Strongheart the German Shepherd Catapulted to Fame for His Heroics in Silent Films. Later, Spiritualist Writings Immortalized Him in Death

The beloved dog starred in six movies during the Roaring Twenties. After Strongheart died in 1929, author J. Allen Boone chronicled their enduring connection in a pair of nonfiction books

Strongheart “was kind of a Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger [type] action hero,” says film studies scholar Kathryn Fuller-Seeley.  Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Eliza McGraw - History Correspondent

In 1920, after years of searching for the right dog to star in their planned adventure film, movie director Laurence Trimble and screenwriter Jane Murfin met Etzel von Oeringen, a handsome German shepherd who’d trained with the police in Berlin and aided the German Red Cross during World War I before being shipped off to the United States. Agile and bright, the dog—soon renamed Strongheart—picked up nuanced commands quickly. These qualities made him ideal for a career in front of the camera, and in 1921, Trimble and Murfin formed a company specifically to make Strongheart movies.

The dog would go on to become a bona fide silent film star. He appeared in six successful movies and served as a predecessor to other canine celebrities like Rin Tin Tin and Benji. At the height of Strongheart’s fame, in 1925, German shepherds became the most popular dog breed in America. On screen, Strongheart played a wolf-dog, romanced a fellow pup and saved a man framed for murder. Decades after his death in 1929, the dog earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Fun fact: The first canine movie star

• Blair, a collie owned by British director Cecil Hepworth, is widely considered the first canine movie star.
• The dog appeared in Hepworth’s 1905 short film “Rescued by Rover.”

Because of his military background, Strongheart didn’t initially understand how to frolic. Instead, he was always waiting for a command. As Trimble wrote in a 1924 essay, he capitalized on Strongheart’s training to teach the dog how to have fun, issuing the command “play” to get him to romp and “swat it” to encourage him to bat at a rubber ball. Trimble used mirrors during these sessions to encourage Strongheart to avoid looking directly at him while they were filming, which would disrupt the movies’ verisimilitude.

Strongheart seemed to understand Trimble perfectly, evincing an almost uncanny communion with his human. “I merely have to feel and he does the expressing,” Trimble wrote in his essay. “Words have but little part directing him. The words I use are the ones best calculated that will call up into my mind sorrow, joy, peace or any of the other emotions, and he senses my mood.”

Strongheart’s first film, The Silent Call, was released in November 1921 and reportedly made $1 million at the box office. In the movie, the budding star shows strength and ferocity, drowning a human antagonist. “It was not only a fine picture but a triumph for this splendid dog,” noted the Film Daily in its review. In another film, The Love Master (1924), Strongheart showcases his preternatural abilities in a battle against death itself, placing his front legs on his sick owner’s shoulders and enacting “a fierce physical fight against something neither of the human watchers can see,” as one reviewer wrote.

The Strongheart films weren’t just movies for kids, says Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, a film studies scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. “In the silent era, animal features were for much broader audiences,” including adults and their children alike.

Roaring Twenties audiences loved to watch Strongheart save the day. “He was kind of a Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger [type] action hero,” says Fuller-Seeley. Most of Strongheart’s films are now lost, but his performance in The Return of Boston Blackie, a 1927 movie about a reformed thief, is available to watch on YouTube. (Neither Murfin nor Trimble was involved in this late-career production; a trade publication described it as a “dandy mystery drama with Strongheart doing his best.”)

Watching Strongheart, the viewer notices his beauty and strength. To modern audiences, the human actors in silent films might seem to be overdoing it a bit. But the dog’s actions and responses make sense. Strongheart bounds alongside his human companion, and his eyes sparkle, especially when he looks up toward the camera.

In one scene in The Return of Boston Blackie, the canine hero finds himself in a fun house full of distorting mirrors. He barks at his elongated reflection and checks behind a mirror, seemingly looking for the other dog. Strongheart also dives off an amusement park ride into a pool of water. Later, when ensnared in a net, he barks at an encroaching fire before freeing himself and trying to open a door with his paws. Surrounded by flames, the dog spies a broken pane of glass in a window and jumps through, shattering the glass and racing to bring an enemy down, biting his arm and barking out an alarm. The pair tumble on the ground as the man tries to push Strongheart away. Police escort the villain off, and an intertitle appears on screen, describing the dog as “the guardian who had really been on the job.”

Strongheart found fame in the era that created the celebrity machine seen today. “There were stars before the 1920s,” says Marsha Gordon, a film studies expert at North Carolina State University, “but this was the decade that the movie studios mastered the art of movie star promotion.” As she explains, studios signed actors on long-term contracts and invested heavily in marketing. Fans, in turn, requested pictures and autographs, “sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of letters a month,” Gordon says.

Strongheart signed autographs with a paw dipped in ink. He and his mate, a fellow German shepherd dubbed Lady Julie (also referred to as Lady Jule), appeared on screen together in The Love Master. In 1923, a reporter “interviewed” Strongheart at “his own ranch, nestling at the foot of Mount Hollywood,” where the dog “roams, proud of his family, friends and possessions—king of all he surveys.” Another caught up with him and Lady Julie when they made an appearance at the 1924 Westminster Dog Show in New York City. “Of course, I have always felt that I belonged to my public,” Strongheart “told” the reporter.

As he grew older, Strongheart appeared in fewer films. Fellow German shepherd Rin Tin Tin, whose film career extended to some early “talkies,” became a big star for Warner Bros. and eventually eclipsed Strongheart in the public consciousness. In 1929, Strongheart burned his leg on a lamp on a movie set. The burn became cancerous, and he died that June at either age 11 or 13. “The first dog actor of the screen died yesterday at the home of his owner and friend, Jane Murfin,” wrote the Associated Press in an article syndicated by newspapers across the country. As a Seattle Star reporter reflected, “The lot of dogs is better because Strongheart lived, embodying those qualities of affection, loyalty and honesty that are creditable in a human. He grew old in the harness and, I hope, passed on to a just reward.”

Strongheart went on to star posthumously in another body of work: the writings of author J. Allen Boone, who’d met the dog’s owners in Hollywood and ended up caring for him at times. The two got along well. As Trimble had noticed during his own work with the dog, Strongheart seemed almost able to read minds. Once, Boone was writing with the dog at his feet when he decided to quit for the day to go hiking. Strongheart appeared with his jeans, boots and walking stick.

Boone was a Spiritualist, subscribing to the idea that the living could communicate with deceased humans and animals. The author’s 1939 nonfiction book, Letters to Strongheart, and its 1954 sequel, Kinship With All Life, shared his conviction that he could still reach his canine friend. Both books “have been reprinted many times and remain classics of the Spiritualist faith,” noted Fuller-Seeley and colleague Jeremy Groskopf in a 2014 essay.

“Let others believe you are dead if they desire; that is their privilege,” Boone wrote in Letters to Strongheart. “But I want no part of it, for as far as I am concerned, you are just as vitally alive and just as much the ‘old pal’ now as ever. It could not be otherwise. I know too much about the expanse of the real you.” Throughout, Boone signed each letter to the dog with the closing line “I’ll be seein’ you.” To at least one reader, he signed a copy of the book as from himself and Strongheart.

What made readers respond to Boone’s missives to the departed dog? “The practice of Spiritualism dropped in popularity after the 1920s,” says Emily Suzanne Clark, a religious studies scholar at Gonzaga University, “but the general ideas behind it did not at all.” Figures like Harry Houdini had criticized Spiritualism, and by the mid-20th century, Americans attended fewer Spiritualist events. Still, Clark says, “the ideas of the movement remained strong in the popular mindset. Namely: There is a spirit world beyond this one, and it benefits both us and spirits to be connected. With the Great Depression and then World War II, people looked for stability. The spirit world connection could provide that.”

Boone’s enduring affection for Strongheart resonated with readers. In 1941, a newspaper columnist noted that Letters to Strongheart had “run through four editions and seems just now to be falling into its stride.” In 1950, the Washington Evening Star mentioned the writer-actor duo in a trivia question: “What American author addressed a series of letters to a dog after its death and earned an international reputation by doing so?” In 1954, when Boone released Kinship With All Life, a reviewer noted, “Before we knew of his relations with the dog, his writings seemed more or less corny, to use a slang term. But now, when he explains his experiences in detail, we can judge his feelings better.”

The idea of Strongheart as a kind of exalted being—cinematic hero or spiritual muse—is of course person-designed and person-centered, from delighted film audiences to Boone’s readers, who gained exposure to a new kind of animal-human connection. The dog “was my pal,” Boone wrote in Letters to Strongheart. “He still is my pal. Circumstances sent him into my individual mental world of awareness, and as long as he got in there and added so much to it, I shall take precious good care that nothing shoves him out again.”