Mickey Rooney and The Black Stallion

The death of Mickey Rooney offers the opportunity to once again recommend The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard’s shining example of how to adapt a potboiler novel into a luminous film.

Rooney (then in his late fifties) played grizzled horse trainer Henry Dailey, and he was a big part of making Walter Farley’s formulaic horse-racing plot feel real. He could overact like no one else, especially in movies for kids. (Check out Pete’s Dragon from two years before and Odyssey of the Pacific from three years after.) But when Ballard asked Rooney to provide an understated, naturalistic performance, he did a terrific job.

As Bruce Coville noted on Facebook, The Black Stallion also offers a bookend with one of Rooney’s best films from his MGM stardom, in National Velvet. A still from the earlier film even appears in the later as a photo from his character’s past.

In the following years Rooney reprised the role as Dailey in a TV show, and his later filmography is dotted with other, lesser “Stallion” films. He needed to work, and he was fine with letting projects sag into formula if he got work. But when pushed, there was nothing Mickey Rooney couldn’t do.

The Best Movie Adaptation from a Children’s Book

The Salon article on good and bad cinematic adaptations of children’s books (quoted here and here) got me thinking about my own list.

To judge simply by the artistic distance from the written source to the cinematic reworking, my top choice is The Black Stallion. The novel by Walter Farley was serviceable. Written when Farley was in high school and college, it’s a standard boy’s adventure with ordinary prose and better-than-average horsemanship.

In contrast, Carroll Ballard’s movie looks gorgeous, thanks to Ballard and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. The plot is pretty much the same, and very basic it is. But there are real feelings of loss and risk, giving the triumphal story more layers. And the performances by Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr, and Hoyt Axton are wonderfully natural.