Adapted from a best-selling Israeli novel, Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog is a historical melodrama that hits its emotional marks with the subtlety of a pit bull. The film raises questions about how much we value animal life over human life and cheap caricatures over sensitive dramatization. Yet as often as the movie plays like the most manipulative TV product, it’s fairly effective, that is if animal lovers are willing to overlook the human overacting.
The film opens as a litter of German Shepherds is born in the apartment of a Jewish family in a time and location that a title card doesn’t specify beyond “Germany 1930s.” One pup takes a shine to the boy Joshua (August Maturo), but the family can’t keep them all, so they take them to the park in the hopes of finding the others a good home. Roth’s script gets too obvious pretty quickly, as a stern Aryan type comes along asking if the dogs have their papers. ”How do I know it’s pure German?” he demands.
Joshua’s parents are devout Jews, but the children are less respectful of tradition. Before an important guest comes over, Joshua smears a matzo on a piece of roast meat; later, when town merchants increasingly put up signs declaring No Jews, Joshua’s sister asks their mother, “Why can’t we just become Catholic?”
One of the final blows—at least, according to the dramatic structure—is when Nuremberg laws forbid Jews from owning pets, forcing the family to give away Kaleb without the children’s knowledge. When the parents break it to Joshua, Roth has Maturo overplay the scene hysterically; the young actor seems perfectly capable of expressing a quiet grief, but boy does he overdo it, and he’s not the only one subject to such broad direction.
Fortunately, the overheated tone leads to some vivid villains, as if mere Nazis weren’t enough. When Kaleb is given away to a new family, the stern Greta (a deliciously campy Lois Robbins) becomes his new worst friend. “How could you get us a Jewish dog,” she barks at her more sympathetic husband. Kaleb soon loses his pep and quietly broods, leading to the film’s first flashbacks, memories of puppyhood and good times with Joshua. Here is when Shepherd’s strange purpose kicks in, and the viewer realizes they’re watching a Lassie movie set during the Holocaust.
Kaleb’s new home situation comes to a head when Greta finds that the dog has torn up her favorite chair; her rage, of course, segues to a furious rainstorm, and Kaleb runs away, only to come back for one more chance. When the dog finally leaves for good, he looks for Joshua and his family and learns that their apartment is occupied by new tenants. What happened to his family?
You know what happened, and you know there’s an improbable reunion and rescue to come, but not before Kaleb gets sent to the pound, is recruited by Nazis and is trained to round up Jews, a task at which the dog becomes quite adept. When the Nazi dog trainer Ralph (Ken Duken) scowls at the camera, there’s a quick cut to Kaleb looking thoughtfully towards him, loyal to his new master but also mourning the loss of his canine moral compass. The dog feels shame—unlike the film, which shamelessly plays the audience like a pet store violin.
Shepherd walks a precarious tonal tightrope. Should a Holocaust movie be this campy? Is it appropriate to recount such suffering through the story of a boy’s love for his dog? And with such cartoonish villains? Still, Roth navigates this emotional (and inevitably literal) minefield with blunt skill. When Ralph hires Joshua to take care of the animals and warns him that he will be shot if he steals a crumb of food, it dramatizes the central conflict: are we more sympathetic for the animal than for the boy? The question is answered indecisively in the form of an alternately harrowing and tacky melodrama.
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