The Humpherys Family

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A Dog of Flanders

Record Added: 2/1/2017
 
Movie Genre Family, Musicals Country   Netherlands
A Dog of Flanders is a superb tear-jerker, filmed on location in Holland and Belgium in 1959, but set in 1900. It stars the then twelve-year-old David Ladd as the orphan Nello and veteran actor Donald Crisp as his elderly and infirm grandfather. Although devoted to one another, they live a very poor life selling milk from a hand cart they pull around Antwerp. Nello is an artistic, intelligent and sensitive little boy who wants to paint like his idol, Peter Paul Rubens, but he has no money to enable him to study or to buy proper materials to paint with.

They find a badly treated dog, left to die at the roadside by his heartless owner and take him home and care for him. Because he's been so badly treated, it takes time for him to accept them as his friends. But eventually, they gain his trust. Nello names him Patrasche...the name that Rubens had given to his dog...and he becomes part of the small family, even pulling the cart when grandfather is unable to do so any more.

One day, Nello has just finished a sketch of the old man dozing in a chair outside their one-roomed hut and goes to show him the finished drawing. But he cannot awaken him and slowly, he comes to realise that his beloved grandfather is dead. Completely bereft and unable to keep up the rent on their home, Nello and Patrasche are evicted by an uncaring landlord in the middle of winter and just before Christmas. Somehow, they have to learn how to survive without his grandfather in a harsh and bitter world. Patrasche gives Nello the hope to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.
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