The Red Pony (1949) – DVD

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, Shepperd Strudwick, Peter Miles
screenplay by John Steinbeck, based on his short story collection Red Pony
directed by Lewis Milestone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In the simplest possible terms, The Red Pony is a Disney true-life adventure with a literary pedigree. As far as Disney true-life adventures go, it’s a superior one, thanks largely to competent direction by Lewis Milestone and a screenplay by John Steinbeck. But even the reasonably A-list personnel on hand can’t lift it above the lowliness of the genre–largely because what you see is what you get. There’s nothing to read between the lines of its tale of a boy and his pony, and despite some peripheral interest involving the boy’s parents and a stableman, the film fails completely to evoke the spaces between their words and the tension in their relationships, making it come and go with little rhyme or reason.

The story, taken from a Steinbeck anthology, is that of a boy named Tom (Peter Miles) who lives on a ranch near Salinas Valley and wants to look after a pony. True, a quartet of adults orbit around him (Mother and Father (Myrna Loy and Shepperd Strudwick), Grandfather (Louis Calhern), and ranch-hand Billy Buck (Robert Mitchum)), but they’re mostly for background colour–they provide the environment that will make Tom’s love affair with his pony all the more piquant. There’s tension between Father and Billy Buck, because the coldness of the former has driven his son to the attentions of the latter, and poor old grandfather keeps harping on his oft-told war stories in an attempt to seem important, but this stuff is designed to direct you to Tom’s need for the pony and his love for it. Which of course makes it all the more tragic when Billy accidentally lets the animal out during a storm, striking him ill and putting the boy’s tenuous self-image on high alert.

While I haven’t read the film’s source material, I feel fairly safe in suggesting that the film’s ultimate failure lies in losing all of the extraneous commentary that a writer can make in his/her work. On the page, you can tell people the character’s motives and feelings without distracting from the narrative; here we are simply presented with the skeleton of the narrative, and denuded of any context, it’s just a tale to be consumed. Without the window into the characters’ heads, the trials of the ex-city slicker father to tend his ranch and the obsolescence of poor grandfather don’t resonate beyond machinations of the plot, and they make the potentially complex nature of Tom’s obsession with his pony seem like little more than an excitable kid with a horsey to ride.

This whimpering end to the narrative might have been averted with some formalist comment on the action–if ever there was a time for the elegiac John Ford treatment, it would be now. But Lewis Milestone is more of a craftsman than an artist, and he sets up the action in terms so simple that they further bastardize the already sketchy scenes. You’d think that the drama surrounding the pony’s illness would have been occasion to ratchet up the visuals, so that we feel the panic of the child instead of just having it blankly represented. No such luck: the results are all very professional, all very easy on the eyes, and all completely devoid of any sense of the internal. Not the tragedy the filmmakers are groping for, though to be fair it’s far from inept and goes down easy. Remade for TV in 1973 with Henry Fonda.

THE DVD
Time, alas, has been unkind to the negative of The Red Pony, and the print on offer here on Artisan’s DVD is well shy of ideal. Presented in a fullscreen transfer that maintains the film’s original Academy ratio, there’s a general muddiness to the colours and a profound lack of definition–blues especially suffer from bleed, making night scenes almost impossible to make out. Quoting the back cover, the film is presented in Dolby Surround, but the track is monophonic in nature and adequately audible. While it lacks the fullness and sparkle of the best mixes, it at least improves when compared to the image. There are no extras, not even a trailer.

91 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Artisan