Green Grass of Wyoming

This is a sweet little film, in glorious technicolor, about kids and horses - a sequel to a sequel of "My Friend Flicka". but with a different cast. Robert Arthur is charming as the lead boy and Charles Coburn as his rival is excellent. But Peggy Cummins is wretched as the love interest - so saccharine! Lloyd Nolan is good as always, but Burl Ives is wasted (and sings a truly woeful song).

But the humans don't matter much because the horses steal the show. A beautiful white stallion is the star and the glorious black mare he kidnaps is the leading lady. Together they gallop through magnificent mountain scenery like salt and pepper against the green. The scene where he seduces her is intensely erotic, and when she becomes stuck in a bog their distress is completely believable. How they got the horses to do the things they do I'll never know (and I pray it was not cruel), but they are superb.

Back in the sixties, when I was growing up in Lancaster, Ohio, I had heard that part of 1948's Green Grass of Wyoming was shot in Lancaster, because they wanted to film at a picturesque racetrack and grandstand setting for the harness racing scenes. I never saw the film until now, and I was delighted that it is true. On the site of the Fairfield County Fairgrounds, they filmed some wonderful action scenes. They even pronounced the name of the city correctly.

I did think, though, it was strange that the film has the two owners of two horses take them all the way from Wyoming to Lancaster, OH to race them.

A side note: the first shot of the race track and environs might look like an aerial shot, but it was taken from the top of Mt. Pleasant, a large mountain that rises above Lancaster, situated in the adjacent Rising Park. This mountain is a geological oddity in an area known for its rolling hills.

I found the movie enjoyable. It is a coming-of-age story about a young horse lover (Carey) and a neighbor boy (Kenny). Amidst the beautiful scenery of Wyoming and Utah, they raise horses, with hopes of owning a champion trotter.

I really enjoyed Peggy Cummin's portray of Carey. She has a beautiful voice and glows on screen.

It is also fun to see a young Burl Ives. He sings and narrates.

The highlights of the film for me were the action scenes involving animals. I have no idea how they got the horses (and other animals) to do what they did.

Peggy Cummins, adopting an amusing Irish burr, plays one of those dungaree dolls who are crazy about horses and the neighboring teenage boy, wearing her blonde hair in tight pigtails and taking a stern hand with her hard-drinking, rough-hewn grandpa as if she were in-training to be his wife. The script for this family film, based on Mary O'Hara's book--and sort of a second-cousin to her popular sagas "My Friend Flicka" and "Thunderhead, Son of Flicka"--is perfunctory without being exciting, and the movie is so well-scrubbed it's beatific. Narrator Burl Ives also appears, playing a guitar-strumming ranch-hand (he entertains at the teen-dance singing the totally inappropriate novelty, "I Wish I Were Single Again") and Charles Coburn is Cummins' grandfather, who blames a mythic wild horse from running off with his mares. Charles G. Clarke's picture-postcard photography was Oscar-nominated, and deservedly so: his rich Technicolor panoramas display beautiful blue skies and vast mountain terrain, handsome ranch houses nestled in the hills and even horses who seem satisfied. The climax at the sulky races isn't a crowd-pleaser, but the film may placate animal-lovers even though it's all been done before. **1/2 from ****

The majestic Technicolor landscapes photographed by Charles G. Clarke look on placidly as a good cast of humans is increasingly sidelined as this film concentrates on Thunderhead's developing romance with mare Crown Jewell (with the usual threats by local meanies to shoot him for his presumption). Anthropomorphic reaction shots of Thunderhead are occasionally edited in to suggest that he's actually responding to things that people have just said; most amusingly when he seems to be looking pleased with himself when they realise that his lady friend is now pregnant.

By this stage earlier suggestions of an equivalent romance developing between fresh-faced young Robert Arthur and Peggy Cummins following a tussle in the straw in their barn have been largely forgotten; and the Breen Office would certainly have taken a far less benign view had their relationship been depicted as going as far as the horses' had!

A lovely film, you get happy seeing it, and it's easy going an. The two horses that have the lead roles in the movie are adorable beautiful (stallion is white, and the mare bang black).

My personal benefit was Beaver Greenway (Charles Coburn) fine acting together with his granddaughter, and exceptionally adorable Carey Greenways (played by Peggy Cummins), which is absolutely phenomenal in the manner she treats his grandfather.

This film will apparently be Marilyn Monroe's sixth film, where she will be one of the dancers in a brief scene in the middle of the movie, but I could not see her. For those who like horses, is a must movie to watch ;-)