It’s a rare horse race where everyone comes out a winner. This week on “Picture Perfect, it’s bound to be a photo finish, with four beautiful and rousing scores from films about horses and horse racing.
“The Black Stallion” (1979), based on the classic novel by Walter Farley, depicts the bonding of a shipwrecked boy and an Arabian stallion, whose shared destiny takes them to the race track. Mickey Rooney’s uncharacteristically subdued performance as the former trainer who finds a new lease on life earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Francis Ford Coppola executive produced the film, and his father, Carmine Coppola, wrote the music. Reportedly the unsung Shirley Walker, who had been hired as an orchestrator, wound up contributing a fair amount to it, when the composer was put off by requests from director Carroll Ballard that portions of the music be rewritten.
“The Reivers” (1969), after William Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a coming-of-age story about a boy swept into automobile theft and illicit horse racing in the American South. Mark Rydell directed, and Steve McQueen stars as the rakish Boon Hogganbeck. The narration is by Burgess Meredith, who reprises his role in the recording we’ll hear, with John Williams conducting his own music.
For the film, Williams provided an alternately wistful and carefree Americana score. It’s said that the music for “The Reivers” is what moved Steven Spielberg to hire him to write the music for his first theatrical feature, “The Sugarland Express.” The Spielberg association brought Williams to “Jaws,” the first of his truly iconic film scores. He also worked with Mark Rydell on “The Cowboys” (1972), “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), and “The River” (1984).
It was inevitable that the nonfiction bestseller “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” would be given the big Hollywood treatment. The miraculous ascent of the real-life dark horse who became a symbol of hope during the Great Depression seemed tailor-made for dramatization.
Though it presses all the right buttons, “Seabiscuit” (2003) is not to be confused with a superior documentary that was shown on PBS around the same time. Nonetheless, the film, which stars Tobey McGuire, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Cooper, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Randy Newman wrote the music.
Finally, we’ll turn to “Hidalgo” (2004), also allegedly based on a true story, though the source material – the memoir of distance rider Frank T. Hopkins – has also inspired a fair degree of skepticism. In 1890, Hopkins became the first American invited to compete in a centuries-old 3000-mile survival race across the Arabian Desert.
Viggo Mortensen plays Hopkins, and Omar Sharif is the sheik who asks him to put up or shut up, over the claim made by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show that he and his horse are the greatest distance runners in the world. The music is by James Newton Howard.
It will be a dead heat in June, with the wind in our hair. Enjoy an hour of equine film scores, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
