Disney: Lady and the Tramp (1955)

As with most Disney movies, I'm not exactly sure when I became aware of Lady and the Tramp since the studio's movies have been a part of my life as far back as I can remember. Now having said that, I want to clarify that I didn't grow up with this movie. What I meant was that I'm unsure exactly when I became aware of Disney's individual films if I didn't grow up with them. I saw a little bit of Lady and the Tramp at some point during my elementary school years (in fact, I saw it while I was at school and it may have been around the time the film was re-released on video in 1999, which would have been when I was eleven years old). I knew of it before I saw that little bit but I wouldn't see the entire film until I got the Platinum Edition DVD in 2006 when I was sixteen. Funny story about that DVD. I bought it at Downtown Disney at Walt Disney World in Orlando. I tried to get it from a dispenser machine that had DVDs in it. It had a rotating rack of DVDs in it and you put your change in, you had to push the button the minute you felt you could get it. I wasted so much change trying to get that DVD (it didn't help that the machine came with a voice that would say, "So close!" every time I lost) and I eventually had to buy it at one of the shops. Of course, by the time I sat down to watch it, I pretty much knew the story and about certain scenes (the spaghetti scene, obviously) as well as that it was supposed to be one of Disney's sweetest films. My thoughts on the film are the same now as they were then: it's pretty good. It's not one of my absolute favorites from Disney but it's a charming, well-made little film.

It's interesting that I saw a fan-made music video on YouTube that set scenes of the film to Billy Joel's Uptown Girl because that's pretty much the story of the film. If you put aside the fact that the characters are dogs, the film becomes the ageless tale of two people from completely different social classes falling in love. There's actually two plots. The other is the world and lives of humans as seen as through the eyes of dogs and how a beloved pet would process its owners having a new addition to the family. You see Lady from when she comes into her owners' family as puppy to when she grows up into their dearly loved pet, has to deal with their expanding family, and ultimately how she finds love in the most unlikely of places. It also doesn't hurt that the story is told with a lot of grace and skill.

One thing that makes Lady and the Tramp unique among Disney's library of animated features is that it's one of the few that is an original concept, not based on a fairy tale, folklore, or a book as most of them are. There was a novelization of the film but it was made in conjunction with it. The production team combined an original idea from story man Joe Grant and a short story by writer Ward Greene. Greene would eventually write another novel that would become the primary basis for the film's story but it was written while the story was being developed and was released two years before the film was finished in 1955. So while there is a novelization basis for the film, it was created as the story was being developed at the studio so it can safely be said that Lady and the Tramp is an original creation of the Disney Studio. The film's three directors were Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson, who worked on a lot of the studio's cartoon shorts and who were on a veritable role at the time, having directed Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan back to back before collaborating again on Lady and the Tramp. While this would be the last film Jackson would direct, Geronimi and Luske would go on to direct together again on One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Geronimi would also go on to be one of the four directors on Sleeping Beauty and Luske would direct the enjoyable Donald Duck educational film, Donald in Mathmagic Land.

In my opinion, Lady is the true main character of the film. She's the character you see grow from a playful pup to a prim and proper full-grown cocker spaniel. You're with her right from the first real scene of the movie and there are few scenes throughout that she's not part of. What I like about her is that even though she's from a wealthy family, she's not snobbish in the least. You sort of get the sense that she doesn't think about social classes or anything like that and just sees other dogs as equals. She has only scene with Tramp before the two of them grow close but she doesn't look down at him at all. Even so, she does have her lady's honor and feels betrayed when she discovers that she was the latest in a long line of girlfriends that Tramp has had. You also see her having to deal with her beloved owners not being able to spend much time with her due to their newborn baby and her growing fond of him as well. I think some may feel that she learns about the enjoyment of the free life of the "unleashed" dogs but I don't think so. She may enjoy her evening with Tramp but she's clearly not too fond of the streets and while she does admit to Tramp that a life in the countryside without fences or houses does sound wonderful, she loves her family and can't leave them. Plus, the posh, highly cultured life is all she knows. So I do like and sympathize with Lady as a character. If I have one complaint, it's Barbara Luddy as her voice. I'm not knocking the performance, mind you. The performance is sound. The thing is that Luddy was almost fifty at the time and she sounds a little old for Lady, who's supposed to be less than three dog years old by the end of the film so therefore, she should sound relatively young. I guess they had trouble finding a young woman who could sound as classy and graceful as Lady is supposed to be and while it's not that big a deal, I tend to forget that Lady is supposed to be rather young.

Whereas Lady comes from the cultured side of town, her eventual beau Tramp is a carefree bachelor of a dog who loves life without a leash. He enjoys going wherever he pleases, eating whatever he wants, chasing chickens, outwitting the dog catchers, and being a playboy with all the female dogs. He's also quite cynical when it comes to the bonds between dogs and humans. He considers the whole "man's best friend" concept to be a complete joke. In fact, when he's telling Lady what effect the birth of the baby will have on her life, he says he's the "voice of experience", suggesting that he once had a family but was booted out when said family had a kid, which would explain not only his life on the streets but also why he doesn't buy into the whole owner thing. Tramp later tells Lady that he visits a different family every day of the week, mainly just to get food, and says that, "none of them have me." While you could see that as him simply commenting on not being anybody's pet, he might also be saying that he doesn't get close to any family in order to not be hurt again. (And yet, you also have to question that because Tramp looks like a mutt and, therefore, was probably born on the streets. When he says he's the voice of experience, he could simply mean that he's seen it happen to other dogs and that's why he's content with being nobody's pet.) Whatever the case with Tramp, he tries to show Lady (whom he calls "Pigeon" and "Pidge") what he considers to be a real dog's life and even after their romantic night together, when Lady wants to go home, he doesn't try to keep her for himself like he could. That's the endearing thing about Tramp: there's a heart of gold underneath the rascal. He saves Lady from some vicious dogs, helps her get a muzzle off her face, and comes to her aid, despite her being angry with him, to save her owners' baby from a hideous and terrifying rat. While he has had many girlfriends before, you can tell that he does generally care about Lady and wants to make her happy. I thought Larry Roberts did a good job at voicing Tramp. He plays the cynical side of the character not as emo and dreary but simply as someone who finds others who follow the adage of man's best friend to be both amusing and naive, unable to believe that they don't see it for the joke that he sees it as. He also excels at playing the charming, street-smart side of the character. If I have one problem with the Tramp character at all, it's that I don't get why he suddenly changed his mind and became another pet for Lady's owners. I guess you could say that it's because he's decided that Lady is the one but even so, would he really be willing to give up the free life? I just wish we could have had a scene where we see him make that decision based on his feelings for Lady. Oh, well.

Lady has two friends in her part of town: Jacques, a Scottish Terrier and Trusty, an old bloodhound. Jacques (voiced by Bill Thompson), is one wily, slightly tempermental little dog. My favorite moment with him is when they first meet Tramp. Both Jacques and Trusty take an instant disliking towards the mongrel and I love when Jacques has finally had enough of Tramp and tells him off: "We've no need for mongr-r-rels and their r-r-radical ideas. Off with you now! Off with you! Off with you!" Tramp replies, "Okay, Sandy." The response: "The name's Jacques." "Okay, Jacques." "Heather Lad of Glencairn to you!"That's just great. Trusty (voiced by Bill Baucom) is a charming old bloodhound with a Southern accent. He used to be one of the best bloodhounds ever but, according to Jacques, has lost his sense of smell in his old age. He manages to get it back at the end when he and Jacques have to search for the dog catcher carriage with Tramp. He's always referring to his grandpappy Ol' Reliable and there's a running gag throughout the film where he's trying to quote Ol' Reliable but never gets a chance to. When he finally does at the end of the movie, it turns out he forgot what Ol' Reliable used to say. Best thing about the both of them is that they're dependable, honorable guys who really care for Lady. Not only do they try to cheer Lady up when she's down about her owners acting strange towards her when they're expecting their baby, they also try to protect her honor by offering her "marriage" (whatever that means to dogs) after they hear what happened between her and Tramp (more on that later). Like I said, they also attempt to save Tramp from the dog catcher when they discover he's been blamed for something he didn't do, They do succeed but Trusty pays a heavy price, namely a broken leg. Speaking of which, Trusty was supposed to die at the end and you can tell. The image of him underneath the carriage's wheel and Jacques shedding a tear and howling is clearly meant to suggest that he's dead. However, Walt didn't want to go through the controversy that happened with the death of Bambi's mother again and so they changed it to where Trusty was only injured. I'm glad Trusty didn't die but it's odd to have a scene that's meant to be mournful and then have Trusty be alive in the following one.

There isn't much to say about Lady's owners, Jim Dear and Darling (Lee Millar and Peggy Lee) since they're not important to the plot. All you know about them is that they seem to be nice, decent, upper class people although I have to question their parenting skills seeing as how they go off on a trip and leave their practically newborn child behind with a babysitter (maybe it was an important trip but we never get an explanation for it). Still, Darling was having second thoughts and felt that she should probably stay. Speaking of which, my favorite scene with the couple is when Lady curiously walks into the baby's room while Darling is singing to him. She tries to get a good look at the baby but has trouble and finally Jim Dear picks her up so she can see him. The look on Lady's face when she sees the baby, the closeup of her wagging tail, and the two humans petting their beloved pet is as heartwarming as you can get. You can't tell me you're not touched by that scene.

There are some villains in this film but they're not major. I wouldn't call Aunt Sarah (Verna Felton) a villain per se. She means well but she's a real busybody who clearly doesn't like dogs and the way she treats Lady (throwing her out of the baby's room, putting a muzzle on her) can make you dislike her. According to Jim Dear, she did send them some dog treats so maybe she learned that Lady and Tramp weren't bad dogs. Her cats, Si and Am (both voiced by Peggy Lee), on the other hand, are definitely villains. They're just two slinky little troublemakers who do what they please when they emerge from Aunt Sarah's basket, which includes attempting to eat the family canary and goldfish, steal the baby's milk, and, most loathsome of all, make it look as if Lady damaged the living room and attacked them, which results in Lady being muzzled. They're only in that one scene but it was enough for you to despise them. (I'll discuss the other villain of the piece later.)

The rest of the side characters are actually testaments to voice acting as most of them are voiced by just two or more people. The most memorable, despite her only being in two scenes, is Peg, the sultry female dog modeled after and voiced by Peggy Lee. You just got to love her sexy voice and her crooning over Tramp in her signature song He's a Tramp. The beaver (Stan Freeberg) that Lady and Tramp encounter in the zoo who helps remove the muzzle from Lady's head can definitely be seen as a predecessor to the character of Gopher in the Winnie the Pooh films and TV shows with his whistling speech patterns (which Freeberg created by using a real whistle). Not much else to say about that character other than he's a gullible little guy who inadvertently finds a use for Lady's muzzle after he removes it. George Givot voiced the brief character of Tony, the Italian cook who brings Lady and Tramp their spaghetti dinner and proceeds to serenade the two of them with his deep, operatic voice. Bill Thompson really gets a chance to show off his voice acting skills here. Besides Jacques, he also voices Bull, the English bulldog; the Irish policeman outside the zoo; Dachsie, the dachsaund who's trying to dig his way out of the pound; and Joe, Tony's assistant cook. One last character I have to mention is Boris, one of the dogs that Lady encounters while she's in the pound. He's not worth mentioning because of his importance (he's only in that one scene) but because of who voiced him: Alan Reed, who would become the first voice of Fred Flintstone. There's some interesting animation trivia for you.

As with most of Disney's animated features, the actual design and look of the film is very well done. While the exact year is never made clear, it's obvious that the film is set some time around the turn of the century. I think I've heard that the look of the town was based on Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri and it's fitting since Walt was born in 1901 along with the 20th century so why not base this movie's setting on it? (Who knows, maybe Jim Dear and Darling's baby is meant to be Walt in a strange way.) It's also interesting in that this was the first animated feature to be filmed in Cinemascope, a decision that was made while it was already in production, forcing the artists to extend the backgrounds (in fact, it's the widest film Disney has ever produced). Also, since a lot theaters at the time still weren't properly equipped to show a Cinemascope movie, that led to there being a fullscreen version of the film as well as the widescreen (I can't think of another animated movie where you have to choose the format you want to watch on the DVD).

As I said, the other plot of this movie is the world of humans as seen through the eyes of dogs. First, the dogs are convincingly animated and move like real dogs (the animators studying dog movements really payed off). They've got the normal movements, the threatening gestures, the wounded movements, the sad movements, etc. They've got everything down pat, helping to remind us that the characters are still dogs despite their being able to talk. Second, the artists decided to keep the film entirely at a dog's perspective. Everything is at a low angle and the human characters' faces are almost never seen. It's not something you automatically process when you first watch the movie but when you hear about it in the supplemental features and go back and watch it again, you see that it does click. Finally, and best of all, there's how dogs process the lives and habits of humans. There's the fact that Lady's owners are simply known as Jim Dear and Darling. This is meant to keep with Lady's point of view. Since she lives with them and that's all she hears them call each other in such an intimate setting, that's what they are to her. Of course, the most obvious example is the subplot with Lady dealing with the coming of Jim Dear and Darling's baby. Being young and naive about the habits of humans (or the mating habits of all creatures, in general), Lady doesn't know what to think when her owners begin acting rather coldly toward her. Jacques and Trusty, who are more experienced with but still not entirely informed on the manner, give Lady their own "birds and the bees" talk. Naturally, they don't go into the details (probably because they don't know them) but they do their best to describe what a baby is to Lady. You also see Lady observing the consequences of the various stages of Darling's pregnancy: trying to decide when the baby will come, Darling developing weird cravings and sending poor Jim Dear out into the cold to satisfy them, their friends having a baby shower for them, and finally, Jim Dear being an overly excited father when the baby does come, seeming like a lunatic to Lady. All of this makes Lady decide to find out what a baby is to herself, leading to that heartwarming scene with the baby that I mentioned earlier.

One thing I admire about Disney is that they make family-friendly pictures while still injecting some more adult material into their films (or they used to, anyway). Lady and the Tramp deals with two adult matters. First, while the film is light-hearted most of the time, it doesn't sugarcoat the darker aspects of the world of dogs. Lady is chased by some very fierce looking dogs and Tramp comes to her aid. We see most of the ensuing fight in shadow but the implication is that it's fairly brutal. When Lady is in the pound, she and the other dogs see, in shadow, a dog being taken into a room whose door says KEEP OUT. When you see that and hear the dogs call it the "One-way door", you know exactly what's going on: Nutsy, the dog in question, is going to be euthanized. You don't need to see anything else. Also, there's this hideous rat that Lady chases off at the beginning of the film but comes back near the end when Lady is tied up and sneaks into the baby's room. First off, that rat was originally intended to be comical but the end result is not funny in the least. It's a very frightening creature in that it's kept mostly in the shadows and all you mainly see are its yellow eyes, shining teeth, and slinking movements. The scene where Tramp goes inside the house to kill the rat is very moodily designed, with a lot of shadows and a storm raging outside. The actual fight between Tramp and the rat is fairly intense and while you don't see Tramp ultimately kill it, you do see Tramp come limping out from behind the curtain where he finished it off and lick his paw, indicating that the rat managed to injure him. Let's also not forget that circumstance lands Tramp in the dogcatcher wagon and Jacques and Trusty have to save him from being euthanized for something he didn't do and also that Trusty seems to be killed in the chase, even though we see that he wasn't. The movie may be light-hearted for the most part but it doesn't forget that a dog's world is very perilous.

The movie also doesn't gloss over the sexual side of romance. Lady and the Tramp, even though it's done very subtly, is quite a sexual film when you look into it. Let's start with Lady and Tramp's romantic night out. That spaghetti scene has become iconic as one of the most romantic scenes in cinema and for good reason. You really can see these two characters, particularly Lady, falling in love and it leads to them having their own night on the town. Walt himself even admitted that the fadeout from the two of them sitting on the hill in the park to the next morning with them sleeping next to each other is meant to imply that they made love. While I don't try to look for the supposed subliminal stuff in Disney flicks (mainly because I think a lot of it is a bunch of crap), if Walt himself said it then it must be true and even if you didn't know that, you can't deny that the implication is very strong. That's also why Lady feels dishonored when she hears about all of Tramp's past girlfriends, since she's the only one he did it with and why Jacques and Trusty propose marriage to her. They're trying to protect her honor in the dog community. Some may say that the night between Lady and Tramp is what led to the birth of their puppies that you see at the end of the film and that the reason those dogs that Tramp saved Lady from were after her was because she was in heat (which makes sense) but I'm not so sure. This is supposedly taking place in April or May, some time around there. If Lady got pregnant from her night with Tramp, that would mean that their puppies would have been born around July since the gestation period for puppies is typically two months. Going with that logic, I doubt those pups would have looked that young around Christmastime where the film ends. So you could argue that the puppies were probably conceived after Tramp was accepted into Lady's family and that Jacques and Trusty were tying to protect Lady's honor not because she was pregnant but because she had lost her virginity. Of course, the production team probably wasn't looking that deep into the movie and I could be thinking about it too hard. Still, there's no denying the fact that Lady and the Tramp is a very romantic film in more ways than one.

Lady and the Tramp is also a bit different from other Disney animated features in its songs. The film is a musical but in the traditional sense in that there are only a few songs that are actually sung by a character. The rest are either sung by an omnipresent chorus or, interestingly, in a character's mind. Besides voicing many characters in the film, Peggy Lee also wrote the songs along with Sonny Burke and collaborated with Oliver Wallace on the film's actual score. Lady has a really sweet theme that signifies her grace and innocence as well as her energy. Of course, there's also the romantic parts of the score during their date as well as the suspenseful music that plays whenever the rat is on-screen and in the fight between it and Tramp in the baby's room. When Jacques is first introduced, he hums and softly sings a modified version of a Scottish folk song called Loch Lomand. Most of the actual songs are also sung by Peggy Lee. The most obvious is He's a Tramp, sung by the character Peg that was modeled after Lee. That really is an enjoyable song simply because it's so sultry and sounds like something you'd hear in a bar. Lee also sang the Siamese Cat Song and had the odd task of doing a duet with herself since she voiced both cats. While she gave both cats the same voice, it does work and feel like a duet and compliments the evilly mischievous nature of the cats, even if some of the lyrics don't make sense (they intend to make the goldfish drown?). La La Lu, the sweet lullaby that Darling sings to her baby is, as I've said before, a very heartwarming melody and I feel fits with the love between a mother and her newborn child. The most surprising fact about the songs is that What Is a Baby?, the song sung by Lady in her head, is also performed Lee but I could have sworn that that was Barbara Luddy singing it. There's nothing else that special about the song other than it proves that Lee was quite an adept mimic. Everyone remembers Bella Notte (This is the Night) since it accompanies the most famous section of the movie. As I mentioned earlier, George Givot's deep, Italian baritone really sets the mood and so does the chorus that sings the rest of the song. There's also Peace on Earth, sung by Donald Novis and a chorus, which bookends the movie as does the Christmastime setting it's heard in (the film started at Christmas with Jim Dear giving Lady to Darling and it ends at Christmas with Tramp having become a new member of Lady's family).

Lady and the Tramp may not be one of my absolute favorite Disney animated features but I do enjoy it and understand why it's so loved. It's a simple, sweet little love story with loveable characters, a nice setting, memorable songs, and it's not afraid to subtly address the more adult side of romance as well as the dark part of dogs' lives. Since it's set around the turn of the century, it also takes us back to a simpler time when the world wasn't quite so corrupt and cynical (as Walt probably saw it when he was growing up around that time). If you've never seen it, I would highly advise checking it out, particularly with a loved one this Valentine's Day.