Dan Owen (Jason Robards sr) is the foreman on the construction site
building the Colorado Reclamation Dam, and of course the dam's owner's
(Wilfrid North) daugher Marcella (Virginia Brown Faire) is his sweetheart
... but the dam's first technician Sturgeon (Richard Santschi) secretly
works for the competition and does everything to sabotage the project,
like unexpectedly opening the floodgates on the valley below - and only
the dam's guard dog Satan (Rin Tin Tin) closes the floodgates again just
in time (ho0w he has learned which levers to pull and puch to do just that
is beyond me.
Sturgeon quickly realizes that both Owen and Satan are in the way of
him destroying the dam, so he tries to chase them down ... but the two of
them fall into a well and disappear from the surface of the eart - which
is good because Sturgeon now can't find them, but not so good because now
they are at the bottom of a well, and it's not all that easy to get out
...
Only eventually does Satan make it out and deliver a warning message to
Marcella, but by that time, Sturgeon and his crooks have already taken
posession of Nanette, Satan's girlfriend (also a dog, in case you
wondered) and used her to track him down - so Satan is on the run again,
while the message he has delivered to Marcella is of little use since she
has become Sturgeon's captive.
Ultimately, Owen also makes it out of the well, and he and Satan
finally right a few wrongs, with Owen defeating Sturgeon in a hand-on-hand
fight while Satan saves Marcella's life and once again closes the
floodgates Sturgeon has opened again - even if that meant he had to
sacrifice Nanette's life who he couldn't save when the baddies threw her
into the water in heavy chains destined to pull her to the ground because
he had to fulfill his duty.
But wouldn't you know it, in the end Nanette has survived nevertheless,
and Satan is made honorary member of the police (hence the title, Tracked
by the Police) ...
I have to admit, I never really liked films about wonder dogs, and I
thus didn't really like this one. So maybe I'm just an old cynic, but a
dog that knows exactly just which levers to pull and push to close the
floodgates of a dam, this just stretches belief way beyond breaking point
- especially the second time Rinty has to do it but the villain has
renmoved all the levers and Rinty finds a work-around in less than five
minutes ... I mean come on, even I wouldn't have been able
to do that in that short a time, and I'm not a dog.
But even apart from Rinty's amazing technical skills, the film seems to
be way too dog-centered, with the human drama invariably taking back seat
- to a point where certain subplots are discontinued at all -, but maybe
I'm not really the best person to judge that, being anything but a
dog-lover. Some of the action on and around the dam itself is quite nice
though ...
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