The Red Pony

There is an unusual abundance of talent associated with this film. The screenplay was written by one of the great American writers of the 20th century, John Steinbeck, taken from his excellent short novel of the same name. The score was written by Aaron Copland, perhaps the most noted composer in American history. The director, Lewis Milestone, made many fine pictures over a long career including Academy Award winner 'All Quiet on the Western Front.'

All that talent doesn't necessarily mean that 'The Red Pony' is going to be the greatest movie of all time, though it is a good one. Milestone's direction and Copland's score are both fine, but I didn't feel like Steinbeck's script was nearly as good as his book.

We often complain when a favorite work of literature is changed considerably by the movies, but what do you say when it's a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author doing it to his own work? Although I don't think this filmed version lives up to the novel, it still covers the same ground. It's about a boy growing up on a farm in Steinbeck's beloved Salinas Valley in California, where he learns some lessons about life. One of them is that the things you think you want the most sometimes come at a much higher price than you were prepared to pay. My favorite actor in this movie was Myrna Loy as the mother. Where did I ever get the idea that she wasn't supposed to be that good an actress? I must have had her mixed up with someone else.

The Red Pony was an early novel of John Steinbeck dealing with memories of his childhood in the Salinas Valley in California. It was Republic's prestige film for 1949 away from the B westerns that were the company's bread and butter. Herbert J. Yates even had the good sense not to have wife Vera Hruba Ralston in it.

He probably spent half the studio budget signing as stars Myrna Loy who was free lancing and Robert Mitchum from RKO. In Mitchum's case it might have been a question of a favor or two owed to Howard Hughes. Both studios were B picture companies.

The story takes place like Steinbeck's other classic, East of Eden, during the years before American entry into World War I. The Tiflin family has recently moved on that ranch. For Myrna Loy it was a case of going back to her roots on both the screen and the film, in real life she grew up on a ranch in Montana. But her husband Sheppard Strudwick is a school teacher and a city kid and feels an outsider. Especially when their kid Peter Miles starts hanging around with ranch hand Robert Mitchum.

Anyway the lad is given a roan colored pony, a really good looking and smart animal as well. The pony and the boy take to each other and Miles follows Mitchum's instructions on care and feeding implicitly. He even teaches the pony some tricks one of which will innocently bring about the animal's ultimate demise and a Tiflin family crisis.

Though the Tiflins are quite a bit up the economic scale from the Baxters, The Red Pony is very similar in plot in a lot of respects to the Marjorie Keneston Rawlings classic, The Yearling. Both are nice family films in which the boy protagonists face crises involving their respective pets. They also have some disturbing scenes in them, young Peter Miles's scrape with some buzzards might give real little kids nightmares. I may have some myself tonight.

Still if you are willing to risk the bad dreams, The Red Pony is a fine family film that still holds up well after 59 years.

This is a beautiful motion picture about a boy and a horse (and there are many of those). Adapted by John Steinbeck from the author's own short stories, it captures its rural setting perfectly, and the entire production is enlivened by strong characterizations. Louis Calhern is especially fun as Grandfather, and Margaret Hamilton shines as a stern schoolmarm. But the real star, aside from the titular animal, is the dialogue. The people in this story speak so realistically and naturally, it spoils you and makes you wish all films were written this way. An added bonus is Aaron Copland's music. Remade in 1973 as a television movie by Universal.

"The Red Pony" tells the story of a ranching family living near Salinas, California and the obsessive love of a boy for his pony. Within that story, certain dramas are being played out; a man unsure of himself and his ability, feeling a stranger in the place he lives, even within his own family; his wife, struggling to keep the family homestead going, unsure of her man's determination and grit; an old man whose time has passed him by, struggling to cope in a world he no longer fully comprehends; a boy coming of age, having to deal with nature's cruel injustice as well as the knowledge that adults are not infallible but also make mistakes.

Robert Mitchum is outstanding in the role of the ranch hand, Billy Buck, who seems to know everything there is to know about horses, thus earning the adoration of Tom, the ranch owner's son. Equally impressive is grandfather Louis Calhern, a former wagon train boss no longer needed for such kind of work. He is reduced to recycling stories that no one wishes to hear any longer. Myrna Loy, on the other hand, seems a bit too casual and matter of fact to be the challenged wife of an unsteady partner in the ranching business. She is much better suited to romantic comedy, playing such roles as Nora, the madcap wife in "The Thin Man" series. Peter Miles, who plays Tom, is satisfactory, but not as charismatic as some other child actors of the period.

The gifted American composer, Aaron Copland, does the music score, teaming successfully with the great American story teller, John Steinbeck, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel. "The Red Pony" may not be the best adaptation of Steinbeck to appear on the silver screen, on the order of "The Grapes of Wrath" or "East of Eden", but it is certainly worth watching, especially for the performances of Mitchum and Calhern, as well as for the music of Copland.

Like John Garfield, Robert Mitchum is yet another one of my very favourite actors from that particular, by-gone era of moviedom history.

If you ask me, Mitchum was such an easy-to-like actor. Without any apparent pretentiousness, he casually projected just the right kind of masculinity (on-screen) which unanimously appealed to both men and women, alike.

So, with keeping that in mind - Is it any wonder that I found the best scenes in The Red Pony to clearly be the ones where Mitchum played a direct part in the action? I mean, without this dude's presence I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this film to the degree that I did and I most likely would've rated it somewhat lower, as well.

For the most part - I'd say that The Red Pony (which was beautifully filmed in lush Technicolor) was a film that would be best enjoyed by children. There really wasn't much of a tale in this sentimental, Hollywood Western to hold the rapt attention of an adult.