Horse Movies!
Hello, horse fans and mystery fans and horse mystery fans!
This week we hope that you’re also movie fans as Lezah and Dave discuss their favourite (and maybe not so favourite) horse movies.
As people who are and have been closely involved in the world of horses and the horse industry, Lezah and Dave bring a different viewpoint to these films – seeking an accuracy that is beyond the scope of the average movie fan.
What makes a good horse movie? What horse movies would the hosts recommend? And what horse movies should they watch?
Some of the horse movies discussed were:
- The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit – a sentimental favourite for Lezah with excellent show jumping footage from a different era
- Secretariat – a pretty good biopic that suffers, in Lezah’s opinion, from the miscasting of the central character
- Sea Biscuit – an excellent biopic that offers authentic period details of the horse world of a bygone age
- National Velvet – a horse fantasy that fails to appeal to the initiated
- Lean On Pete – a deep, loving study of the multi-level connections between humans and animals
- The Rider – an elegiac love letter to the character of the horseman
- Buck – an amazing documentary of a deeply intuitive teacher and trainer
- Jockey – a sad movie detailing the final days in the career of an aging jockey
- Harry and Snowman – the plucky story of luck and talent meeting in the jumping ring
- Unbranded – a criminal story of the tragic murder of wild horses as the Wild West is tamed by its last inhabitants
We told you what we thought, and now it’s your turn. What’s your favourite horse movie? Knowing their tastes, what horse movie would you recommend to Lezah and Dave?
We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Please comment about the show, and please like and subscribe on all your favourite podcast aggregators!
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After hearing Dave recommend horse movies on Sneaky Dragon, I started catching them when they showed up on our movie channels and streaming services. Then I’d look for other horse movies as they made for good comfort viewing during early days of the pandemic. Here are a few recommendations:
Ride Like A Girl (2019) – based on the true story of Michelle Payne vying to be the first woman to win the Melbourne Cup in 2015. It stars Teresa Palmer (from A Discovery of Witches) and Sam Neill as the patriarch of a large horse-training family. It was directorial debut of Australian actress Rachel Griffiths. Stevie Payne, Michelle’s brother who has Down syndrome, plays himself and is a real scene stealer.
Concrete Cowboy (2020) – starring Idris Elba and Caleb McLaughlin (from Stranger Things). It’s a fictional story of an estranged father and son bonding over horses. It’s inspired by the real-life African-American riding culture of Philadelphia and the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. The movie was adapted from the YA novel Ghetto Cowboy and it had me at “Idris Elba.”
And it’s the kind of animated horse movie that Lezah is not into, but for any 6-year-olds out there, I would recommend Spirit Untamed (2021). Set in old west, it’s about an estranged father and daughter bonding over…well, you know. It got mixed reviews (from non-6-year-old reviewers) but it’s about a trio of plucky multicultural girls trying to save a wild herd of horses from evil wranglers. C’mon, what’s not to love about that?!