Wonderfully offbeat film!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The Red Pony was an early novel of John Steinbeck dealing with memories of his childhood in the Salinas Valley in California. It was Republic's prestige film for 1949 away from the B westerns that were the company's bread and butter. Herbert J. Yates even had the good sense not to have wife Vera Hruba Ralston in it.He probably spent half the studio budget signing as stars Myrna Loy who was free lancing and Robert Mitchum from RKO. In Mitchum's case it might have been a question of a favor or two owed to Howard Hughes. Both studios were B picture companies.The story takes place like Steinbeck's other classic, East of Eden, during the years before American entry into World War I. The Tiflin family has recently moved on that ranch. For Myrna Loy it was a case of going back to her roots on both the screen and the film, in real life she grew up on a ranch in Montana. But her husband Sheppard Strudwick is a school teacher and a city kid and feels an outsider. Especially when their kid Peter Miles starts hanging around with ranch hand Robert Mitchum.Anyway the lad is given a roan colored pony, a really good looking and smart animal as well. The pony and the boy take to each other and Miles follows Mitchum's instructions on care and feeding implicitly. He even teaches the pony some tricks one of which will innocently bring about the animal's ultimate demise and a Tiflin family crisis.Though the Tiflins are quite a bit up the economic scale from the Baxters, The Red Pony is very similar in plot in a lot of respects to the Marjorie Keneston Rawlings classic, The Yearling. Both are nice family films in which the boy protagonists face crises involving their respective pets. They also have some disturbing scenes in them, young Peter Miles's scrape with some buzzards might give real little kids nightmares. I may have some myself tonight.Still if you are willing to risk the bad dreams, The Red Pony is a fine family film that still holds up well after 59 years.

"The Red Pony" tells the story of a ranching family living near Salinas, California and the obsessive love of a boy for his pony. Within that story, certain dramas are being played out; a man unsure of himself and his ability, feeling a stranger in the place he lives, even within his own family; his wife, struggling to keep the family homestead going, unsure of her man's determination and grit; an old man whose time has passed him by, struggling to cope in a world he no longer fully comprehends; a boy coming of age, having to deal with nature's cruel injustice as well as the knowledge that adults are not infallible but also make mistakes. Robert Mitchum is outstanding in the role of the ranch hand, Billy Buck, who seems to know everything there is to know about horses, thus earning the adoration of Tom, the ranch owner's son. Equally impressive is grandfather Louis Calhern, a former wagon train boss no longer needed for such kind of work. He is reduced to recycling stories that no one wishes to hear any longer. Myrna Loy, on the other hand, seems a bit too casual and matter of fact to be the challenged wife of an unsteady partner in the ranching business. She is much better suited to romantic comedy, playing such roles as Nora, the madcap wife in "The Thin Man" series. Peter Miles, who plays Tom, is satisfactory, but not as charismatic as some other child actors of the period. The gifted American composer, Aaron Copland, does the music score, teaming successfully with the great American story teller, John Steinbeck, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel. "The Red Pony" may not be the best adaptation of Steinbeck to appear on the silver screen, on the order of "The Grapes of Wrath" or "East of Eden", but it is certainly worth watching, especially for the performances of Mitchum and Calhern, as well as for the music of Copland.

I guess this movie is about personal isolation. All of the characters seem to be totally isolated from one another. I never sensed that they were really interacting - just acting. We know why all of these individuals are so isolated, but none of them really seems to do anything to overcome the isolation. They just seem to wallow around in it, except Billy (Robert Mitchum) in the end, when he resolves to provide the boy a new pony - at a potentially high, gruesome cost.The film reflects lots of internal tension, but the characters are not accessible enough to each other or the audience for us to get drawn into their individual desperation. The father is a stranger in his community, and estranged from his wife (Myrna Loy), son, and especially his father-in-law. The father-in-law is living in his own past. The wife is estranged from her husband, and doesn't interact much with her son. At first, I thought one of the subplots of the movie was going to be about Loy's being torn between her husband (who is distant from both her and their son) and the brooding and handsome hired hand, Billy (who connects with the boy). But that never really materialized. From the beginning Billy is already absorbed in something, but I couldn't figure out what. (I kind of expected to discover that he was on the lam, and that might become a subplot!)The boy relates to the hired man, Billy, through the first part of the film, but then their relationship founders after the red pony dies. In the end, Billy is worried about his horse coming into foal, and he is prepared to sacrifice her for the colt, so that he can give it to the boy and redeem himself in the boy's eyes for the earlier death of the pony. But the horse has an uncomplicated delivery of her colt, and everybody ends up laughing. So, I guess they all finally connect and live happily ever after. The arrival of the foal seems to magically knit everything together. Great... I guess.Through the entire film I had the feeling that there was a ton of back-story that was essential to understanding all of the characters (except the boy) but for some reason the director simply chose to omit it. In particular, Billy (Mitchum) seems like a mysterious and brooding loner from the outset, but that mystery is never resolved.A nice cast, great writer, great composer and very competent director never get this film to gel. For me all of the characters were superficial and distant, never personally drawing me into their own struggles. Consequently the resolution of those struggles seems one-dimensional - in fact, a mystery to me. A pity - I would have liked to like these people, but I never really got to know them.

Average family drama movie about a young boy, his new Pony and his family.Good drama and adequate acting is displayed here.The story is simple but quite entertaining for the whole family.A better script would have helped this movie.A must see for grade school children who love Horses or animals.Only for fans of this type of genre and big fans of Loy and Mitchum......