THE GREEN GRASS OF WYOMING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 485, 8 October 1948, Page 16

THE GREEN GRASS OF WYOMING

(20th Century-Fox) [_TKE the blue grass of Kentucky, the green grass of Wyoming breeds beautiful horses, and if you enjoy the sight of them galloping freely over tough upland pasture, with a backdrop of craggy mountains behind them-all in glorious technicolour-then this is the show for you. It is almost exclusively a horse show. There are humans in it, among them Charles Coburn as a sadly sodden trainer of trotters, Peggy Cummins (his grand-daughter), and Robert Arthur who is innocuous and rather insipid. But the real stars of the show are the horsesthe white stallion Thunderhead (son of Flicka), and the glossy members of his harem, headed by a dainty little mare called Crown Jewel. Thunderhead, who is a_half-wild range stallion, has built up his harem by serenading its individual members and then eloping with them from the home-paddocks of their yahoo owners, ahd when the story opens there is ‘con siderable heart-burning in the ranchhouses. When Crown Jewel kicks over the traces, a punitive © expedition is organised to rescue the errant bloodstock and restore them to the fréédom of the training-track, but ofite the horses were brought down off the range, and Thunderhead tricked into returning to civilisation, I lost interest in the film, There was subsequently a good deal of contrived excitement in the running of several trotting heats (to enable Charles Coburn to Fight the Drink, and redeem himself in the eyes of his grand-daughter and the ,trotting fraternity), but I thought them pretty flat races after Thunderhead’s ballet-dancing courtship and the breathless flight through the hills. I was left, too, with an uneasy feeling that Swift was right, and that the horse’ was the nobler animal.