Gone to the Dogs (1939) User Reviews

Wallace bows out in so-so style!

[JohnHowardReid · 6/10 · 13 January 2007]

Gone to the Dogs starts off in high gear when two gorillas get loose in Taronga Park Zoo. Despite poor process work, this opening sequence comes across as quite amusing and gives us a comedy promise for the rest of the movie that is unfortunately never realized, or even approached. Even such a sure-fire stratagem as the haunted house episode is disappointingly muffed, and the climax, whilst displaying an astonishing improvement in the process work, is likewise mishandled, even though it anticipates similar antics by Abbott and Costello (in Keep 'Em Flying) by several years.

All the same, the idea of partnering the diminutive butterball Wallace with tall, beefy John Dobbie makes for a delightful contrast (a bright idea that Billy Wilder was later to use in Kiss Me Stupid when he partnered Ray Walston with Cliff Osmond).

However, Gone to the Dogs offers one great compensation in Lois Green. She's a beauty! And her foot-tapping title song is reasonably well staged. (Alas, this is her only movie appearance).

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 5 July 2022]

This British B musical farce is basically an extremely overlong short, nearly an hour and a half in the listed running time and thankfully just over an hour in the print I got, discovered while researching films from the movies greatest year, 1949. Like Kermit the frog said while singing in "The Muppet Movie" about rainbows, there are just too many, and that big production number in the middle of the film here comes out of nowhere, there's no purpose and goes on too long even though the tune itself is catchy. But in practically every musical I've watched, out of the blue comes the song with a rainbow theme, and nothing that has stood the time of 1939's Oscar winning song.

This film features a comedy team of George Wallace and John Dobbie, a fourth rate Laurel and Hardy, bumbling zoo employees who have to deal with an alleged talking dog, a fake haunted house and an unbelievable group of crooks. The humor is the type that back in the day pre-teenagers would laugh at, but the type of gags that today gets sneers. I've seen the going on in the haunted house in other films, and so much funnier. The upside down room however is an original idea, but this comedy team doesn't have but likeability of other comedy teams of this period. The big ugly black mass that Wallace and Dobbie makes and gets chased around because of is just plane odd. A comic film that became instantly dated, or probably back then already past its sell by stamp.