Duty and the Beast

Alec Geiss directs a look at the hunting dog, his devotion to food and his tendency to protect partridges and sandwiches from all who would assault them in this funny Columbia cartoon.

This was from the period when Dave Fleischer was in charge of Columbia's cartoons. He didn't last long -- no one did -- but it looks like he ran the shop on the same lines as when he was directing cartoons for his brother Max: cram as many gags into the cartoon as possible, and there will be something for people to laugh at.

It works here. Director Geiss is another of the under-documented talents in movie cartoons, but for a few years in the 1940s, he directed some funny ones at Columbia. He lived until 1975, 77 years, and must have done something else. The record remains stubbornly blank.