The early sound era of film was like the Wild West when it came to making movies. It was into this experimental milieu that a series of short films that used all-dog casts was produced between 1929 and 1931.
Professionally trained canines were the stars of the “all-barkie” Dogville Comedies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the nine shorts as parodies of Hollywood’s hits. The films were shot with silent film and dubbed over with human speech, utilizing the voices of the creators Jules White and Zion Myers, as well as their colleague Pete Smith. According to Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of UCLA’s film and television archive, it is likely that other contracted MGM actors and actresses also lent their voices to the films, although none of that work was credited.
To a modern viewer, it can be hard to tell who the audience of these films were. It might seem like a canine cast is best suited for children, but the plots were often mature, featuring adultery, murder, and even cannibalism.
So how did these films come to be made? To understand that, one must also understand the way the studios were operating in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this era, shorts would play before a full-length feature. They were primarily produced by independent companies and distributed through the studios. As the popularity of the shorts grew, studios brought on some of those independent producers to develop in-house work.
In 1929, according to film historian Rob King, MGM hired Jules White and Zion Myers to organize their new short subjects department. White had close connections in Hollywood. In King’s recent book Hokum!, he writes that Jack White, the older brother of Jules, was a top comedic shorts producer who helped Jules secure work as an assistant film editor before being recruited by MGM. A young Myers began working at Universal as a secretary in the early 1920s, when his sister Carmel was a rising silent film star. One of his co-workers there was Irving G. Thalberg, who would go on to become a legendary figure in American filmmaking. When Thalberg became an executive at MGM in the 1920s, Myers was able to secure a job at the company as a shorts director.
The Dogville shorts started with 1929’s College Hounds, a parody of Buster Keaton’s College that features a huge doggie football game. The next film was Hot Dog, about a murder in a seedy cabaret after a jealous husband finds out his wife has been cheating on him. The subsequent films all had equally punny names. There was the murder-mystery Who Killed Rover? and a Broadway parody called The Dogway Melody. Those were followed…
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