Monday, January 8, 2018
373 - The Black Stallion, United States, 1979. Dir. Carroll Ballard.
Shipwrecked. Or Stranded.
The Odyssey. The Tempest. Gulliver's Travels. Robinson Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson. Lord of the Flies. And Then There Were None. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Gilligan's Island. The Blue Lagoon. Cast Away. Lost. Life of Pi. Swiss Army Man.
Horse Racing.
Sporting Blood. A Day at the Races. You Can't Buy Luck. Home in Indiana. National Velvet. The Story of Seabiscuit. The Rocking Horse Winner. The Galloping Major. April Love. The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit. International Velvet. Phar Lap. The Horse Whisperer. Seabiscuit. Flicka. Dreamer. Secretariat.
These are two of the most popular topics ever turned into stories. I have listed only a few examples of each. There are many more.
What if you create a story combining both?
Walter Farley published the novel The Black Stallion in 1941. It was so popular that he wrote twenty more novels, the last one with his son Steven, over the course of the next 48 years. Steven has continued the series, adding at least ten more novels since his father's death.
Alec Ramsey rides with his father on board the ship Drake , returning from visiting his uncle in India. His father is gambling with the diverse group of international travelers on board. Rather than betting with currency, each man uses whatever trinkets of value he has in his possession--from gold coins to jewels to a pocket knife to an iron miniature of a horse.
Alec goes to see his father, but his father is busy with the poker game. So he goes up on deck, where he watches some Arab men trying to contain a wild black stallion that is travelling on board the ship. Alec smuggles sugar cubes with him from the rom below. Later when the horse is contained and in his stall, Alec sets the sugar cubes on the window sill where the horse can eat them. The horse does. The horse and the boy bond.
Alec's father is lucky. He wins it all. That night in their room they divvy up their winnings. The knife and the expensive things for dad. Some gold coins and other trinkets for Alec. And the miniature iron horse. The horse's name is Bucephalus.
Dad tells Alec the story of Bucephalus. The horse belonging to Alexander the Great. The most famous horse of all time.
Then the fire comes.
And the ship sinks.
And Alec finds himself on an island with the horse.
What follows is what makes the movie.
Long stretches of shots without dialogue and without much cutting where a boy and a horse get to know one another. Their physicality and their chemistry is real.
The island, filmed in Sardinia, Italy, has such clear water that in at least one shot from high overhead you can watch the undertow moving out beneath the incoming tide.
In the second half of the film, Alec bonds with former jockey Henry Dailey, who becomes his mentor and father figure. The two bond and together help each other as they try to turn the wild horse into a racehorse.
* * * * *
Carroll Ballard was a cameraman who directed his own short films. He worked Second Unit Photography on Star Wars (1977), and two years later directed his first feature.
Caleb Deschanel is the cinematographer. You may know him as Zooey's dad. He has had a long and distinguished career and has been nominated for five Oscars. His work includes The Right Stuff (1983), The Natural (1984), parts of Titanic (1997), Message in a Bottle (1999), Anna and the King (1999), The Patriot (2000), and The Passion of the Christ (2004). He is currently working on Jon Favreau's CG version of The Lion King (2019).
Dailey is played by the legendary Mickey Rooney, himself a veteran of horse movies, including Down the Stretch (1936), Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937), Stablemates (1938), Out West with the Hardy's (1938), and of course, the great classic National Velvet (1944) alongside Elizabeth Taylor. After The Black Stallion, Mickey Rooney would go on to star in Lightning the White Stallion (1986), and even later, Lost Stallions: The Journey Home (2008).
Mickey Rooney may be the most prolific movie star in the history of Hollywood. With credits from 1926 to 2017, he starred in two of his own series as a child and young--Mickey McGuire and Andy Hardy--and was for awhile the biggest box office draw in the world. According to the guides at Disney World, Mickey Mouse was named after Mickey Rooney. (If you try to look it up, you will find stories trying to refute it, mostly because Mickey Rooney repeated the story himself. But the official tour guides at Disney World state that Mickey Mouse was named after Mickey Rooney. That would seem to be a good source of information.)
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