I remember seeing Goodbye My Lady back when I was a lad as the second part of a double feature. I was pretty amazed at this most unusual canine.
Young Skeeter, who lives with his Uncle Jesse in the swamp area near Pascagoula, Mississippi comes upon a most unusual dog in the swamp. It grooms itself like a cat, has a hyena like laugh instead of a bark, and has the speed of Secretariat. Any kid like the one I was when I saw this would want to possess an animal like this. When Skeeter finally does capture him he finds he's got the most natural hunting dog ever seen those parts.
Brandon DeWilde was a pretty popular child actor in the Fifties, Shane and The Member of the Wedding cemented his career. He and Walter Brennan playing Uncle Jesse are a winning combination. They get good support from Phil Harris as the local grocer, Sidney Poitier has a small role as a young black neighbor and William Hopper, the Yankee visitor from Connecticut.
Would you believe this film was produced by John Wayne? His Batjac Production company occasionally did films that did not star the Duke. Duke got a top director in William Wellman with whom he had just finished The High and the Mighty to direct Goodbye My Lady and Phil Harris and William Hopper who was in the cast of same. Wellman mixes all the elements just right for a winning film.
This unusual dog turns out to be a basenji from Africa and of course the dog is lost from it's real owner. The ending isn't what you would expect from a boy/dog picture, it's more real and that's as far as I go at this point.
Living in Buffalo as I do now, there's a bit of humor here that non- Buffalonians can't appreciate. Phil Harris has a hunting dog named Millard Fillmore, named after our 13th American President. Fillmore is somewhere in the middle rank of Presidents generally, but as a native of Buffalo, you'll find a few people in this part of the world who will accord him as great.
Harris makes a joke about nothing ever being named for Fillmore. Where I live there's a page or two in the phone book for things named Fillmore. That must have sent up a few howls back when I was a kid in theaters here.
