Best in Show (90 mins, 12)
Directed by Christopher Guest; starring Guest, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban
Dogs have, as it were, left their mark on numerous milestones in the history of cinema. The first significant British movie is Cecil Hepworth's technically accomplished six-minute Rescued by Rover (Rover was a collie), made in 1905. Until the coming of sound, Warner Brothers were kept solvent by films featuring the German shepherd Rin Tin Tin, most of them scripted by Darryl Zanuck, founder of 20th Century-Fox. A little later, the Yorkshire collie Lassie (dubbed 'Greer Garson in Furs') became a major star at MGM, and from Pluto to 101 Dalmatians, dogs have always played a leading role at the Disney studio.
Movie dogs have usually been man's best (sometimes only) friend, as in De Sica's Umberto D. Occasionally, though, they're his worst enemy - in Stephen King's Cujo, for instance, and Sam Fuller's White Dog, which distributors rejected because it featured a canine racist. Dogs have brought disparate people together (the homophobic Jack Nicholson and his gay neighbour in As Good as It Gets), and have helped solve crimes (Nick and Nora Charles's schnauzer Asta in the Thin Man films; Tom Hanks's giant watchdog in Turner and Hooch) and been the victims of murderers (Hitchcock's Rear Window).
Before this column attracts the comment: 'Enough four-footed-friend flicks - Ed', let me proceed to the film that caused my mind to scamper down memory lane, the consistently funny Best in Show . It's directed and co-scripted by the American comedian Christopher Guest, who co-wrote and passed himself off as the English rock musician Nigel Tufnel in This is Spinal Tap. Like Spinal Tap, his new film is a spoof documentary, in this case about competitive dog owners, though in Best in Show we don't get to meet the film's supposed makers, and only when talking direct to camera do the participants show an awareness of being filmed.
As documentaries do, the film follows five couples from different social strata and different parts of America, all of them credible grotesques, and all treating their pets like the children they never had, and probably never will have. Christopher Guest himself plays a North Carolina backwoods store owner, who has a bloodhound and counts as his hobbies hunting, reeling off lists of nuts, and ventriloquism.
Next up the social scale is a lower-middle-class couple from Florida, with a tiny Norwich terrier; the husband (Eugene Levy, the film's co-author) quite literally has two left feet and is constantly being made aware of the raunchy past of his wife (Catherine O'Hara). From Illinois comes a yuppie couple (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock), both lawyers and in therapy along with their weimaraner bitch dog that's been traumatised by seeing them have sex.
New York contributes a pair of outrageous Cage aux Folles-style gays, the leading hairdresser Stefan Vanderhoof (Michael McKean, another Spinal Tap alumnus) and his lover Scott Donlan (John Michael Higgins), who dote on two fluffy little shih-tzus. Top of the social scale, but tackiest of all, is the gold-digging Sherri (Jennifer Coolidge), who's married a senile Pennsylvanian multimillionaire, but is on the brink of a lesbian affair with the expert dog handler (Jane Lynch), who cares for Rhapsody in White, Sherri's champion poodle. Guest never runs a scene too long or lets the actors (who improvised a lot of the material) step out of character.
The hearts of all five couples are set on their dogs winning the best in their class, then going on to get the blue riband for 'best in show' at the annual Mayflower Dog Show, which has, we're persuaded, been held in Philadelphia since 1875. Here we meet another splendid collection of characters - the prissy descendant of the show's patrician founder, the manager of the coliseum where the event is staged and, most amusingly, the toffee-nosed manager (Ed Begley Jr) of the hotel where the dog owners traditionally stay. He's very tall and on meeting him the gay hairdresser remarks: 'You make me feel like Alan Ladd on Easter Island.'
The film sends up the conventions and clichés of Hollywood competition movies - the sudden crises, the inexperienced dog handler forced to take over at the last minute, the rejection of the overweaning and the little guy turning up trumps. But what makes the show so splendid is the arrival of two new figures, a pair of TV commentators, one a reserved Englishman, Trevor Beckworth (Jim Piddock), who knows everything about canine competitions, and the other an extravagantly vulgar American, Buck Laughlin (Fred Willard), there to flaunt his ignorance as a representative of the people. The movie provokes steady smiles and chuckles from its opening moments, but the exchanges between Trevor and Buck produce loud laughter.
Best in Show is gentle satire, more at the expense of the absurdity of human life than this particular doggie subculture, which it views with affection. Only occasionally does it sting or draw blood. The astonishing thing is that apart from the hotel manager's little lecture on hygiene, there are no jokes about dogs peeing or defecating.
This is unlike every dumbed-down Hollywood picture you see nowadays, not to mention Robert Altman's Prét-à-Porter , which in satirising the fashion business chooses to have as its chief running gag people stepping in dog shit.
