The Black Stallion (1979)

Directed by Carroll Ballard

Our Film of the Week continues this week’s look at man and horse together, brains and heart, intelligence and "mood," meaning spirit, drive, noble striving, high passion but willing to be steered by reason. We don’t often feature a film made after 1969. One of the best of such, which might also have done for our film this week, was Chariots of Fire, again with that image of galloping horses, a film about the fire in the soul of two very different men, the patriotic Jewish Englishman, Harold Abrahams, and the Scots missionary, Eric Liddell. Abrahams has a grudge against the nation he loves so desperately, and Liddell is animated by his zeal for God, compared with whom all the nations, as he himself preaches from Isaiah 40, “are as a drop in the bucket.”

But I’m going with a film that makes me feel as if I’m a boy again, even though I’ve only been on a horse once or twice in my whole life. It’s The Black Stallion. It’s an unusual film, in that the most spellbinding part of it, a good fifteen minutes or so, doesn’t have any dialogue at all! That’s when the hero, a boy named Alec Ramsey, cast away on an island in the Aegean after a shipwreck that killed his father, befriends and tames, or I should write “tames,” a glorious Arabian stallion, jet black, as wild as a horse can be. That horse too is a survivor from the wreck, and Alec saw him on the ship, fascinated, watching while five or six Arab men, with their harnesses and their whips, tried by cruelty and brute force to tame the creature, and failed. Alec doesn’t fail — and when we see the boy on the horse, riding so swiftly along the beach of that island, of course without saddle or bridle or reins, it’s as much as we can do to keep to our seats.

Before the wreck, Alec talks to his Dad about what he’s seen, and Mr. Ramsey tells him a story about how King Philip of Macedon once had a horse nobody could tame, called Bucephalus. Philip gave up on the horse and ordered him to be killed, but all at once his son Alexander, still just a boy (notice that Alec bears the same name as the great conqueror), said, “Father, I can ride that horse!” And his father tells him that if he can do it, he can have him. So Alexander goes up to the middle of the arena where the horse stands pawing and grumbling, and all at once, “quick as a cat,” says Dad, “he jumped on his back and he grabbed that long black mane and away they went!” No question that’s on Alec’s mind, when he sneaks around on the ship to get close to the horse, and then on the island — whose adventures I won’t spoil for you, except to say that it’s no quick and easy thing for Alec to get the stallion, all power and freedom and fury, to trust him, and to be ruled by a boy he could stamp to death in a minute if he had a mind to.

Alec is eventually found by fishermen — there would be no film if he didn’t get off that island, after all. He insists that he won’t leave unless the stallion goes with him. And when he finally gets home, his mother (Teri Garr) doesn’t have the little boy she used to have. He’s a boy turned man, and he’s known a lot of that strange freedom of complete self-reliance, and so he doesn’t quite fit in at the local public school; it would be like asking the stallion to give pony rides. But he won’t give up the horse. And that means he has to find a stable for him, and that is how he meets a couple of old men who also love horses, an old black farmer, Snoe (Clarence Muse), and a retired jockey named Henry Dailey (Mickey Rooney). A jockey? Yes — Alec wants to race the stallion, because he is so fast, nobody knows yet how fast he can be.

Mickey Rooney, who could do everything in film and song and dance except, obviously, be a leading man, said that The Black Stallion was his favorite among all the films he’d ever done, and that’s saying something. I think that some of the best movies made after Hollywood’s golden age had passed feature little dialogue, but plenty of unstated or understated feelings, which can come across with all the greater power. There’s nothing showy or exaggerated in the canny advice that old Mr. Dailey gives to Alec about racing, nothing sloppy in their father-son kind of relationship, nothing flippant, no easy sneers at kids who haven’t had to learn to survive on a desert island, and the mother-son relationship is also intelligent and tender, even as Mom must yield to Alec’s high-hearted desire to enter that world of speed and danger. All that, and scenes shot in Sardinia! Can it get any better?

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The film is available now courtesy of Internet Archive.

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