Zane Grey gets the full Technicolor treatment, with Howard Duff trying to catch and train the greatest mustang ever, but requiring Edgar Buchanan and top-billed Ann Blyth. She's a tomboy, from the top of her perfectly marcelled hair, to her sculpted eyebows, red painted lips and ivory skin. Duff may be the man who catches Black Velvet, but it's Miss Blyth's mysterious power over horses -- horsepower, I call it -- that gets the animal trained.
It's one of Universal's "Shaky A" westerns, with quite a cast. George Brent, Chill Wills, Jane Darwell, Lloyd Bridges, but the beauty of it is not in the story as directed by George Sherman, but the way that Irving Glassberg's camera captured Ford country: so bright you can't look, air so clear, you can see everything. It's shot in Ford Country, but Ford's cameramen made the landscape a mythic dreamscape, where the cowboys shake off dust that no one ever raises, just the godlike wind. In Sherman's movie, everything is just as bright, but when people trod on the red, dry ground, they're the once who raise the dust; and everyone, comic sidekick Buchanan aside, is always perfectly clean. It's not the godlike land that makes the story here. The land is the setting, godlike people make the story.
