Possibly the best horse movie since National Velvet and without question the best Mickey Rooney showcase in a long, long time, but not quite as long a time as since National Velvet. Carroll Ballard, a Francis Coppola protégé, makes the story seem very tall, as though seen from a child's point of view. His extensive narrative skills range from inflating a couple of mundane objects -- jackknife and horse statuette -- with symbolic and sentimental value, to finding an out-of-the-way path into every big event, like the momentous moment when the shipwrecked boy mounts the wild Arabian stallion for the first time, luring the horse into the ocean for a graceful underwater pas-de-deux and then swimming onto his back. The drawback of this improbably arty children's movie, depending on how much beauty you can tolerate at any one sitting, is the rapturous photographic style which occasionally results in something really hair-raising, like the shipwreck scene with the panicked horse leaping over the railing against a fiery night sky and the boy plummeting from the midst of the inferno into the dark and silent ocean, but results more often in a sort of National Geographic appreciation of nature; nature at its most laundered, starched, ironed. With Kelly Reno, Terri Garr. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd