Pound (1970)

Summary

Dogs at the pound wait to be adopted.

Director

Robert Downey Sr.

Downey Factor

Low. One line in one scene.

Character

A puppy at the pound.

Looks

Five years old.

Performance

Full of childlike wonder. No really, it's sort of adorable.

Line

Got any hair on your balls?

Cast

Elsie Downey, Allyson Downey

Connection

Allyson Downey (sister) in Up the Academy and Moment to Moment.

Elsie Downey (mother) in Greaser's Palace and Moment to Moment.

Robert Downey Sr.'s Hugo Pool, Moment to Moment, Up the Academy, Rented Lips, America, Too Much Sun, Greaser's Palace, in The Last Party, Johnny Be Good and Sr..

RDJ Says

It almost seemed like life was kind of making a movie and kind of being a kid, at the same time because my folks were mostly underground kind of counterculture it wasn't like I saw later on like my friends like Jason Bateman who literally grew up in the high end multi camera TV show stuff, our stuff was always weird so there was something that felt outsider-ish about it ... Dad got a grant to make a film about dogs. He said it would be more realistic if he could have actors interpret what the dogs were feeling. So one guy had on a silk robe, and he was a boxer. And another guy had short hair, and he was a Chihuahua. I was a puppy who gets adopted by this bald guy ... Pound is about how everyone's basically waiting to die. [My father takes] kind of a dark comedic attitude toward very real issues that some people don't even touch on ... I played a dog in a pound. We were all going to get gassed unless we got taken, so that was our motivation! It was a real art piece ... I couldn't understand why we had to shoot scenes over and over. It was disconcerting and rather boring ... [A crewmember on The Shaggy Dog] came up to me and said, "I used to baby-sit you when your dad was making Pound. I know what it was like back then." And he handed me the slate from Pound which was the first movie I ever made, and it said 3/17/70, so it was literally like 35 years ago. It looked like something the art department had come up with to look like a period collector's item, like Sotheby's from The Fortune. So lately there's been a whole sense of closure.

Availability

Very hard to find. Not released on DVD. There are some clips of it in the documentary Johnny Be Good and Sr.

2 Reasons to See It

1. You've always wanted to know what dogs were thinking.
2. The cutest little film debut ever.

Overall

A rare and obscure '70s art film that briefly features Downey as a small boy.

If You Liked It

You might also like Greaser's Palace (1972), Lethargy (2002)

Photos

Video