Another trip into nostalgia-land yesterday; after wrestling with a fractious printer which for some reason will only print blue out of the multicolor cartridge, I popped on Disney's Horse Without a Head (based on Paul Berna's book. This is one of my favorites of the made-for-the-television-series Disney films (it was released theatrically in Europe and that's the version I had recorded off the Disney Channel--say, remember when the Disney Channel still showed Disney films????). The story: five poor kids in a small French town have only one toy, a big Victorian hobbyhorse on wheels that one of the children's grandparents found in a bombed-out house (the book takes place in the early 50s, when France was still pockmarked with shelled buildings from World War II, the Disney version looks contemporary to 1962 when it was made, but it's hard to tell). The toy lost its head in the bombings, hence the title. The kids use it as a sort of roller-coaster to ride down the long hill in town, blocking traffic to the eternal exasperation of the local gendarme, and arising the ire of a tinware peddler named Roublot. Roublot, we find out as the story opens, has some unsavory friends, ones who are planning to rob a train of a ten-million franc bank shipment.

Of course the kids, the horse, and the crooks all collide, along with the help of Inspector Sinot, the good-natured chief of police who's, ironically, longing for some action.

They wouldn't make a movie like this for kids today. Heavens, there are no fancy special effects, no snazzy costumes, no fantastical turns or loud noises, no farting jokes! It's just a nice kids' adventure story of the Enid Blyton/Trixie Belden/Whitman books school of writing.

Speaking of Trixie Belden, in Horse, although the leader of the kids is ostensibly Fernand, played by Vincent Winter, who's also in The Three Lives of Thomasina and Almost Angels, the most interesting and ingenuous is Marion. Played with waiflike looks by Pamela Franklin in what I believe was her first Disney job (A Tiger Walks was later), Marion has always been one of my favorite characters, literary/movie, whatever. She's "the girl with the dogs": when she's not helping her mother or racketing down the street on the horse without a head, she picks up injured or hungry strays, feeds and treats them, then finds them homes. But first, she teaches them to always respond to her whistle.

And they do, several times in the movie, to great effect. :-) I always did like Marion...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:12:00 AM

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