Black Stallion rides again

Press, 19 August 1983, Page 10

Black Stallion rides again

The story could not have been simpler — boy loses beloved horse, boy sets off to retrieve horse. Yet the team adapting Walter Farley’s “The Black Stallion Returns” into a motion picture had a considerably harder time of it than the man who wrote it. Long before shooting began, the filmmakers were acutely aware of their central challenge: credibility. For the novel on which their efforts are based grew not out of research but pure imagination. During the Second World War, Farley, having successfully published “The Black

Stallion while still in college, found himself on duty with the United States Army in Alaska. His way of coping with the bleak Artic nights was to create another grand adventure — which he set in the broiling deserts of North Africa. The story begins with the magnificent Arabian stallion called “The Blac,” being taken from Alec Ramsey (the teenager with which it survived a shipwreck) by the horse’s rightful owner, the desert chieftain Abu ben Ishak. Alec survives an eventful journey from the United States to ben Ishak’s kingdom deep in the Sahara. There, he learns that to reclaim The Black, he must ride him to victory in a gruelling trans-desert race. The film stars Kelly Reno and Alec and Teri Garr as his mother, Belle (continuing the roles they created in 1979’s “The Black Stallion,” as well as Vincent Spano, Jodi Thelen, Allen Goorwitz and Woody Strode). It is directed by Robert Dalva from® script by Richard Kletter and Jerome Kass. Its executive producer was Francis Coppola. “We kenw we were making a fantasy,” says Tom Sternberg in defining the challenge, “but within that fantasy, there had to be reality.”