In his latest visit to the cinema, our equine film correspondent talks to child star Kelly Reno about his role alongside Mickey Rooney in a gorgeous adventure movie from the late 1970s.
The Black Stallion (1979)
directed by Carroll Ballard; starring Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney
Kelly Reno will be relaxing at home, enjoying a little quiet time before his next long-haul truck run, when a text will pop up on his phone from friend. “Hey, Kelly. Heads up. The movie is on TNT right now.”
Reno will sigh, smile, and maybe even switch channels, if only to acknowledge the message. The movie is The Black Stallion, a bonafide classic among the greatest horse fables, and the kid on the screen cavorting with the gorgeous Arabian steed is the 11-year-old version of Reno himself, in the role of young Alec Ramsey.
Those of us fortunate enough to have been in theatres at the release of The Black Stallion, in October 1979, came away thinking it was a handsome, adventurous telling of the Walter Farley origin story, from the first of his series of books. The tale was delightfully preposterous, wrapped in cinematography for the ages.
I saw it on the biggest of all possible screens in one of the twin, 1,400-seat Century Plaza Theatres in West Los Angeles. You know, the way movies are meant to be seen. As a working turf writer at the time, I’m sure I was hyper-critical of the film’s racing scenes that served as an action climax.
But the viewer does not come to The Black Stallion for the horse race. They come for the fiery shipwreck, with young Alec and the stallion flailing in panic as the sea burns around them.
They come for the tentative, wordless evolution of their relationship while stranded on the Mediterranean island. They come for a second half of the movie seized by the inimitable Mickey Rooney as Alec’s mentor, his character channeling the spirit of his role in National Velvet from more than half a century before.
Referring to director Carroll Ballard, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote: “His great scenes have a sensuous trancelike quality. The movie is set in 1949, but it seems outside time. And this distilled atmosphere makes it possible for a simple boy-and-animal story to be transformed into something mythological.”
That simple story is conveyed by a pair of amateur actors who steal the show: Cass Ole, the eight-year-old black Arabian bred in Texas, and Reno, the kid fresh off the family’s Colorado ranch.
Now 56 and living in a suburb of Milwaukee with his wife, Dawn, Reno has been at the wheel of cross-country truck hauls for the last quarter of a century, making a living far from what turned out to be a brief acting career.
‘I wasn’t trying to be an actor’
It was a friend of the Reno family who noticed an ad in the Denver Post calling for young riders to audition for a role in a movie. “I wasn’t trying to be an actor,” Reno said recently. “For me it was a day off from school, so why not?”
Before long, young Kelly found himself in Southern California auditioning on horseback. Maybe it was the freckles, or the scratchy, piccolo voice, or the wirey, pre-adolescent physique that sold the filmmakers.
Reno found himself cast alongside veteran performers that included not only Rooney, but also Teri Garr, Hoyt Axton, and the African-American character actor Clarence Muse, whose long list of credits included a role as “stablehand” in the 1930 film Thoroughbred. (Muse died on Oct. 13, 1979, one day before his 90th birthday and four days before the release of The Black Stallion, his final picture.)
The whole Reno family headed for Italy, where the shipwreck scenes were filmed in a vast tank at the fabled Cinecitta Studios in Rome and the island locale was the real life Sardinia.
However, for this fan the most dramatic passage remains the stormy, dead-of-night workout turned in by the Alec and the stallion in an effort to secure a starting spot in the heralded match race. If nothing else, the sequence earned Robert Dalva his Oscar nomination for film editing, as the special effects crew cranked up the elements.
“They were using fire hoses for the rain and wind machines,” Reno recalled. “But that was me shivering for real. It was cold.”
Reno did the great portion of Alec’s riding, and their scenes on the island remain the benchmark for horse-human interaction in film.
“There was a pocket in my shorts with oats I’d feed him,” Reno said, “so when I’d take off running across the beach, he knew where those oats came from and follow me around.”
Then again, the movie magic did not come without cost. “I remember how he grabbed me once by the shoulder with his teeth because I didn’t feed him quick enough,” said Reno, all of 75 pounds at the time.
‘Shook me like a rag doll’
“He picked me up and shook me like a rag doll. I reared back and punched him right in the nose. The director yells: ‘Don’t be punching the horse!’ But I’m 11, a ranch kid. I think he was mad because the horse was the star.”
In addition to Dalva’s Oscar nomination for editing, Rooney was nominated as Best Supporting Actor, his first in 23 years. Rooney died in 2014, a hardcore horseplayer to his final days.
“Mickey Rooney was a helluva a guy,” Reno said. “He was the life of the party. But when you were one-on-one with him, sitting in his trailer, he was the nicest, most helpful guy in the world.
“He did get mad at me once when we were filming at a track in Canada. I bet two dollars on a horse he said had no chance, who went out and won at 50-1. He got a little quiet for a while.”
As for the legacy of the movie, which was produced by Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather fame, the Los Angeles Film Critics honored Caleb Deschanel for his cinematography and composer Carmine Coppola for his music.
In 2002, the National Film Preservation Board added The Black Stallion to its list of significant films, then in 2005 a poll published by the American Film Institute placed the movie at No. 64 among America's 100 Most Inspiring Movies, ahead of Cool Hand Luke, Thelma & Louise, and The Ten Commandments.
Reno went on to make three more movies, including The Black Stallion Returns and a segment of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. In 1984, he was severely injured in a highway crash in Colorado when an 18-wheeler ran his pickup truck off the road.
‘Birthday present was being able to walk’
Reno had a long siege in the hospital to repair a badly fractured leg, among other injuries, and by the time he was back in the world, his film career had passed him by. “My 18th birthday present was being able to walk again,” Reno said.
After a period ranching in Colorado, Reno turned the nightmare of the crash caused by that errant 18-wheeler into a steady career driving big rigs far and wide. Once in a while he’ll be surprised by someone who recognizes his name as the kid from The Black Stallion.
But thoughts of ever making movies had faded far away – until he got a call from independent filmmaker Richard Douglas Jensen, who was working on a movie called No Man’s Law.
“The Black Stallion is the finest example of film-making where a classic book is turned into a brilliant movie,” Jensen said. “I was watching it during pre-production and found an article about Kelly from a few years ago. The part that intrigued me was his wife quoted saying that every now and then she could see he missed the movie business.
“When I contacted him about doing the cameo he was skeptical,”Jensen said. “But I wrote the scene specifically for him and he agreed to do it.”
The viewer must wait until the final moments of No Man’s Law before Reno appears, at the wheel of his big rig, to share a scene with Jensen as actor/director. “When Kelly's name was added to the credits on the IMDB site, the film suddenly shot up in notoriety,” Jensen said.
More recently, Reno had another small role in a Jensen film. And though it’s far from the celebrity of a major Hollywood project, it must be fun to be asked.
“It is, and Richard makes it easy,” Reno said. “But I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s been an awful long time for a comeback.”
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