The Fighting Stallion

A cowboy hero home from the Pacific front is losing his sight. Can he train the FIGHTING STALLION, a super-smart but untrained mustang from the hills to be his seeing eye horse (and lure the pretty nurse from the dude ranch) before everyone finds out he's going blind?

For a B-western, this is above average, if only because this plot is pretty far from the usual rustlers, lawmen, cattleman vs farmers, relative gone bad plots that litter the non-musical B-western. Problem is, the movie still isn't terribly compelling, because of the usual stock footage and wooden acting issues one find in these things. If you are an enthusiast of the genre, this won't matter, even though the modern day trappings (a modern dude ranch, a jeep) might be an annoying reminder of a lesser Gene Autry outing. The somewhat insipid romance, however, takes up a lot of screen time, leaving less time for rootin tootin western animal action.

Rather interesting movie here that combines melodramatic weepie with a western. Bill Edwards stars as a soldier who gets out of the service to become a cowboy, only to learn that he slowly going blind! When he gets to the ranch, he comes across a wild horse that No one can break! But of course, he just walks up, and the horse is like putty in his hands. He decides that the horse will be, yes, his seeing eye-horse! Soon, he falls in love with a ex-nurse, who catches on that he's slowly going blind (she caught him riding his horse with a handkerchief over his eyes!) but he doesn't want pit from her. Will he see her again? There's a whole pile of other things, wild horses, the horse's mate and his kid, her former beaus, a forest fire that wander in and out, they're throwaway plot devices. They don't slow the story down, they're padding it, yet the movie doesn't really seem too long because of it. I really liked Bill Edwards in this role. Big strong man who faces up to the fact that he's human (and the fact he has Super Horse helps too).

This film is fine except for one glaring point. There's about 5 minutes of horse fighting in this. It looks like it was staged just for this film, and there's no WAY that the horses here could not have escaped any injuries from the fights seen here. No animal protection laws yet! Anything goes! Tsk.