Back when I was younger, there was much talk about “hybrid vigor” — the idea that when you mix two different breeding lines of the same species, you get a stronger (all senses of the word), better variant of the species. This is, of course, the opposite of the idea that when you inbreed too strongly, you end up with Jukes and Kallikaks. Strangely, the concept of hybrid vigor was rarely applied to humans or horses, where “thoroughbreds” were considered stronger and better variants; the Nazis were not, in that long-ago age, the only conservators of the idea of “racial purity”.

This is a movie about two “mongrels” — the mustang Hidalgo and his rider, Frank Hopkins. Back in the last decade of the 19th century, Frank and Hidalgo travel around North America riding in (and winning) races against thoroughbred race hourses, playing in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and occasionally carrying messages for the army to outposts not yet reached by telegraph. This latter is how he happens to be present when the massacre at Wounded Knee occurs, an event that strongly affects Frank — it happens that, while his father was himself a cavalry scout, his mother was an Indian woman, a fact that Frank, who (as actor Viggo Mortensen) is blond and blue-eyed enough to “pass”, does not advertise, though anyone who listens to him conversing with other Indians in fluent Sioux might be able to guess. (Between Sioux and Arabic, the film is perhaps overloaded with subtitles.)

Bill Cody (J. K. Simmons) ⁽¹⁾ advertises Hidalgo as the best long-distance horse in the world. In Arabia, Sheikh Riyadh (Omar Sharif), who considers himself the breeder of the best long-distance horses in the world, is irritated when he hears this, and he sends envoys to convince Cody (and Hopkins) to put up or shut up. Hopkins travels with Hidalgo to Aden and finds himself involved in a three-thousand-mile race across the Rub’al Khali, the Mesopotamian desert and Syria, against several dozen prize Arabian thoroughbreds, of both species. It’s a race in which not only Hidalgo but also Frank must prove their intrinsic worth — and Frank, for various reasons, must come to terms with his own bicultural background.

Marvellous cinematography, both in Arabia and in America. Remarkably, in this post-9/11 America (and, as I remember from numerous films, in the pre-9/11 world), Moslems are treated as human beings, with the general nobility and flaws that one finds in Americans as well; there are both good and bad guys among the Allah-worshippers, a situation long ago ordained by Allah or whatever name She’s using this week. Frank’s friendship with the sheikh’s daughter Jazira (Zuleikha Robinson ^[2]) is, unfortunately, bound to come to naught at the end, this being (supposedly) a true story. Lady Anne Davenport (Louise Lombard), the film’s real villain(ess), is perhaps underused. ⁽³⁾ The one major flaw in the film (to me) was the subplot about the sheikh’s nephew Katib (Silas Carson) and his brigand band, particularly the part in which they kidnap Jazira and Frank must ride off to the rescue; this deviation from the main flow of the story seemed more like something out of the dime novels with which the sheikh was so enamoured, and less like something out of a true story.

This one, I think, is worth seeing — and, for me, worth getting, eventually, for my filmotheque.

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⁽¹⁾ The IMDB describes Hopkins as a “Pony Express courier”. Bill Cody might have been a Pony Express courier in his youth — I remember, as a kid, going to the Saturday matinee at the Lake Theater in Oswego fifteen weeks running to catch every installment of the now-long-forgotten “Cody of the Pony Express”. Hopkins, who died in 1951 at the age of 86, would have been busy being born at about the time that the Pony experienced its short but exciting and long-remembered life.

⁽²⁾ I note that this actress has also been a Harlow — in “X-Files” and “The Lone Gunmen”.

⁽³⁾ This being a true story, she walks away at the end untouched — except, perhaps, in the pocketbook.

Don Harlow, March 7, 2004 10:43 AM

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