The Plague
Dogs
(1982)
(SPOILERS) While
I’ve seen Watership Down many times
over the years, this is my first visit to Martin Rosen’s follow-up to Richard
Adams’ follow-up. I can see why it passed me by, since it misses out on almost
everything that makes its predecessor a confirmed classic. Where Watership Down casually observes the
destructiveness of man through the prism of the rabbits’ infrequent encounters,
The Plague Dogs wears his essential
cruelty on its sleeve. This might have worked if there was a story to tell, or
a glimmer of hope, but the circular, doom-laden narrative, set amid a grimly
unwelcoming Lake District, offers no respite, making for an over-extended,
laborious picture.
As such, The Plague Dogs is part of the tide of
despair informing British cinema during the 1980s, faced by the intertwining spectres
of Thatcherism and Armageddon. It’s noticeably there in the decade’s animations
(not that there were many UK animated features, but the ones that were, the
same year’s Pink Floyd – The Wall,
the wailing misery and gnashing of teeth (in a very restrained, conservative
manner) of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind
Blows, were fortified with unremitting bleakness.
The Plague Dogs carries that brooding dread throughout, most
starkly in its permanently overcast Lake District setting. The premise may
suggest the kind of escape to freedom from laboratory testing seen in Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (The Plague Dogs came out the same year
as the considerably lighter and more magically orientated adaptation The Secret of NIMH) but what it leads to
is closer to the futility of Edge of
Darkness. If parents wonder how Watership
Down escaped with a U certificate, there can be no doubt why The Plague Dogs received a PG; with its
swearing, bloody carnage (a man gets shot in the face at one point) and
unalleviated despondency, it might even have warranted a 15.
The chief
problem is not this gloom, but the complete lack of narrative propulsion once
Snitter (a fox terrier voiced by John Hurt) and Rowf (a Labrador voiced by
Christopher Benjamin, perhaps best known as Henry Gordon Jago in the 1977 Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang) have fled to the wilds. They embark on
an endurance exercise of sheep-killing, being chased, and chatting to a particularly
unpleasantly-rendered fox (James Bolam relishing his Geordie Reynard). Mostly,
though, the duo wander listlessly, oblivious to their inevitable demise.
Unlike Watership Down, where the animal
perspective and singular understanding of the world created a uniquely cohesive
vision, The Plague Dogs is punctuated
by voice-overs of the human side of the equation, searching for the two dogs
amid fears they may be carrying plague (they aren’t, but that’s to no avail
when it comes to the “necessity” of dispatching them). It’s disruptive, a
reminder that there’s no fuel in the main plot’s tanks, with the canines
unmotivated aside from their next meal. The counter of the days clicking by is
a further unwelcome reminder that the picture lacks focus.
Apart from
its overriding theme, of course. The animal testing is presented quite clearly
as an unnecessary cruelty (Martin Rosen may have said it wasn’t
anti-vivisection, but it would be nigh-impossible to come away thinking that).
At one point, a scientist comments of the experiment on Snitter that it is
based on “confusing subjective with
objective in the animal’s mind”, but he sounds unclear himself, other than
seeing the loss of the animals, and with them precious results, as a waste. Rowf, meanwhile, is shown being drowned and resuscitated in the opening scenes,
evidently a regular sufferance. Then there’s the monkey in the “pit of despair”
cut to at various points with see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil poses.
The picture
certainly doesn’t make things easy, offering no respite, and its verbalising of the contradictions within a dog's psyche is perhaps less successful than in it was in the land of lapins.
A hound acting an idiot one moment (dutifully approaching humans who may wish to
harm it), then articulating the dangers of the environment the next, creates
something of a schism. There’s also a sense that the unrelieved fatalism of
their lot is compounded by every incident; of
course Snitter accidentally puts his paw on the kindly gentry’s shotgun
trigger. As for their eating the corpse of the gunman, it’s presented as a pure
horror punchline, with no attempt on Snitter’s part to admit they know it would
be a very bad thing to do (but needs must).
Snitter,
his brain augmented, is very much the Fiver-esque visionary of the tale. Fox The
Tod ("Just a proposal, bonny lads") is the Keehar and Rowf effectively a Bigwig type; it’s surely no
coincidence that a leader and guide to safety, a Moses-Hazel figure, is absent.
Imagine if Keehar had been killed off in Watership
Down? Imagine if there was no comfort of a hereafter embracing these
creatures when they shuffle off?
The Tod may not be as winning, but the casual
sight of his corpse retrieved when the hunt is on for the dogs marks out
starkly that there can be no happy ending here. Apparently the final scene, in
which the two hounds swim through the misty sea towards “an island” (one does actually
appear in the credits), suggesting they are fated to drown out there, is closer
to the one first envisaged by Adams (in the book the dogs are taken in by
Snittter’s original owner). Whether or not that island is an intentional
glimmer of hope, the general tone of the picture tends to the negative, and it
would be difficult to conclude they make it to shore.
Rosen
imbues his picture with moments of tension (escaping the furnace, various
pursuits and escapes) but the film as a whole is unfortunately weighed down by
its heroes’ inertia. I commented that a two-and-a-half hour Watership Down could easily have been
made from the source material. The same could not be said of The Plague Dogs, which is overlong at
100 minutes. The film undoubtedly reverberates in terms of atmosphere and tone,
leaving the viewer with a sense of profound hopelessness and despair at the
idle machinations of man, but it ought to have been compelling with it.
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