As he entered his teenage years, former child actor and Our Gang trouper Jackie Cooper required new stories that reflected his looming maturity. Paradoxically, home studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer looked ahead by reaching back to Cooper's first starring role in a feature film. In Paramount's Skippy (1930), the then 8 year-old actor had played a pampered physician's son who befriends a mangy mutt from the wrong side of the tracks and spends the duration of the film attempting to keep his four-legged pal from the clutches of the local dog catcher; in Tough Guy (1936), Cooper is the pre-teen son of Robert Warwick, a self-made man whose disdain for the family dog (Rin-Tin-Tin, Jr.) compels the boy to hit the road as a runaway. When Cooper and his German Shepherd companion fall in with a gang of crooks, one of whom (Joseph Calleia) takes an avuncular shine to them, Tough Guy begins to play out like a pencil sketch for Captain's Courageous (1937), complete with a climactic act of self-sacrifice that serves to reconcile father and son. Scenarists Edgar Allan Woolf and Florence Ryerson were a successful screenwriting duo, best remembered for their work on the screenplay for Metro's The Wizard of Oz (1939). Less well-remembered is that Woolf (who also wrote dialogue for Tod Browning's Freaks [1932]) died tragically in his Beverly Hills home in 1948 after fracturing his skull in a fall caused by tripping over his own dog.

By Richard Harland Smith