The Voice of Bugle Ann

Although I was only 9 years old at the time, this film somehow left a deep impression on me. Certainly not because it was the first I'd seen — I had been watching films for several years by then. No, it was the feeling generated in a kid's heart . . . anyone who loved dogs would have felt it, I'm sure. I don't even remember much else about it. Just the baying of that lonely, doomed animal, Bugle Ann, caught in a steel trap on a foggy night. I don't even recall the details around it. They found her the next morning (Lionel Barrymore in one of his more moving scenes) when it was too late. It was a rare film, in those days, that left me feeling worse when I left the movie house than when I went in.

(Of course, the impression might have been solidified for me when I discovered that the girl I eventually married had also been deeply saddened by this film — one of HER earliest film memories, and that was in the late 1940s when we talked about it.)

I do wish I could see a re-issue of it.