Ride a Wild Pony

The 1976 date on this appears to be its wider release. Not that most people are familiar with it either way, but for some reason the site I use to fill out my schedule for the Year of the Month list says it’s 1976 and everyone else says 1975. It was released first in Australia, for reasons that will make sense when we get to the plot, then had a Christmas release in LA, not that it was going to be an Oscar contender either way, then has a release date of March 25. This sort of thing can be confused. Even modern dates, where everything starts in wide release instead of trickling into theatres over a few months, gets messed up with festival releases and so forth.

At any rate, the movie is set in rural Australia between the World Wars. Angus Pirie (Alfred Bell) is a poor farmer who had clearly moved into the area with his wife (Melissa Jaffer), who never gets a first name, in hope of a better life, but the farm is a bad one and not providing the living they hoped for. His son, Scotty (Robert Bettles), is of school age, but the nearest school is seven miles away, a long way to walk back and forth every day. Rather than any of the other negative consequences possible, they arrange for him to buy a wild Welsh mountain pony, which Scotty tames and names Taff. Unfortunately, one day, Taff vanishes. He’s later captured again and ends up pulling a cart for Josie Ellison (Eva Griffith), a rich girl paralyzed by polio.

Would we feel as sorry for Josie if she weren’t paralyzed? We would not. Sure, she trains the pony she names Bo mostly by herself, but she has at least some help from Bluey (Graham Rouse), who cares for her father’s stables. Because, you know, her father has stables. Why doesn’t her father buy an already trained pony? That’s an interesting question. It also seems likely to me at least that Josie wouldn’t be able to train “Bo” as quickly were it not for the time Scotty put in on Taff. Scotty is used to working hard, and I’m sure there’s something to do with actually owning something of his own involved. I don’t want to dismiss how much Josie loves Bo, but let’s be clear; her disability is used to make her a figure of pity.

Not that Scotty’s poverty isn’t. As established, his mother never does get a name. A local lawyer, Charles E. Quayle (John Meillon), does some work for the family. (Scotty pays him at one point with some of Taff’s fresh manure, as in he has the pony stand in the garden while it poos, and that’s the weirdest variant of paying in kind that I’ve ever seen.) He points out that Angus was cheated when it comes to his land and suggests that, if some way of getting the boy to school isn’t found, Quayle might have to start making a fuss about this fact. But, um, surely a fuss should be made regardless?

For the curious, yes, the wild pony survives the picture. You might not expect it. I suppose it helps that we get to have drama about who actually owns the damn thing, so one kid is likely to go without a pony regardless of our solution. Though there are a lot of ways we can change that. One of the issues, which does make sense, is that both kids have fallen in love with the pony. I find it frankly astonishing that an adult who should presumably know better says that all the ponies look alike. I haven’t been a horse person since perhaps 1986, and even I know better than that.