THE RED PONY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 18

THE RED PONY

(Republic) ESPITE the rough-and-ready oad of its homely philosophising, this film is rather a damp squib. The scintillating display: one might have expected from script-writer John Steinbeck (adapting his own short story), director Lewis Milestone, composer Aaron Copland, and players Robert Mitchum, Myrna Loy and Peter Miles, turns out to be only a fitful glimmer. This is.one of those productions that seem. to suffer from disunity of purpose. In some ways the authentic atmosphere sof Steinbeck is preserved (in the small details that etch out the routine of Californian farm life, for instance), and in others (the mystic significance of wild life) it is often obscured. The story describes how a little ranch boy (Peter Miles) gets a red pony as a present from his parents, how he learns about human nature from his experiences in training it, becomes bitter when it dies, and eventually rediscovers the sweetness of life on the land. The matrimonial differences between his parents, and the Wild West reminiscences of his aged grandfather, may have been brought in to give the film a rounded wholeness of vision, but once again they tend to detract attention from, instead of illuminating, the main theme. In a film that is a mixture of moral pretension and rustic simplicity the most attractive feature is Aaron Copland’s wildly atonal musical score.