1979: Revisiting The Black Stallion
Saturday, May 16, 2015 at 1:00PM In honor of the Year of the Month (1979) and horse racing’s most exciting month – with the second leg of the Triple Crown, the Preakness, being run today – Lynn Lee revisits a childhood favorite movie, The Black Stallion.
As a little girl, I didn’t ride horses but I loved reading about them, from Black Beauty to Misty of Chincoteague to just about every book in the Black Stallion series. Naturally I loved the Black Stallion movie and watched it multiple times in my pre-teen years. I recently decided to watch it again and see how I felt about it over two decades later. Here are the five things that struck me most strongly this time around:
1. How quiet the film is.
There’s barely any dialogue. That makes sense for the first half, most of which takes place on a desert island where the two shipwrecked protagonists, the boy Alec and the Black Stallion, slowly earn each other’s trust. But even after they’re rescued and return to society and enter a big honking horse race, the quiet remains. Most of the human characters have only a handful of lines... [More]
