The Silent Call

It sounds as though this isn't a terrifically high-grade film, but for early-sixties kids the sympathetic longing to see the boy and his dog reunited keeps up interest, and of course the ending has a nice payoff. Since the vote comes from a little kid who enjoyed it, the kid is giving it top marks; probably the grown-up me would be more critical! I either saw this at my school's 16mm Saturday matinées in the auditorium or on TV... hard to remember, and maybe I have it confused with "The Littlest Hobo". All those stories with pets conquering vast distances to find their humans worked for me; we were a family with plenty of pets and like most kids I liked pretty much anything with animals. It may have been this film that had a scene with the dog traveling through the snow, and I was so absorbed in the story that I remember being surprised that I couldn't see my breath. Remember how real movies were when you were little? I think that the real-life instances of similar animal odysseys actually involved displaced pets returning to their original homes rather than sensing the new location of departed human family members. The homing instinct is a very strong one, after all. But you never know...