HEART OF A CHILD is a middling children's adventure film of 1958, made interesting by some solid character actors in support and one or two more contentious elements in the story (including a violent interlude you wouldn't expect from this material). The setting is the Austrian Alps in 1918, where a shortage of meat leads to a farmer selling the family St. Bernard to the butcher for sausages! Of course, the tousle-haired son of the family isn't having it, and a small-scale journey adventure plays out from there. It's ordinary stuff and not particularly engaging, although the animal star is inevitably good value and Donald Pleasence gets to play a different kind of villain.
Review of Heart of a Child
