A Ride on a Dream Horse

By Frank Rich

THE BLACK STALLION Directed by Carroll Ballard

Screenplay by Melissa Mathison, Jeanne Rosenberg, William D. Wittliff

Watching The Black Stallion is like spending two hours with a stack of National Geographies. Director Carroll Ballard's adaptation of Walter Farley's boy-and-horse novel consists of one stunning view after another: coral seas, scarlet sunsets, moonlit landscapes, stormy skies. Almost every shot is suitable for framing, and Ballard prefers it that way. Whenever actors step into the frame, the director dismisses them quickly; he seems to feel that characters are intruders who come around only to mess up his pretty pictures.

Luckily for the audience, the film's early scenes do not focus on individual people. Ballard opens with pure spectacle, allowing his movie to get off to a rousing start. As the camera wanders around an exotic ship traveling near North Africa in 1946, there is mystery and sensuous excitement at every turn. In one corner of the ship, middle-aged adventurers silently play poker for a high-stakes pot of dazzling gems and religious icons. In another, a bizarre team of white-gowned Arabs zealously guards a shrieking black Arabian stallion. When a storm strikes late one night, the film provides a shipwreck of classic proportions. In a series of corrosive, lightning-quick cuts, Ballard does as much as a film maker can to capture the vertigo and horror of death by fire and drowning at sea.

Soon thereafter, The Black Stallion's real story begins, and so do the movie's difficulties. The young hero Alec (Kelly Reno) and the black stallion, sole survivors of the wreck, are washed up on a deserted and terribly picturesque beach. There they carry out a lengthy and teasing courtship that manages to merge the sentimentality of Lassie with the homoeroticism of Equus. Alec and the stal lion find food for each other, watch sun sets together and finally celebrate their relationship in a wild ride along the shore. Once the pah-- are rescued and reach Alec's small-town American home, the film's mystical aura evaporates completely. What follows is a rehash of National Velvet.

Now Ballard's sumptuous images exist only to distract from his rather conventional failings of craftsmanship. The ruse does not succeed. Though the freckle-faced Reno and Mickey Rooney (as the horse's crafty old trainer) are well cast, then-scenes together are perfunctory and impersonal. Emotions are provided in stead by a busy and overbearing musical score. The film's story begins to move in fits and starts. Except for the inevitable big race, it is not advanced visually but by bald snatches of voice-over dialogue. No doubt children in the audience will have a fine time anyway; they may even enjoy the film's prosaic conclusion more than its arty opening. Still, adults cannot be blamed if The Black Stallion 's highly disappointing final stretch motivates them to take a trot.

-Frank Rich

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