Can you guess the movie from its first and last shot?
The answer once you scroll down is after the jump...
That's Fred MacMurray and screen son (and shaggy friend) in Disney's The Shaggy Dog (1959). MacMurray had an interesting double-career, playing morally questionable men in adult-oriented dramas and noirs, while also playing loveable dads in movie comedies and sitcoms.
The Shaggy Dog is one in a long but sparsely populated subgenre of lycanthropic-adjacent movies that aren't horror films but fantasies or comedies in which a person shapeshifts into an animal. The Shaggy Dog later had a sequel in The Shaggy D.A. (1976) in which MacMurray's character's son (now grown up) starts transforming again. It's now streaming on Disney+.
I was randomly thinking of these movies the other day when I wondered what was happening with an upcoming Searchlight film called Nightbitch, directed by the very talented Marielle Heller, in which six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams plays a frustrated stay-at-home mom who is possibly turning into a dog? It's in Post Production now. It sounds quite risky but Marielle Heller's directorial career has been bangers only: Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), and the filmed Broadway show What the Constitution Means To Me (2020). On the side she's also a quietly excellent actress --see her shouldabeen Emmy nominated work in The Queen's Gambit as the protagonists complicated mom.
Have you ever seen the Shaggy Dog movies? Are you looking forward to Nightbitch?