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Why so much hype?

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie but grossly overrated

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Like John Garfield, Robert Mitchum is yet another one of my very favourite actors from that particular, by-gone era of moviedom history.If you ask me, Mitchum was such an easy-to-like actor. Without any apparent pretentiousness, he casually projected just the right kind of masculinity (on-screen) which unanimously appealed to both men and women, alike.So, with keeping that in mind - Is it any wonder that I found the best scenes in The Red Pony to clearly be the ones where Mitchum played a direct part in the action? I mean, without this dude's presence I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this film to the degree that I did and I most likely would've rated it somewhat lower, as well.For the most part - I'd say that The Red Pony (which was beautifully filmed in lush Technicolor) was a film that would be best enjoyed by children. There really wasn't much of a tale in this sentimental, Hollywood Western to hold the rapt attention of an adult.

The Red Pony was an early novel of John Steinbeck dealing with memories of his childhood in the Salinas Valley in California. It was Republic's prestige film for 1949 away from the B westerns that were the company's bread and butter. Herbert J. Yates even had the good sense not to have wife Vera Hruba Ralston in it.He probably spent half the studio budget signing as stars Myrna Loy who was free lancing and Robert Mitchum from RKO. In Mitchum's case it might have been a question of a favor or two owed to Howard Hughes. Both studios were B picture companies.The story takes place like Steinbeck's other classic, East of Eden, during the years before American entry into World War I. The Tiflin family has recently moved on that ranch. For Myrna Loy it was a case of going back to her roots on both the screen and the film, in real life she grew up on a ranch in Montana. But her husband Sheppard Strudwick is a school teacher and a city kid and feels an outsider. Especially when their kid Peter Miles starts hanging around with ranch hand Robert Mitchum.Anyway the lad is given a roan colored pony, a really good looking and smart animal as well. The pony and the boy take to each other and Miles follows Mitchum's instructions on care and feeding implicitly. He even teaches the pony some tricks one of which will innocently bring about the animal's ultimate demise and a Tiflin family crisis.Though the Tiflins are quite a bit up the economic scale from the Baxters, The Red Pony is very similar in plot in a lot of respects to the Marjorie Keneston Rawlings classic, The Yearling. Both are nice family films in which the boy protagonists face crises involving their respective pets. They also have some disturbing scenes in them, young Peter Miles's scrape with some buzzards might give real little kids nightmares. I may have some myself tonight.Still if you are willing to risk the bad dreams, The Red Pony is a fine family film that still holds up well after 59 years.

THE RED PONY is a beautifully photographed Technicolor film from Republic starring MYRNA LOY and ROBERT MITCHUM, accompanied by one of Aaron Copland's most distinctive background scores. It has wonderful credentials in that it's based on a series of John Steinbeck stories and is directed by Lewis Milestone.For all that, the story of a farm boy's growing awareness of the cruelties of nature and the fallibility of men--even good men like Mitchum who can't always make the best of a bad situation--lacks any dramatic vigor it may have had if it wasn't directed in such a casual, slow-moving fashion and cluttered with small moments that detract from the main storyline.Atmospherically, it's rich in farm detail, filmed on a real ranch and capturing the look of country life with effortless ease. Little PETER MILES plays the boy capably enough, but it's ROBERT MITCHUM as the ranch hand who feels he's failed the boy when the pony dies, who gives the truest, most believable performance in the film.MYRNA LOY and SHEPPERD STRUDWICK are a bit too solemn as the rather remote parents and LOUIS CALHERN is allowed a little too many blustery moments as the grandfather living on his past exploits.Summing up: It's the sort of film you wish could have been better, never quite living up to its rich potential.

I guess this movie is about personal isolation. All of the characters seem to be totally isolated from one another. I never sensed that they were really interacting - just acting. We know why all of these individuals are so isolated, but none of them really seems to do anything to overcome the isolation. They just seem to wallow around in it, except Billy (Robert Mitchum) in the end, when he resolves to provide the boy a new pony - at a potentially high, gruesome cost.The film reflects lots of internal tension, but the characters are not accessible enough to each other or the audience for us to get drawn into their individual desperation. The father is a stranger in his community, and estranged from his wife (Myrna Loy), son, and especially his father-in-law. The father-in-law is living in his own past. The wife is estranged from her husband, and doesn't interact much with her son. At first, I thought one of the subplots of the movie was going to be about Loy's being torn between her husband (who is distant from both her and their son) and the brooding and handsome hired hand, Billy (who connects with the boy). But that never really materialized. From the beginning Billy is already absorbed in something, but I couldn't figure out what. (I kind of expected to discover that he was on the lam, and that might become a subplot!)The boy relates to the hired man, Billy, through the first part of the film, but then their relationship founders after the red pony dies. In the end, Billy is worried about his horse coming into foal, and he is prepared to sacrifice her for the colt, so that he can give it to the boy and redeem himself in the boy's eyes for the earlier death of the pony. But the horse has an uncomplicated delivery of her colt, and everybody ends up laughing. So, I guess they all finally connect and live happily ever after. The arrival of the foal seems to magically knit everything together. Great... I guess.Through the entire film I had the feeling that there was a ton of back-story that was essential to understanding all of the characters (except the boy) but for some reason the director simply chose to omit it. In particular, Billy (Mitchum) seems like a mysterious and brooding loner from the outset, but that mystery is never resolved.A nice cast, great writer, great composer and very competent director never get this film to gel. For me all of the characters were superficial and distant, never personally drawing me into their own struggles. Consequently the resolution of those struggles seems one-dimensional - in fact, a mystery to me. A pity - I would have liked to like these people, but I never really got to know them.