originally brought in to play. It would, of course, be naive to assume that the dog used to portray Harry in Amityville is necessarily the same dog in every shot. Films often deploy multiple lookalike animals for different sequences, particularly in the cases of complex or challenging roles that would otherwise require a single animal to be conditioned to perform an insane variety of stunts. In Cruel Camera, we also see footage of Miller working alongside a white German shepherd named Folsom, who was only one of multiple dogs used to portray the same role in the 1982 film White Dog. The 1995 film Babe (on which Miller also worked as a trainer) famously had over forty pigs playing the titular role. The Blu-Ray commentary for Eyewitness, however, does make it clear that Ralph was always portrayed by the same dog. The Amityville Horror Blu-Ray released by Second Sight comes with a commentary not from the cast or the crew but from Dr Hans Holzer, Ph.D in parapsychology (who wrote a number of books about the Amityville case), which I'm guessing is going to tell me sod-all about the dog who played Harry, so I'm not going to bother with it. To reiterate, I'm open to the possibility that is another dog entirely and that I'm barking (sorry) up the wrong tree, but I have a strong suspicion that this is our Harry and I'm going to proceed on that basis.
If you have even the vaguest interest in the paranormal, US folklore or horror iconography, then chances are that the name "Amityville" means something to you. In a nutshell, The Amityville Horror was a professed true account of the paranormal phenomena experienced by the Lutz family while living at 112 Ocean Avenue in the Amityville suburbs in Long Island, New York, where twenty-three year old Ronald DeFeo Jr had murdered his parents and four siblings only a year prior. Written by Jay Anson and published in 1977, the book made its impact on popular culture but let's just say that not everyone believes the Lutzs and that no one who's lived at the property since has reported any kind of unusual activity. Be it a chilling tale of true-life terror or a cynical cash grab engineered to exploit the unease left in the wake of the DeFeo murders, the story has been used as the basis of a long line of feature films, beginning with Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror in 1979, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. An enormous commercial success, the film grossed over 80 million dollars domestically but I think it's fair to say that its time in the sun was sorely limited. It predates both Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982), two films with which it shares a number of common elements, but it lacks the dark artistry of the former and the gleeful personality of the latter. The Amityville Horror isn't overwhelmingly scary, although it is intermittently gruesome, in a grimy, insalubrious kind of way, with its regular images of fly infestations (if you're entomophobic, then Amityville is definitely not your film) and at one point a misbehaving toilet. The ghastliest thing about the film by far, though, would have to be Lalo Schifrin's Academy Award-nominated score, which I found actually made me feel a whole lot queasier than any of those aforementioned fly or toilet images (perhaps I just have some hitherto unknown Pavlovian response to choirs attempting to sound simultaneously elegant and off-kilter). Still, Rosenberg's film offers of a smattering of enjoyable set pieces (I'm quite partial to the scene where one of the Lutz children gets his hand squished by a window). And it has Harry the dog, which surely counts for something.
As part of their account, the Lutzs claimed that the family dog, Harry, was frequently unsettled while living in the house, particularly at the discovery of a mysterious red-painted room the family found hidden at the back of the basement. Our Harry accordingly spends much of the film scratching away incessantly at the basement wall, evidently attuned to something that the humans aren't. Harry only gets to show off his Jekyll/Hyde abilities at the very end of the film, when he attacks George Lutz (James Brolin) - ironically, after George has returned to the house specifically to rescue the dog - and even then he doesn't display anything close to the kind of startling ferocity seen in Eyewitness. It certainly doesn't come across that Harry has been possessed by a the devil - in fact, his attack on Brolin actually amounts to something of a fake-out, for the dog does ultimately prove himself to be a perfectly loyal and loving pet. In the end, the family unit endures in Amityville, and those values are extended to the family dog. Although it's intriguing looking at Harry's earlier efforts at savagery, he definitely did his best work ripping into William Hurt. Now that's a set-piece for the ages.
Unfortunately, there's a paucity of information out there about Harry, who would certainly be long dead by now, but I couldn't tell you exactly when he passed on or if he made any additional screen appearances following his spot on Cruel Camera. I can, however, throw in a few more words about Miller, who was responsible for bringing the animal action to a wide variety of pictures, from the rabid St. Bernard in Cujo (1983) to the more family friendly St. Bernard in Beethoven (1992), the cat in the Stephen King-based anthology horror Cat's Eye (1985) and the various farmyard fauna in Babe (1995) and its sequel Babe: Pig In The City (1998). Sadly, Miller passed away in 2008, aged 66, but his daughter, Teresa Ann Miller, has followed in her father's footsteps and become a professional animal trainer. She recently trained dogs for the 2014 Hungarian film White God.
* In my own personal headcannon, Eyewitness is the film that Sadness is referring to in Inside Out when she brings up, "the funny movie where the dog dies". Most people assume she's talking about either Old Yeller or Marley & Me, but how do you know she's not talking about this one?
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