The Red Pony Blu-ray Review
A boy and his horse.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 22, 2013
The name Roy Harris may not mean much to many of you who don't have a lot of familiarity with 20th century American
music, but Mr. Harris was one of the most respected composers of his era who unfortunately often found himself
standing
in the rather overwhelming shadow cast by Aaron Copland. Both men came along at about the same time and both
sought
to
invest classical music with a more American "vocabulary", but Copland's immediate accessibility made him the critical
darling while Harris' sometimes thornier compositions weren't quite as inviting. I had the distinct privilege of being
invited
to participate in a Master Class Harris gave late in his life with his brilliant pianist wife Katherine and it is with great
chagrin
that I confess I actually had the audacity to ask the great man about never quite seeming to be able to emerge from
Copland's all encompassing effulgent glow. Mr. Harris quite kindly and laconically responded with a brief, "Aaron wrote
some great music". Mr. Harris was no doubt attempting to be civil to an inelegant question being posed to him, but it
also
sums up both Harris' humility as well as Copland's lasting impact. It's interesting that in the mid 20th century the two
most respected American "classical" composers, Aaron Copland and Copland's quasi-protégé Leonard Bernstein, made
halting entrées into the world of film composing. If their scores were never quite traditional in, say, a Max Steiner or
Alfred
Newman way, they both wrote amazingly evocative music that contributed mightily to their films' successes.
The
Red
Pony is a charming piece of Americana which contains one of Copland's most elegantly melodic scores, one which he
reworked into a frequently performed concert suite. Perhaps surprisingly, especially given how popular that suite has
been, entering the regular concert repertory around the world, Copland did not even receive an Academy Award
nomination for
The Red Pony, though he did end up taking an Oscar home that year for his perhaps more
viscerally dramatic work on
The Heiress.
The Red Pony was an unusual film for Republic Pictures to make, but the late forties saw the studio trying to
escape its B-movie reputation with a series of more high falutin' fare, of which this film is a perfect example. Not only
did
this feature a score by the man who was arguably then the most important figure in American music, it was based on a
series of short stories by John Steinbeck, and Steinbeck himself wrote the screenplay. A-lister Robert Mitchum starred
and
if co-star Myrna Loy was at least a little past her box office expiration date, she still had huge name recognition.
Helming
the film was the legendary Lewis Milestone, a man whose career spanned the silent era to the 1962 version of
Mutiny on the Bounty (and
beyond), and whose legacy included two Academy Awards for Best Director, including the iconic
All Quiet on the Western Front. Republic
obviously splurged on this production, even eschewing their usual black and white ambience for some lustrous
Technicolor
lensed by Oscar winning cinematographer Tony Gaudio.
The story of
The Red Pony is admittedly pretty slight, detailing the adventures of young boy Tom Tiflin (Peter
Miles) on his family's California ranch in an indeterminate time that seems to be in the late 19th century. Tom's life is a
series of chores on the ranch where he's mentored by ranch hand Billy Buck (Robert Mitchum) whom Tom seems to take
to more naturally than to his own father, Fred (Shepperd Strudwick). Fred's wife and Tom's mother Alice (Myrna Loy)
looks on with a minimum of overt emotion as things unspool, the very model of a strong prairie woman. Tom is
ultimately given a gift of a red colt by his father (in what is perhaps a blatant attempt to buy the boy's affections),
though the plan backfires somewhat when it's Billy's expertise that teaches the boy how to raise the little pony. A
rather unexpected turn of events leads to some tragic developments which may remind some viewers of other "kids
with animals" films like
The Yearling (a film which is
quite similar to
The Red Pony in its general
plot and demeanor) and Disney's
Old Yeller.
What distinguishes
The Red Pony, aside from its literary and musical roots, is its unusual emotional ambience,
one that's rather tamped down until a really surprisingly violent explosion late in the film. There's a truly disturbing
scene involving little Tom, his beloved pony and some buzzards that certainly
looks like it violated every
conceivable ASPCA rule that later became the standard in the film industry. There's a perhaps too facile conclusion after
this unsettling episode that some viewers may feel is overly sanguine after the storm that has just passed.
The performances here are uniformly excellent. Mitchum, in an uncharacteristically "soft and gentle" role is superb, and
Louis Calhern is a hoot as Tom's grandfather, a guy who looks like Wild Bill Cody and has certain "story telling"
tendencies that presage a much later Grandpa, the elder character in
The Simpsons. While Loy doesn't have a
whole lot to do here, she is in some ways the emotional center of the film, a stolid woman who keeps the family
together against formidable odds. But it's little Peter Miles who owns this film, and he delivers a beautifully natural
performance that is certainly one of the finest juvenile acting jobs of his era. Rather interestingly, Miles went on to a
writing career and wrote the source novel that was adapted into one of Robert Altman's early films (which Olive has
also released on Blu-ray), the little seen thriller
That Cold Day in the Park. Trivia lovers may also want to keep an eye out for some early
work in the supporting cast by a very young Beau Bridges and (rather incredibly) Nino Tempo. Tempo, for those of you
who don't recognize his name, had a remarkable and long-lived career as a musician, topping the charts and winning a
Grammy in 1963 for his rendition of the chestnut "Deep Purple".
