The Black Stallion (Omni Zoetrope Productions, United Artists, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 9) my husband Charles and I watched The Black Stallion on Turner Classic Movies. It was a film I’d avoided when it was new because stories about children bonding with animals bore me because they’re almost always too rankly sentimental. The Black Stallion began life as a children’s novel by Walter Farley in 1941 – though the film takes place in 1946, five years after the book’s publication. It starts on a passenger ship which is carrying as cargo a mysterious black stallion, played on screen by a real-life Arabian horse named Cass-Olé (who actually gets listed in the credits), who’s wild and untameable. The central human character is Alec Ramsey (Kelly Reno, who was 13 when he made this film even though I got the impression the character was supposed to be about nine), who’s traveling on the ship with his parents (Hoyt Axton and Teri Garr – TCM was showing the film as the last in a three-movie tribute to her). We see dad involved in a high-stakes poker game which he apparently wins. Then the ship gets wrecked in a storm and dad and the other poker players conveniently die, and Alec ends up shipwrecked on a deserted island off the coast of Africa with only the horse for company. Alec frees the black stallion from the ropes that have got tangled in the rocks, and the stallion saves Alec’s life when a cobra is about to attack him by stepping on the snake, thereby dispatching it. The first half of The Black Stallion, directed by Carroll Ballard from a script by Melissa Mathison (three years before she co-wrote E.T.), Jeanne Rosenberg and William D. Wittliff, is actually quite beautiful. There is virtually no dialogue – the first half of The Black Stallion is practically a silent movie, or a “sound film” in Sergei Eisenstein’s definition (one which would contain no dialogue but would use music and sound effects to heighten the emotional impact of a story) – just a stunning set of images, well photographed by Caleb Deschanel, as the boy tames the supposedly untameable horse and the two bond.

Unfortunately, the second half of The Black Stallion, which takes place after Alec and his mom (who survived the shipwreck) return to the U.S. and the titular black stallion comes with them, turns from the sublime to the, if not quite ridiculous, certainly the clichéd. Alec and the horse run into a long-retired trainer named Henry Dailey (Mickey Rooney) and also a Black milkman, junkman or some sort of proletarian who needs a horse-drawn cart for work, named Snoe (played by another 1930’s veteran, Clarence Muse), and Dailey conceives the idea of training the black stallion to run in a horse race against the world’s two fastest horses as rivals. At least director Ballard deserves credit for getting a relatively understated performance out of Rooney – not since Rowland Brown successfully toned him down in the original footage for the 1936 gangster film The Devil Is a Sissy before he got fired from the film and his replacement, Woody Van Dyke, let Rooney chew the scenery as usual, had a director got him to calm down, and Rooney won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for this. But from its sublime first half The Black Stallion degenerates into the usual stuff of movies: we know in advance that the black stallion, with Alex as his rider, will stage a dramatic come-from-behind victory and win the big race. That duly happens, though either Ballard or his writing committee dissolve from the race just as it’s reaching its climax to show us unnecessary flashbacks to Alex riding “Black” (the name the stallion races under) on the African desert as they were first getting to know each other. That’s a suspense-killer if there ever was one!

The second half of The Black Stallion does have a few good moments, notably the grim scene in the jockeys’ weighing room. One of the weirder rules of professional horse racing is that the horse must carry exactly 120 pounds; if the jockey is heavier than that, he or she can’t ride, and if he or she is lighter, the judges put extra weight on the horse to bring its burden to 120 pounds. We see a scene in which a jockey (presumably for another race on the card) weighs 118 pounds and the judges insert two pounds’ worth of lead weights just under the saddle. Then Alex comes along and he only weighs 75 pounds, though it’s not at all clear what they do with him. The scene reminded me of the controversial chapter in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Seabiscuit that described the weird diet regimens, including purging themselves, that jockeys in Seabiscuit’s day engaged in. Hillenbrand gave an interview for the paperback edition of Seabiscuit in which she said many readers have criticized her for including that chapter, but she felt it was very important to describe what terrible ordeals jockeys put themselves through for the privilege of riding. And The Black Stallion also reminded me of the exchange involving Allen Jenkins from the 1938 film Going Places in which one of the other characters looks at the super-horse from that film and says, “There ain’t nothing on four legs that can beat that horse.” Jenkins’s character replies, “Yeah, and there ain’t nothing on two legs that can ride ‘em.”

Francis Ford Coppola is listed as “executive producer” of The Black Stallion, though it’s unclear what his role was. At least the film was made by Coppola’s company, Omni Zoetrope, in association with United Artists, and Coppola’s dad, Carmine Coppola, supplied the music (a bizarre assemblage of tracks from various genres; at one point the accompaniment to the African scenes was nothing but Latin-style drums, and I joked, “It’s a good thing there’s a samba school nearby”) The Black Stallion is an O.K. movie overall, its stunning first half all too evenly balanced by a quite ordinary and even banal second half, though it was a big enough hit to merit a sequel, The Black Stallion Returns (1983), with Kelly Reno repeating his role four years later at an age when those four years matter big-time. We see so many shots of Reno topless and wearing just skimpy shorts, intercut with so many scenes of various wild animals, I joked, “This film is both kiddie porn and animal porn!”