[5][6] St. Clair had demonstrated skill in handling animals in two-reeler comedies for Mack Sennett Studios before directing Rin-Tin-Tin for Warner Bros. His 1919 Rip & Stitch Tailors and The Little Widow featured Teddy the Dog, a clever canine who engages in domestic duties and misadventures.

The movie was delivered ahead of schedule, in compliance with producer Jack L. Warner’s dictum, “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday.”[8] Film critic Charles S. Sewell in a Moving Picture World review of the film provided fulsome praise for The Lighthouse by the Sea, based on the “thrilling stage melodrama” by Owen Davis.

Conceding that some of canine hero Rin-Tin-Tin’s “stunts” are “rather implausible,” Sewell declares that the picture “remains a melodrama of unbridled and primitive emotions…played up to the utmost.” [9] The battle between uncooperative inanimate objects and humans featured in Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith (1922), and co-directed by St. Clair, is revisited in Lighthouse By the Sea.

Here the contest pits Rin-Tin-Tin against the temperamental mechanisms of the lighthouse, which the insightful canine masters and in turn serves to advance plot development.

Film historian Ruth Anny Dwyer describes the picture as “an amalgam of a Keaton-like obstreperous machines and one of St. Clair’s intelligent dogs.”[10] As a melodramatic action-adventure, the scenario is reduced to a manichean formula: Good vs. evil, weak vs. strong, oppressed vs.

For her thirteenth birthday, the Jewish diarist Anne Frank watched this film from a rented reel with an early projection machine along with her friends who thoroughly enjoyed it.