There seems to be some imperative at work in British cinema that dictates that all family movies have to be created in a vacuum that denies the existence of the past 60 years of British history. But in Lassie, a new film adapted from the same 1940s novel as Lassie Come Home in 1943, the nostalgia for a class-bound bucolic England has got a little out of hand. The film is dogged with clichés, from the bluff Yorkshireman grafting in t’pit to put bread and dripping on the table for his family to the arrogant eccentric aristos who care more for their beasts than they do for their servants. It’s like a feature-length Werther’s Original advertisement.

The coal mine has closed and the Carraclough family have barely a pair of clogs to rub together. Regretfully, they decide to sell the only thing in their possession that is worth a bean — their lustrous-furred, miraculously self-cleaning collie Lassie. The dog has other plans, however, and pulls off a series of daring escapes from her new home in the kennels of the local toff (a frail-looking Peter O’Toole).

Lassie returns time and again to the side of Joe, the Carraclough’s young son and the heart of this film thanks to a wonderful performance from nine-year-old Jonathan Mason. He’s that all-too-rare commodity, a child actor with next to no self-awareness.

His blithely unaffected performance highlights the shortcomings of some of the adult actors. In particular, the usually impressive Samantha Morton, playing the harried wife and mother Sarah Carraclough, seems ill at ease in a role that offers her little to work with bar a shapeless pinny and a bag of clothes pegs. Kelly MacDonald gets five minutes screen time as a dog-loving Glaswegian, and Nicholas Lyndhurst briefly incurs the fearsome wrath of Lassie. There’s also a fleeting and utterly bizarre cameo by the Loch Ness Monster.

Inoffensive and sentimental, Lassie is well-meaning but just not in the same class as the family films of the Forties and Fifties that it is so obviously trying to re-create.

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