Benji (1974)
Directed, written and produced by Joe Camp
Music by Euel Box
Distributed by Mulberry Square Releasing
Starring Higgins (dog), Patsy Garrett, Cynthia Smith, Alan Fiuzat and Peter Breck
Originally released October 17th, 1974.
Growing up, I often heard mention of a dog my family had when my brothers were young. There's a 16 year age difference between me and my eldest brother, so as much as I would have liked it, this dog and I never crossed paths. He was small, white, fluffy and, by all accounts, an annoying little shit. Just as the family was about to settle in for dinner, he would bolt from their picturesque 80's suburban home and into the large park the neighborhood surrounded. And he never even had a purpose. He just wanted to
be in that park. He did this regularly. Once or twice a week. He really committed to the bit. I respect the hell out of him for that. What a little rebel! He was also very sweet and my mother loved him dearly, but his most prominent feature was, far and away, his escaping antics. This dog's name was Benji, and he, like many dogs born or adopted after October 17th, 1974, was named for a very popular fictional dog. A stray who did what he wanted, when he wanted and with whom he wanted was the subject of the third highest grossing film of 1974.
Benji essentially redefined the family friendly G rated genre at a time when that rating was an effective box office kiss of death. It is not great. It's not even all that good. I fell asleep for 3 hours about halfway through and was not excited to continue watching when I woke up. But it represents an important moment in the 70's, and it's a checkpoint for examining the evolution of movies aimed at children in the late part of the 20th century (I know that doesn't sound all that exciting, but I'm going to talk about
Air Bud later, so sit tight).
I know I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised by how much of this movie is actually just a dog running from point A to point B at different speeds and angles. Like, it's 98% a dog running (sometimes two dogs running). The movie follows the story of a little stray mutt who lives in an abandoned house on the outskirts of a mid sized town. Everyday, he takes the same route around the town receiving food and unsolicited advice he can't possibly understand from the locals. Some call him Sam, some call him Buddy, but his favorite family calls him Benji. Every morning, he shows up to a big, white antebellum southern home and is fed by a kindly but no nonsense house keeper as she sends two aggressively white children off to school. The three of them successfully hide this dog-centered ritual from the children's stern, dog hating doctor father (Stern Dad, MD, as I referred to him in my notes). When the kids are abducted and held for ransom by a discount John Lithgow and his cronies, a ridiculously convenient confluence of events enable this wonder dog to save the day.
Benji plays almost like an after school special. With less art. It's barely a movie, really. Visually, it's so utilitarian that it's almost invisible. The script is virtually translucent. It's like having 85 minutes of family friendly dog content liquefied and hooked right to your veins. As much as I love dogs (and I do very very much love dogs), watching them do normal dog things is objectively not that exciting. They must have known how boring the content could be to begin with, so I find it puzzling that the filmmakers didn't do more to spice it up. Specifically with the use of music. Considering how little of the $500,000 budget is evident on screen, they must have spent most of that money getting
Charlie Rich to sing the theme song. Which was received fairly well. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. The
hot track in question, entitled "I Feel Love", won the Golden Globe in the same category. So it's not like they didn't have decent music to work with. And while many of the dog/dogs frolicking in the glowy 70's sunlight scenes have soundtrack in them, a surprising number of them do not. There is a very long (too long) sequence where Benji is running around a police station trying to get someones attention that uses no music what so ever. In this way, it can be hard to gauge exactly how the movie wants you to feel about things. A lot of it ends up feeling like an after thought. No wonder every distributor in Hollywood turned this movie down.
When people saw the moving image of a train pulling into a station for the first time, they dove out of their chairs for fear of injury. They hadn't been trained to understand moving pictures yet. We as movie audiences have learned to react to a pretty specific set of techniques and ques in film. These have grown and changed with time, just as we have. So it stands to reason that modern audiences might react to older films differently than the audiences those films were originally aimed at. We no longer culturally resemble the target audience of films from the 10's and 20's, for instance, so it's not surprising that very few films of that era endure in current popular culture. Obviously there are exceptions to that rule. It's those exceptions that, with the aid of true artistic vision, helped set the tone for the future.
Benji is not one of those exceptions, and it has not aged well. Particularly in the area of pacing. This movie moves a glacial speed. Well, realistically, that's an insult to glaciers. They more or less got where they were going in only 15 thousand years, a jaunty sprint in comparison to the passage of time in
Benji. I'm not exaggerating when I say that nothing happens for the first 30 minutes. The most exciting thing to then happen is our boy dog hero meeting a cute girl dog. He then does the same things he did in the first 30 minutes, just with another dog around. This thing takes it's damn sweet time going nowhere. It is infuriating. Or it would be, if it didn't also suck out one's will to live. I'd have been angry with it if I wasn't so fucking bored. I think this, in addition to lazy film making, is indicative of how audiences and their expectations have changed. We don't have the same patience we used to. Thanks Michael Bay.
I don't know who the first person to say "Hey, what if the protagonist in this story was a dog?" was, but I think they deserve a fucking medal. Sure,
Benji isn't a great example of what this four-legged trope has to offer, but it is credited with reinvigorating the genre. We previously had stories, and later movies, like
Old Yeller and
Lassie (a personal favorite), but even those centered around human relationships with each other. The dog character acted as more of a mirror or catalyst for human feelings. But it was with movies like
Benji that we got used to the idea of a more anthropomorphous live action dog character. One that has human-like thoughts and feelings that it expresses in a, um, doggy style...sorry. After the massive success of this movie (made on a budget of $500,000, it made close to $45 million, a nearly eight fold return), it became an even more
successful franchise. There are 9 movies in total, not including the 2018
remake. It helped make way for classics like
The Adventures of Milo & Otis (1986), the
Beethoven franchise,
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), and perhaps most famously, the
Air Bud franchise. There are other movies that are better technically or more iconic in the realm of "dogs in movies" (like
Marley & Me (2008), or
The First Time A Movie Made Me Cry Into The Family Pet). But these are prime examples of an animal being the principal protagonist in a movie where the human characters occupy only supporting roles. It's kind of nuts to think that this formula worked, and worked
so well. But I suppose that these emotionally sophisticated dog characters' interpretation of the world resemble that of the children the movies are aimed at. Also, dogs were the first animals we successfully domesticated (about 15,000 years ago), so no wonder we feel so connected to them. They're
magic.
Benji isn't a classic worth revisiting in full. I don't recommend you go out of your way to watch it. Unless you're having trouble sleeping. Then definitely check it out. I even think most kids would be bored by it now. That being said, it is a bench mark for a very financially successful chunk of Hollywood movies. What can I say? People love a good dog. After all, we're only human.
***
I didn't have anywhere to put this in the article, but please do yourself a favor and read
this short Wiki page about the original dog who played Benji. It's really sweet and nice. Also, if you're wondering where the animated dogs movies are, I felt that part of the genre deserves it's own article. So don't worry. We'll get there eventually. Thanks for reading, ya filthy animals! See you next week.
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