Bookish Thinking: Comparing The Black Stallion book with the movie
At the end of 2023, Little Miss and I finished the book of The Black Stallion (1941) by Walter Farley and then watched the 1979 movie based on it.
There are movies that stick with you from childhood to adulthood. The Black Stallion was one of those movies for me. A longtime horse lover, I was infatuated with horses, but knew I could never have one.
“They’re too much work,” my parents always said.
I had two childhood friends who had horses so I knew they were right. I also knew we didn’t have the space for the horses. Still, I loved to watch them, look at photos of them, and read about them. Enter Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind and My Little Ponies and – The Black Stallion.
If you don’t know what The Black Stallion is about, it is about a young boy (Alec Ramsey) who is on a ship sailing back to the United States from visiting his uncle in India when the ship is caught up in a storm. The ship sinks and the boy is rescued by a black Arabian stallion who was brought on board at a port along the way. The boy and horse live on a deserted island for twenty days before they are rescued by a fishing ship. They then return to Long Island where Alec fights to keep the horse, even though they live in a fairly populated area. His parents agree to let him keep the stallion because he saved Alec’s life, but they find a place for him in a neighbor’s barn (so this isn’t a super, super urban area, clearly.)
I will say right at the start here that we enjoyed the movie more than the book, only because we felt the book was a bit slow as in repetitive at times, and overly descriptive, especially when it came to the scenes of Alec riding The Black (the name of the stallion).
A good quarter of the book could have been cut by just trimming those scenes down. We already read about how it felt for Alec to run the black on the island. I don’t think it was important to describe that feeling every single time he rode the horse after that.
Despite not liking the slow parts, we did like the book overall and Little Miss was anxious to see the movie to see how similar it was. I watched the movie when I was around her age and was completely enamored with it and knowing she loves horses as much as I always did, I couldn’t wait to show it to her. I insisted we finish the book first, though, because I had never read it and I thought it would be good to compare the two.
She was fine with that, as long as I skipped over some of the overly descriptive parts with the running and the very repetitive and mundane dialogue in some places.
There were parts of the movie that were similar but there were also some very big glaring changes between the book and movie.
For one, in the book, Alec Ramsey is a redhead with freckles. I don’t remember him being given an age in the book, but I guessed him to be around 14 or 15.
In the movie, the boy looks about 10 or 11 and he has freckles, but very dark hair. (I looked this up and the actor was actually 11. Maybe Alec is supposed to be that young in the book. I may have missed his age when we were reading.)
In the book, Alec’s parents are waiting for him at home but in the movie, Alec’s father was on the ship with him.
So there is definitely a different dynamic from the book to the movie.
The action, of course, moves a bit faster in the movie. The imagery in the movie, especially when Alec (portrayed by Kelly Reno) and The Black are on the island and Alec is learning to ride him is gorgeous and mesmerizing. The riding scene is one of the most enchanting and relaxing scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. When I was a kid and watched that scene, everything around me faded away and it was almost like I was on that beach, riding a horse across the sand and through the waves. It was the same watching it again as an adult. My heart pounded, my skin tingled, and I leaned forward as if I was the one holding on to the mane of the horse, my body crouched low as the horse picked up speed.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if watching that movie is what lit the spark for my passion for photography.
In the movie, Henry, the man who ultimately ends up helping Alec train The Black to run in races, is portrayed by Mickey Rooney. Little Miss said he didn’t look anything like she imagined Henry to look and, though I had grown up only knowing Henry to look like Mickey Rooney, I sort of had to agree. I pictured someone completely different in my mind when I read the book.
Still, I think Mickey does an amazing job portraying Henry – a slightly grumpy, retired jockey and horse trainer. He was even nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
Teri Garr portrayed Alec’s mother in the movie. It was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Caroll Ballard.
I always found the scenes with the horse amazing. Like how did they get the horse to film the scenes where he was getting used to Alec? And the race scenes were amazing. The movie was filmed before CGI, which makes it all even more amazing.
Wikipedia is not the most reliable source for information at times, but if what they shared about the horses used in the film is true, it is very interesting.
“Cass Ole, a champion Arabian stallion, was featured in most of the movie’s scenes, with Fae Jur, another black Arabian stallion, being his main double. Fae Jur’s main scene is the one where Alec is trying to gain the trust of The Black on the beach. Two other stunt doubles were used for running, fighting, and swimming scenes.
El Mokhtar, an Egyptian Arabian racehorse, was the producers’ first choice to portray The Black, but they were unable to secure his services for the film from his owners, who declined any offers. He does appear in The Black Stallion Returns, alongside Cass Ole, by which time the studio bought out the syndicate of owners to secure El Mokhtar’s services.
Napoleon was portrayed by Junior, who previously appeared in National Lampoon’s Animal House as Trooper, Niedermeyer’s horse.”
I also found it interesting to read on IMBD’b that Kelly Reno, who played Alec (as I mentioned above) did his own stunts in the movie because he was the son of a cattle rancher and was used to riding horses. He did have a stand-in part of the time but for the most part, the stunts were his own when he was riding The Black.
Kelly was injured in a very bad truck accident involving a semi-trailer after he graduated high school, which ended his acting career. He became a cattle rancher, like his dad, and then a truck driver and lives in Colorado from what I could find out online. There is not a ton of information available about him online since he no longer works in acting, but I did find this really interesting interview from this past year on a site about Thoroughbred Racing.
“It was a friend of the Reno family who noticed an ad in the Denver Post calling for young riders to audition for a role in a movie,” writer Jay Hovdey writes in the article.
“I wasn’t trying to be an actor,” Reno said recently. “For me, it was a day off from school, so why not?”
The article is also where I learned that the shipwreck scenes in the movie were filmed in Italy. The beach scenes were filmed in Sardinia. Reno and his entire family were flown there to film that scene. When we see him shivering from the cold rain and the waves crashing over the ship, that was real because they were using fire hoses to create the illusion and he was very cold.
I’ve always wondered how they got The Black to follow Reno around on the beach and he answered that in this interview.
“There was a pocket in my shorts with oats I’d feed him,” Reno said, “so when I’d take off running across the beach, he knew where those oats came from and follow me around.”
He also said the horse bit him in the shoulder, lifting him up and shaking him like a rag doll the one time he didn’t feed him fast enough.
““He picked me up and shook me like a rag doll. I reared back and punched him right in the nose. The director yells: ‘Don’t be punching the horse!’ But I’m 11, a ranch kid. I think he was mad because the horse was the star.”
Reno said Rooney was amazing to work with and only got “mad” at him once when they were at a horse race and he bet on a horse that won 50-1 and Rooney lost.
About the movie, Hovdey wrote: “As for the legacy of the movie, which was produced by Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather fame, the Los Angeles Film Critics honored Caleb Deschanel for his cinematography and composer Carmine Coppola for his music.
In 2002, the National Film Preservation Board added The Black Stallion to its list of significant films, then in 2005 a poll published by the American Film Institute placed the movie at No. 64 among America’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies, ahead of Cool Hand Luke, Thelma & Louise, and The Ten Commandments.”
You can read the full article and interview with Reno here: https://www.thoroughbredracing.com/articles/5835/jay-hovdey-movies-black-stallion-bonafide-classic-among-greatest-horse-fables/
There was a sequel of the movie made, The Black Stallion Returns, which was the second in Farley’s 21-book series that featured the stallion.
Kelly and Teri Garr were both in the sequel. They were not in the television series that ran from 1990 to 1993 and starred Mickey Rooney and Richard Ian Cox.
So my final thoughts on the book and the movie is that the book is worth a read if you are okay with skimming over some of the scenes that drag a bit.
The movie is worth a watch because you won’t want to fast forward past any scene since it is beautifully acted, filmed, and `presented.
Have you read the book or seen the film?
What was your impression of it or them?
Here is an interview about the making of The Black Stallion and the trailer that ran in 1979 for it.
For additional reading about the movie and the making of it and the book and author, visit Tim Farley’s site here:
