The man behind it was Joe Camp, a Dallas-based commercial filmmaker who had never made a feature before. Camp had grown frustrated with the glut of low-quality family films flooding the market and set out to make something different. What resulted was a live-action story told almost entirely from a dog’s perspective, with the camera riding just four to eighteen inches off the ground.
He wrote, produced and directed it himself, filmed it in and around McKinney and Denton, Texas, and when no studio would touch it, he formed his own distribution company, Mulberry Square Releasing, to get it into theaters. A promotional vehicle carrying the star and his trainer toured more than 60 cities with as many as eight appearances a day to drum up audiences.
The dog at the center of all this was a mixed-breed mutt named Higgins, a scrappy combination of cocker spaniel, poodle and schnauzer who had been pulled from the Burbank Animal Shelter in 1960 by veteran Hollywood animal trainer Frank Inn. Inn, who also trained Arnold the pig on Green Acres and worked on Lassie, recognized something in the shaggy little dog immediately.
Higgins spent six seasons playing the nameless “Dog” on Petticoat Junction, appearing in roughly 149 episodes, before Inn retired him after the show ended. When Camp came looking for a canine lead, Inn initially resisted (the dog was elderly by then), but a few tricks later, Camp had his star. Benji would be Higgins’ final performance, and his best.
Camp stacked the supporting cast with familiar faces from television. Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show) and Edgar Buchanan (Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction, where he’d worked alongside Higgins for years) both appeared, and both retired from acting shortly after.
VIDEO | Benji’s theme, “I Feel Love”
The film opened in Dallas in May 1974 and spread from there, landing third on Variety’s end-of-year box office rankings, just behind The Godfather Part II. Its theme song, “Benji’s Theme (I Feel Love),” written by Euel Box and performed by country singer Charlie Rich, won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song and earned an Oscar nomination.
Higgins was too old for the sequel by the time Camp was ready to make it. For the Love of Benji followed in 1977, with Higgins’ daughter Benjean stepping into the role, a pattern that continued through Benji the Hunted in 1987. A 2004 entry, Benji: Off the Leash!, starred yet another shelter dog Camp had found. Joe Camp’s son Brandon directed a Netflix reboot in 2018.
The franchise’s roots in shelter adoption carried real cultural weight, with the American Humane Association crediting the original film with spurring more than a million additional shelter adoptions in the years after its release. Camp, who died in 2024 at 84, had made his point with the first one — a G-rated movie about a stray dog could hold its own against anything Hollywood had to offer.
The vintage photos and materials gathered here capture the world Benji stepped into in 1974, from the film’s original promotional imagery to the small-town Texas settings that gave it its look and feel.
VIDEO | Benji movie trailer
- Ron Moody (Actor)
- Joe Camp (Director)
- Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
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‘Benji’ Don’t be ashamed — Just have a good cry (1974)
From the Palm Beach Post (Florida) June 3, 1974
Okay, so you’ve got to be semi-insane to own a dog in the first place, and somewhat more so before entertaining any notion of seeing a movie about one.
Yet if you qualify on either count, go see ‘Benji.’ You may be the type who gives lead slugs to thirsty panhandlers and takes delight in foreclosing mortgages on widows with 9 kids, but you’ll find yourself by turns hearty of laugh and damp of eye in this film. You may even realize that your reaction is utterly unfounded and even silly, but you’ll react all the same. If you’re semi-insane, anyway.
Producer-director Joe Camp may well be right in saying that “Benji” is the first film in which the animal is the star and the humans are the props. Benji, played by Frank Inn’s incredibly well trained Higgins, is a very independent stray mutt who has taken a number of Texas townspeople into his circle of friends. Chief among them are a pair of youngsters whose dad wont permit a dog in the house, Benji drops by each morning for breakfast, though.
The story itself isn’t anything you haven’t heard or read someplace before — the kids get into trouble and Benji gets them out of it — but the way in which Camp tells it is delightful.
Though he risked the wrath of the rationalists in doing so, Camp arranged matters so that Benji becomes a conduit for feeling. Opinions will be loud and varied, but any knee-deep-in-fur dog owner knows that the family hound does have a personality and does have feelings. If you doubt it, just study his reaction the next time you’re visibly incensed at his behavior.
What Camp has done, in effect, is to simultaneously extend those reactions a bit, and then compress them into a single dog.
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But who cares what the rationalists are rationalizing anyway? “Benji” was made with the sole intention of providing clear-cut entertainment, and this it does mightily.
If you’re able, try to pry yourself away from some of the credibility-straining things Benji does and imagine how they were filmed. There is a tremendous amount of technical artistry hidden within this film, artistry which many “serious” movie-makers would do well to study and emulate. There is a smooth and even flow to the action, an uncanny sense of how suspense is developed (even when the outcome is foreordained), identification of the good guys and the bad guys.
Now when was the last time you could say all of that about a movie everyone in the family could get into?
If it will make you feel any better about the whole thing, tell your next door neighbor that you had to go with the kids to see this dumb dog movie because you can’t trust the oldest brat to bring home the youngest brat. You can write off the laughter as any sane adult’s reaction to the patently absurd, and other visible indicators of feeling can be attributed to popcorn salt on the eyelashes.
After all, if otherwise sane people pay perfectly good money to watch dogs chase an ersatz rabbit, why should you bridle at paying to see one who feels that cat-chasing is a matter of honor, and is a good actor to boot?
Benji: Dog ‘star’ to retire (1974)
From the Palm Beach Post (Florida) June 3, 1974
Miami Beach — The star looked calm and relaxed and thoroughly at home in his penthouse suite at the Deauville Hotel. One of his aides mentioned that the lifelong veteran of TV and film was actually feeling under the weather — a touch of a sore throat, nothing more — but like most pros he wasn’t permitting it to interfere with his interview schedule.
The penthouse at the Deauville is a long way from the animal shelter in Burbank, but Higgins has made the journey fith style. Fifteen years ago animal trainer Frank Inn ransomed him from the sound, gave him his name and his first square meal, and asked him the canine equivalent of “Say, kid, howja like to be in movies?” The rest is history.
“Benji,” the first movie to be made by newborn Mulberry Square Productions, is Higgins’ farewell effort. After nine rears on CBS’ “Petticoat Junction,” not to mention his other credits, he’s ready for a comfortable retirement. The Hollywood rumor mill says he plans to sleep late every morning, eat well, spend some time dictating his memoirs, and keep fit by treeing cats.
Even though he admits to an occasional discomfort on account of his advancing age, he’s light-years away from purchasing a plot at Forest Lawn.
“You wouldn’t believe the way that dog wore us down,” says Joe Camp, producer-director-writer of “Benji.” “There was one scene which called for him to walk slow and dejected down an alley, and we had to run him around the block any number of times before he’d slow down enough. The rest of us were exhausted just trying to keep him in sight.”
(For those who might wonder about Higgins’ welfare during the grueling 12-week shooting schedule, a representative of the American Humane Association was always present. Moreover, the AHA has presented its “Patsy” award for outstanding performances to Frank Inn’s animals more than 40 times.)
“‘Higgins’ is the most dynamite dog I’ve ever seen,” Camp went on. “When I dreamed up the original idea for ‘Benji, everyone — including some pretty famous trainers — told me that the picture couldn’t be made, that I was asking for the impossible, that a dog couldn’t do the things I’d specified except in an animated cartoon.
“Frank (Inn) wasn’t sure about it himself in the beginning, but pretty soon everyone involved with the picture found out that they could stretch themselves beyond what they thought were their capabilities. And Higgins — well, there wasn’t a single thing he wasn’t willing to try.”
While the star took a business-as-usual attitude during the location filming in McKinney, Texas, everyone else had to feel their way along. Camp and his crew had long experience with turning out commercials for television, but this was their first crack at a feature film.
“We even had to design new support gear for the cameras,” says Camp. “The standard do’lies (carriages) are set at a height for photographing people, but we had to come up with something so that we could shoot at eye level — about eight inches off the ground — at roughly 30 miles an hour.”
Camp says that, in the past, films about animals have actually been films about people with animals added as props. “I think we nay have been the first to reverse the order, because the people are the props in ‘Benji.’ This is why we didn’t try to attract any big-name actors.”
While the producer has been discoursing at length on the trials and tribulations of film-making, the star has remained polite but somewhat silent — his sore throat, remember. It’s clear, however that the morning’s doings coupled with his indisposed condition have fatigued him. Slowly he cruises the room from his over stuffed club chair to the sofa where trainer Inn has been seated. Higgins climbs up beside him, rests his chin on the trainer’s knee, and while Inn absentmindedly holds the proffered paw in his hand, the movie star and the star-maker both doz off for a moment.
Yes, it’s good to retire after making one last knock-’em-dead picture.
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Benji Call Home VHS movie cover
For the Love of Benji – Vintage View-Master reel cover
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