Hollywood Hoofbeats E-Book

Petrine Day Mitchum

• Herausgeber: CompanionHouse Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 429

Beschreibung

The horses that captured the moviegoers' hearts are the common denominator in Hollywood Hoofbeats. As author Petrine Day Mitchum writes, "the movies as we know them would be vastly different without horses. There would be no Westerns—no cowboy named John Wayne—no Gone with the Wind, no Ben Hur, no Dances with Wolves…" no War Horse, no True Grit, no Avatar! Those last three 21st-century Hollywood creations are among the new films covered in this expanded second edition of Hollywood Hoofbeats written by the daughter of movie star Robert Mitchum, who himself appeared on the silver screen atop a handsome chestnut gelding. Having grown up around movie stars and horses, Petrine Day Mitchum is the ideal author to pay tribute to the thousands of equine actors that have entertained the world since the inception of the film medium.From the early days of D.W. Griffith's The Great Train Robbery to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, this celebration of movies promises something for every Hollywood fan… the raucous comedy of Abbot and Costello (and "Teabiscuit") in It Ain't Hay, a classic sports films like National Velvet starring Elizabeth Taylor, a timeless epic with Errol Flynn, and films featuring guitar-strumming cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.INSIDE HOLLYWOOD HOOFBEATSMovie trivia and fascinating anecdotes about the stars of yesterday and todayAn inside look at the stunts horses performed in motion pictures and the lingering controversiesHundreds of illustrations, including rare movie posters, movie stills, and film clipsUpdated, expanded text including coverage of new movies and photographsChapters devoted to action films, Westerns, comedies, musicals, child stars, and moreFamous TV programs and their horses including Mr. Ed and Silver (Lone Ranger)

Leseprobe

Hollywood Hoofbeats

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Editor: Andrew DePrisco

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchum, Petrine Day.

Hollywood hoofbeats / by Petrine Day Mitchum ; with Audrey Pavia.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62008-133-4 (alk. paper)

1. Horses in motion pictures. 2. Western films--United States--History and criticism. I. Pavia, Audrey. II. Title.

PN1995.9.A5M56 2014

791.43’66296655--dc23

2014015367

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62008-171-6

This book has been published with the intent to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter within. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the author and publisher expressly disclaim any responsibility for any errors, omissions, or adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

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Dedication

To the memory of champion trick rider and stuntwoman Donna Hall, who once said, “They ought to build a monument to the picture horse.”

Donna Hall 1928–2002

Introduction

Robert Mitchum rides Steel in their second film together, West of the Pecos, 1945.

Hollywood Hoofbeats represents decades of research, not only the fourteen years I and my indispensible co-author, Audrey Pavia, collectively spent uncovering amazing stories but also years of work by film historians, journalists, movie buffs, and horse lovers. To these we owe an enormous debt of gratitude.

My own journey down the Hollywood Hoofbeats trail began in 2000, when I began researching a documentary film for a colleague. The film never materialized, but I was hooked on the subject of horses in film. As a child, my favorite TV shows were Westerns and National Velvet, and I was lucky enough to grow up on a horse farm and have my own pony. But I never thought of horses as actors.

Actors? Actor is not a word that usually springs to mind when contemplating the many roles horses have played in our history. Their contributions to mankind have been well chronicled and celebrated in the arts, yet we rarely think of horses as entertainers. Since the rise of the internal combustion engine, however, horses in developed nations have flourished primarily as sources of amusement rather than labor. Equestrian sports may be big business, but their real raison d’etre is entertainment. Wild West and Civil War reenactments, medieval jousting exhibitions, and a variety of touring equestrian shows have been enthralling audiences for decades. So have horses in movies. But actors?

As my research of movie horses expanded, I discovered what I had long suspected: some horses are natural actors. In my childhood, my family owned a big bay Quarter Horse named Woody who feigned lameness to avoid work. One day he would be lame on his right foreleg, the next day on his left. There was nothing detectably wrong with Woody besides a preference for his pasture over the saddle.

Unlike Woody, movie horses—the good and well-treated ones—love their jobs. Time and again, the men and women who have worked with equine actors—the trainers, wranglers, stunt performers, actors, and directors—told me stories of horses who knew when the camera was running and took direction with uncanny awareness. I heard tales of specially trained stunt horses who loved to show off, and lived long and pampered lives. I also heard about equine star tantrums and unruly performers whose diva behavior was tolerated because of their box-office cachet.

It is true that stunt horses were sometimes subjected to cruelty in the past and that far too many equine fatalities occurred in the name of entertainment. It is also true that there were movie horse trainers working in silent films, and the early decades of filmmaking, who today would be called “horse whisperers,” a moniker they would most likely mock and modestly reject. The best trainers currently working in the film industry utilize the same basic methods of those film pioneers.

Hurried production schedules have not always allowed for the time needed to properly train horse actors, but overall conditions for equine thespians—and all performing animals—have vastly improved in recent decades thanks largely to the vigilance of the American Humane Association’s Film and Television Unit. These days it is considered de rigueur for the AHA’s certification to appear in the credits of any film that utilizes animal actors.

There’s that word again. Actors. In the course of writing Hollywood Hoofbeats, I watched scores of movies. Certain horses stood out from film to film, and I developed favorites: a black-and-white Paint named Dice, whose deadpan expressions belied his hilarious tricks; Highland Dale, a stunning black American Saddlebred stallion who, unlike old Woody, learned to limp on command and won numerous awards during his long career; Steel, a handsome blaze-faced chestnut gelding who supported a galaxy of Hollywood stars. One of these was my father, Robert Mitchum, who lied to the producers of his first western, Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943), and told them he could ride. He learned on the job—barely—and when he won his first starring role as Jim Lacy in Nevada (1944), the producers were smart enough to pair him with a seasoned equine actor, Steel. They made two movies together.

Watching so many films of multiple genres, I began to realize that the movies as we know them would be vastly different without horses. There would be no Westerns—no cowboy named John Wayne!—no Gone with the Wind, no Ben Hur, no Dances with Wolves, no Gladiator, no Seabiscuit or The Black Stallion. In fact, the movies might not exist at all since the entire motion picture industry evolved from an experiment with a camera and a horse.

While it is virtually impossible to cite every horse who left his mark on celluloid, with Hollywood Hoofbeats, I have attempted to pay tribute to the spirits of the marvelous equine actors who have traversed cinema’s varied terrain since its inception.

Petrine Day Mitchum

Santa Ynez, California, March, 2014

1. The First Movie Stars

“The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”

—D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

Abe Edgington and the twelve frames that changed the world.

The first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, in character with some of his equine cast members in Niles, California, where many of his Westerns were made.

The first movie star was a horse. Equus caballus, that potent symbol of human aspiration, had been capturing the imaginations of painters, poets, songsmiths, and sculptors for centuries when he was finally captured in action by motion pictures on a fine June day in 1878. Before Thomas Edison and D. W. Griffith began their careers as film pioneers, before the first cowboy actor on a trusty steed galloped across a silent screen, before the entire film industry exploded to the sound of thundering hooves, there were a revolutionary series of motion pictures starring a Standardbred harness racer with the unlikely name of Abe Edgington. This equine performer blazed unchartered terrain by virtue of a bet that involved his hoofbeats.

The Horse in Motion

Abe Edgington’s place in history was guaranteed in 1878 when his owner, wealthy railroad magnate and one-time California governor Leland Stanford, hired British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his horses. Stanford hoped to prove that a racing trotter going full speed would, for a split second, be completely airborne. On a June day in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge began by shooting a series of photos of Abe Edgington pulling a sulky. Members of the press witnessed this historic event, which utilized twelve cameras with unique lenses and an electronically controlled mechanism designed to operate special shutters. Wires placed underneath the racetrack at 21-inch intervals triggered the release of the camera shutters as the sulky wheels made contact with the ground.

It took half a second to take the twelve pictures, which clearly showed the high-stepping Abe Edgington’s four legs suspended in midair. Stanford had his proof, and the world had the beginnings of a new art form: motion pictures.

Four days later, Muybridge successfully photographed Stanford’s horse Occident being galloped under saddle. Excited by the results, Stanford—who adored his horses and forbade farmhands to speak harshly to them—funded more of Muybridge’s photographic experiments. Within two weeks, Muybridge had produced six more sequential photographs of Stanford’s horses, depicting them walking, trotting, and galloping. The pictures were published as The Horse in Motion.

This revolutionary series aroused international interest, and the University of Philadelphia commissioned Muybridge to take “moving pictures” of a number of animals, including horses. By the time he had completed this work, Muybridge had shot 20,000 pictures, many featuring randomly chosen horses, named Daisy, Eagle, Elberon, Sharon, Pandora, Billy, Annie G, and Bouquet. Along with Abe Edgington, Occident, and Stanford’s other horses, these animals ranked among the world’s first movie stars.

The train robbers made the mistake of dismounting their getaway horses as they are confronted by posse members in this shot from The Great Train Robbery.

Native Americans and their ponies reenact an encounter with cowboys in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, circa 1908.

Edison

In 1894, sixteen years after Muybridge began his unique way of photographing horses, inventor Thomas Alva Edison patented the first motion-picture camera. Edison’s Kinetograph camera and his film-viewing device, the Kinetoscope, had admittedly been inspired by the work of Muybridge, who had invented the first film projector, the Zoopraxiscope, in 1879. Muybridge had shown Edison his invention in 1888 and proposed collaboration, but Edison declined the offer, having his own vision to pursue.

Credited with starting the American motion picture industry, on April 14, 1894, Edison opened a Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City, where awestruck audiences watched his short films. Perhaps again taking his cue from Muybridge, Edison turned to the visual excitement of horses to enliven many early films. A bucking horse, Sunfish, along with Colorado cowboy Lee Martin, starred in the aptly titled 1894 short Bucking Bronco, filmed at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. That same year, Edison filmed Buffalo Bill himself putting his beautiful gray horse Isham through his paces while Wild West performers twirled lassos around them. Technically, these two films could be called the first Westerns.

An early Edison melodrama, The Burning Stable (1896), shows a real barn in flames. This nail-biter depicts four eye-catching white horses being led through the billowing smoke. In the sequel, Fighting the Fire (1896), two horses come to the rescue by pulling a fire engine to the burning stable. Perhaps the first film featuring “trick” horses was the Edison-produced Trained Cavalry Horses (1898), which shows Troop F’s mounts lying down and scrambling to their feet on command. Another 1898 Edison film, Elopement on Horseback, featured a bride sneaking out a window to land behind her beloved on the back of a tall but short-tailed bay. The one-scene thriller was photographed by Edwin S. Porter, who was on the verge of making his own mark on cinema history with the first “feature” film, a twelve-minute Western.

Directed by Porter and released by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1903, The Great Train Robbery told the story of four bandits in the Wild West. (The film was actually shot in New Jersey.) The train robbers made their getaway on horses, which provided a considerable level of action for the primitive film. The getaway mounts, two grays and two dark horses—it’s difficult to distinguish browns and bays from chestnuts in early black-and-white films—in western bridles and cavalry saddles, don’t appear until the second half of the movie. After the violent stick-up, the robbers leap from the train to mount their waiting horses and gallop into the woods; a posse of six sets off in hot pursuit. Thus Porter staged what would become one of the most enduring elements of cinema—the chase scene.

This crude but exciting Western enthralled naïve audiences, and moviegoers began demanding more narrative films. Movies-only theaters sprang up around the country, and a new form of entertainment was assured its place in American life.

Americans were not the only ones riveted by celluloid horses. France and Australia had their own developing movie industries, and horses played significant roles. The French Lumière brothers made a series of minimalist films in the late nineteenth century. Called “actuality” films, these mini-documentaries were remarkably similar to Edison’s earliest efforts. One such offering, Dragoons Crossing the Saone, consists entirely of eleven shirtless boys riding bareback into a river and swimming their horses to the other side. Another Lumière film, Pack Train on the Chilkoot Pass, filmed in the United States in 1898, shows huge pack mule teams being led by men on horseback through a rugged mountain pass.

In 1906, the Australian brothers John and Nevin Tait produced a full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, which employed fifty circus horses and a team of roughriders. The success of the eighty-minute “bushranging” film, the Australian version of the Western, launched a series of wild and woolly Outback features that attracted audiences with authentic—and often dangerous—horse action. In 1912, the New South Wales Police Department banned the films for allegedly making a mockery of the law. The Australians consoled themselves with Westerns imported from America.

A terrified white horse is led to safety in this frame captured from Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable.

An early Australian movie horse hits the water in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).

The Father of Film

Not long after the success of The Great Train Robbery, another player emerged to forever change the fledgling motion picture business. D. W. Griffith, an actor working for a flourishing New York production studio called the Biograph Company, stepped behind the camera for the first time as a director in 1908. Griffith, who would eventually be lionized as “the father of film” for his innovative staging and editing techniques, was primarily interested in human drama. However, he also had an instinct for popular taste and understood the undeniable appeal of horses cavorting on screen. Griffith’s first short for Biograph was The Adventures of Dollie, a gripping tale about a little girl kidnapped and hidden in a barrel by gypsies. In the melodrama’s climactic sequence, the gypsy wagon crosses a river, and the barrel containing little Dollie falls into the drink, headed for nearby rapids. The two horses pulling the gypsy wagon, a flashy dapple-gray and a brown, are essential to the suspenseful action.

In 1908, The Runaway Horse, an immensely successful French film from the Pathé production company, was exported to the United States. This early “foreign film” inspired Griffith to copy its use of reverse motion to great comic effect in The Curtain Pole, which features a horse-drawn carriage as an integral part of the sight gags. While his comic potential was just beginning to be exploited, the horse as sight gag, clown, and “straight man” would become a reliable laugh getter in the years to come.

A more sober subject, Custer’s Last Stand, inspired Griffith’s 1912 action drama The Massacre. Scores of horses stirred up the dust, particularly in scenes involving a “death circle” of Indians on cantering mounts, surrounding their subdued enemies in ever-shrinking circles. This dizzying use of equine action would become a staple of Westerns featuring confrontations between cowboys and Indians.

Another of Griffith’s Biograph Westerns, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), employed a number of pinto horses, used mostly as mounts for Indian characters. During the climactic battle sequence, a gray horse ridden by an Indian rears and topples over in a stunning backward fall while another pinto horse hits the dirt in the background. This sequence is especially noteworthy as both these animals, as well as a brown horse in a later scene, appear to be trained falling horses.

By the end of 1913, Griffith had left Biograph to concentrate on realizing his dream of directing a full-length epic. While he was undoubtedly out to shake up the world, his landmark film would have an impact far beyond anything he could have imagined.

The 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation created a furor throughout the United States. Originally titled The Clansman, after the book upon which it was based, the controversial film incited charges of racism. In the film’s most thrilling and incendiary sequence, Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” was played to accompany scores of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, mounted aboard hooded and caped horses, as they gallop four abreast through the countryside and into town to avenge the death of a white girl. Masterfully edited, the sequence is remarkable not only for its shocking emotional impact but also for the preparation that must have been required to accustom the horses to performing in such elaborate gear. The powerful image of a hooded Klansman aboard a caped and hooded horse was used extensively in poster art and publicity photos for the film and undoubtedly fueled the emotional storm that raged around the movie’s release.

Three years later, Griffith released a less controversial extravaganza, Intolerance, a film that wove together four different stories of man’s inhumanity throughout history. In the final crosscut race sequence, horses and chariots storm through ancient Babylon. While perhaps not as electrifying as the Klan sequence in The Birth of a Nation, this sequence is nevertheless an impressive example of early equine film action requiring sophisticated staging.

Ku Klux Klansmen gallop down a road in The Birth of a Nation (1915); among the actors is future Western director John Ford.

The frightening image of the hooded Klansman and horse drew audiences to see The Birth of a Nation.

The First Movie Cowboy

The Great Train Robbery did more than establish the popularity of the Western. It also launched the career of an unlikely movie cowboy, Gilbert Max Anderson (née Aronson), who came to be known as Broncho (later “Bronco”) Billy Anderson.

A former janitor at Edison’s New Jersey studio, Anderson began his movie cowboy career with a lie. When asked by director Edwin S. Porter if he could ride, Anderson reportedly replied, “I was born in the saddle.” The Arkansas-born Anderson had never been on a horse in his life and quickly proved it by falling off the mount he had been assigned for the shoot. The ambitious Anderson managed to convince Porter to cast him in several nonriding roles instead. Since close-ups were rare in early films, variously costumed actors could easily play multiple parts.

The financial success of The Great Train Robbery, rather than any great desire to work with horses, motivated Anderson to continue his career as a screen cowboy. Horses were merely a necessary part of the business of making Westerns, and he clearly understood their value in adding bankable excitement to a scene.

In 1907, Anderson and a partner started the Chicago-based Essanay Studios and began producing Westerns. The company eventually moved to California to capitalize on the scenic locations and agreeable weather. Pioneering the portrayal of a complex hero, both good and bad, Anderson starred in his own films as Broncho Billy. Although he created a considerable career for himself on horseback, the heavy-set actor never developed great riding skills and never became affiliated with a particular horse. He also had no illusions about his equestrian expertise—or that of his fellow thespians—and was the first actor to employ stunt doubles for the hard falls.

One spring day in 1911, a real cowboy, Jack Montgomery, stumbled upon a Broncho Billy production in northern California’s rugged Niles Canyon. Montgomery, along with fourteen other cowhands looking for work, rode over a ridge to watch Anderson shooting a Western in the valley below. Recognizing a great opportunity for capturing genuine horse action, Anderson offered Montgomery and his saddle pals a good day’s pay for riding in the action sequences. Montgomery rode his own ranch horse, a blue roan gelding named Cowboy, in a number of shots until Anderson explained that he needed a stuntman to double an actor in a scene of a horse and rider falling. An excellent horseman, the unsuspecting Montgomery was selected for the honor.

Montgomery quickly discovered Anderson’s attitude toward movie horses. Anderson’s crew rigged a big bay with a crude version of the tripping device known as a Running W, a contraption designed to pull the horse’s front feet out from under him at a full gallop. Piano wire attached to leather hobbles on the horse’s fetlocks was threaded through a ring on his cinch and staked to a buried post. Montgomery was instructed to bail off the horse a split second before the animal was yanked to the ground. Both horse and rider miraculously endured the brutal incident without apparent injury, but Montgomery, who went on to become a top Hollywood stuntman and double for the great cowboy star Tom Mix, found the horse’s treatment disturbing.

In his later films, Anderson continued to use horses as dramatic elements, increasing his popularity with movie audiences who expected ever greater thrills. His flamboyant theatrics are typified in his 1919 Western The Son-of-a-Gun. In one outrageous sequence, he pulls his horse, a rangy sorrel, into a rear before charging into a saloon, guns blazing. Having made his grand entrance, the chunky cowboy dismounts and, with a hearty slap on the rump, sends his trusty steed back out through the barroom doors. Eventually copied to the point of becoming a movie cliché, this wild entrance was new in 1919; such novel theatrics were essential to Broncho Billy’s appeal.

After contributing five hundred films to the Western genre, Anderson turned his businesslike eye to comedies, working with Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy in subsequent productions. His on-screen persona of Broncho Billy eventually earned Anderson a special Academy Award for being the first cowboy star. More important, Broncho Billy blazed the trail for future cowboy stars—and their horses.

The first real cowboy to become a stuntman, Jack Montgomery is aboard his Mexican horse Chapo in this photo from 1925, the year Rudolph Valentino rode the same horse in The Eagle.

2. A Horse and His Man

“A cowboy is a man with guts and a horse.”

—Attributed to Will James

The Majestic Silver King and Fred Thomson

Since his auspicious debut in the birth of cinema, the movie horse has enjoyed a long canter in the limelight. During the silent film era, 1893–1930, the horse achieved a type of stardom that seems unbelievable today. Even more remarkable, his star power endured for decades. Spurring that rise was the creation of the cowboy-horse partnership. The right man paired with the right horse could make both idols on the silver screen. For some Western fans, the horse was the bigger box-office attraction. Roy Rogers, the great cowboy star of the 1940s and 1950s, who became identified with his palomino stallion, once quipped, “I have no illusions about my popularity. Just as many fans are as interested in seeing Trigger as they are in seeing me.”

Long before Roy Rogers and Trigger became celebrity icons, however, a dour Western actor and his red-and-white pinto pony, William S. Hart and Fritz, established the cowboy-horse partnership in a series of gritty silent films. Following on their heels was a new breed of Western stars—real cowboys such as Tom Mix and Ken Maynard. One horse, a charismatic stallion named Rex, bucked the formula and fought his way to the top alone.

The inimitable Fritz and Hart are seen in the California Desert.

The First Partnership

Like his predecessor, Broncho Billy, William S. Hart hailed from the East and would establish a screen persona as a “good/bad man.” The similarities stop there, however, as Hart had a genuine love of the West and horses. He had spent much of his childhood, in the late 1800s, traveling with his miller father and observing the ways of the disappearing Old West. Living for a time in the Dakotas, he learned good horsemanship and a respect of nature from his Sioux playmates. These childhood experiences would translate into an almost fanatical quest for realism in his films and result in the depiction of interdependent friendship between man and horse.

Before making his first movie, however, Hart spent two decades on the stage, in New York and London, and earned renown as a dramatic actor. His work in two plays about the West, The Squaw Man and The Virginian, helped create his film persona.

Hart’s early movie horse, Midnight—which the star described in My Life East and West as “a superb coal-black animal that weighed about 1200 pounds”—was considered hard to handle. Hart got along with the horse and tried to buy him for $150, a large sum in 1914. He belonged to the traveling Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, which during its off-season leased stock to the New York Motion Picture Company’s California production arm. When Joe Miller refused to sell the horse, Midnight hit the road with the 101 Show, and Hart began searching for another mount. Hart soon found himself drawn to a small pinto named Fritz, who was to become the equine half of the first screen cowboy-horse buddy relationship.

Ann Little began her career in Broncho Billy Anderson serials. She appeared in a series of Westerns for Universal, starting in 1915. She displays her cowgirl skills in this photo circa 1913–15.

Enter Fritz

A Sioux chief named Lone Bear reportedly brought Fritz to California in 1911. Hart first set eyes on the red-and-white gelding at Inceville, producer Thomas Ince’s movie ranch. Fritz was practicing his rear with actress Ann Little aboard and almost came down on Hart’s head. Despite the close call, Hart was smitten—not with Ann but with Fritz.

Though Fritz was small, weighing only about 1,000 pounds and standing just over 14-hands high, Hart saw something special in the little horse. In their first film together, the sturdy pinto impressed the actor with his stamina. The script called for Fritz to carry the 6-foot Hart and another actor, who with their guns and the heavy stock saddle must have weighed close to 400 pounds, for hours. The action culminated in Hart’s “falling” Fritz and then using him for a shield in a gunfight. The actor related in his autobiography that the brave but weary little horse gave him a thankful look that “plainly said: ‘Say, Mister, I sure was glad when you give me that fall.’”

Fritz apparently didn’t mind falling, as Hart regularly threw the pinto from a dead run, using a technique that has been traced back to the armies of Alexander the Great. In an era when tripping devices were commonly used in the movies, Fritz was one of the first trained falling horses.

Because of his markings, Fritz could not be doubled, so he performed every stunt himself—including jumping though windows and fire—except one. In Fritz’s last film, The Singer Jim McKee (1924), an elaborate replica of the pinto was painstakingly constructed (at the then-huge cost of $2,000) to take his place in a fall from a cliff into a deep gorge—a deadly drop of about 150 feet. Hart galloped Fritz to the edge of the cliff, then pulled him into a fall. Once the pinto was safely removed from the scene, the mechanical horse was brought in and held upright with piano wire for Hart to mount. When the wires were cut, Hart and the dummy tumbled over the precipice. While Hart was badly shaken by the fall, Fritz would not have survived it without serious injuries. The final edited sequence proved so convincing that the board of censors, headed by William Hays, president of the newly established Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, summoned Hart to New York, certain he had endangered a live horse. Once he explained how the astonishing illusion had been accomplished, the censors were placated, but when the film was released, it still caused a flood of mail from Fritz’s concerned fans.

William S. Hart discovered his equine partner Fritz at Thomas Ince’s movie ranch, Inceville, circa 1915.

From 1916–1918, William S. Hart’s movie ranch was on the Santa Monica site of the former Inceville.

The Greatest All-Around Horse

Hart adored Fritz, whom he described as “the greatest all-around horse that ever lived.” Two of Hart’s films, The Narrow Trail (1917) and Pinto Ben (1924), were made as tributes to the pinto. Hart even ghostwrote a book, Told Under a White Oak, published in 1922 and “authored” by Fritz. The charming book tells Fritz’s version of all the hard stunts he had performed during his career.

The actor was determined to buy Fritz, but his owner, Thomas Ince, refused to sell, figuring he could keep Hart under contract using the pinto as leverage. Hart outfoxed Ince, however, and made his purchase of Fritz a condition of a contract negotiation, then later withheld him from fifteen films to leverage a higher salary. Since early films were made quickly, Fritz was only out of the public eye for about two years. Fans missed their favorite movie horse, but his absence made his return, in 1919’s Sand, all the sweeter.

For all his sturdiness and willingness, Fritz had a temperamental streak. One of his quirks was his attachment to Cactus Kate, a feisty mare used in bucking scenes. Hart was obliged to buy the mare to keep his costar happy. On one particular day during the filming of Travelin’ On (1921), Kate had been left at the studio barn with another stablemate, a giant mule named Lisbeth. Fritz had several difficult scenes with a monkey and refused to work until the mare was brought to the set. With Kate watching from the wings, the shooting proceeded beautifully until a terrible bellowing and thundering of hooves interrupted work. Lisbeth had broken out of her corral and galloped a mile through traffic to join her friends.

Fritz was retired to Hart’s ranch in Newhall, California (now a museum), in 1924 and thus did not appear in Hart’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925). When the horse died at age thirty-one in 1938, Hart had him buried on the ranch with a huge stone marker that still reads, “Wm. S. Hart’s Pinto Pony Fritz—A Loyal Comrade.” In a monologue added to the 1939 rerelease of Tumbleweeds, the Shakespearean-trained actor gave a heartfelt speech honoring his lost horse.

Audiences had loved Fritz almost as much as Hart had, and savvy filmmakers were on to a winning combination. By the time Fritz made his last fall, the long parade of cowboy-horse screen partnerships had begun.

Fritz brings William S. Hart luck as he played a dice game between takes on the location of Riddle Gawne (Aircraft, 1918).

Ride ’Em Cowboys

With the Old West disappearing and the Western film flourishing, a new breed of actor rode onto the scene—literally. Many expert horsemen looking for ranch work at the turn of the century wound up displaying their skills in the traveling Wild West shows. As the popularity of these shows began to wane in the early 1910s, a number of cowboy performers moved on to the picture business. Rodeo stars were also lured to Hollywood by the promise of greater fame and fortune—or at least a steady paycheck doing stunt work. College athletes traded their track shoes for cowboy boots to cash in on the craze for hard-riding heroes. Thespians who weren’t born in the saddle quickly took riding lessons to get in the game, and playing cowboys catapulted a few actors to wider movie stardom. The first big Western star after William S. Hart, Tom Mix, was, however, a genuine cowboy.

Tom Mix and Tony

Tom Mix would come to be considered—by his cowboy contemporaries as well as by many modern film buffs—the best horseman of all the movie cowboys. Mix, born in Pennsylvania in 1880, learned horsemanship from his father, a stable master. Young Tom became an excellent rider. He also exhibited a theatrical flair and created his own cowboy suit when he was just twelve years old.

At eighteen, Mix joined the army for a three-year stint. He reenlisted but went AWOL a year later when he got married. He worked a variety of jobs, including wrangler, until he joined up with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1906. Mix became one of their top performers. Four years later, he hooked up with the Selig Polyscope Company to make Western movies. A Selig press release for the 1911 film Saved by the Pony Express stated: “The mounting and riding at full gallop of Western horses, and of an unbroken bronco by Tom Mix, are some of the most thrilling feats of horsemanship ever exhibited in a motion picture.”

Mix rode many horses in the 170 films he made for Selig. His first one, a stout brown gelding, looked like a real ranch horse and obviously derived his unusual name, .45, from the brand on his left hindquarters. Mix’s avowed favorite movie mount was his own horse, Old Blue, a tough little roan with two hind socks and a long dished face, typical of Arabian breeding. (It is not known whether this sturdy little gelding actually had Arabian blood.) Old Blue was so loved by Mix that when the horse had to be put down after breaking a leg in his corral at age twenty-two, the star was bereft. He had the roan buried at his ranch, Mixville, in Edendale, California, where many of the actor’s Westerns were filmed. Ever faithful to “the best horse I ever rode,” Mix placed a wreath on Old Blue’s grave every Decoration Day.

Tom Mix and his horse .45.

Tom Mix and his most beloved horse, Old Blue, as is clear from his heartfelt inscription on the photo.

By 1920, Mix was challenging William S. Hart for the cowboy-hat crown. The former’s early penchant for clothes had evolved into a flamboyant style, the antithesis of Hart’s gritty, authentic look. Mix’s movie persona was lighthearted and imbued with clever tongue-in-cheek humor. Audiences responded enthusiastically to Mix, but still something was missing—an equine sidekick as flashy as the man who rode him.

Enter Tony, “the Wonder Horse” Many stories have been circulated about Tony’s origins. They usually involve Tony’s being noticed as a colt, following his mother as she hauls a vegetable cart. Inevitably, Mix buys Tony for $10 or $12. The foggy details of the colt’s metamorphosis into the Wonder Horse imply that Mix himself trained Tony. However, the most convincing version of how Tony arrived in the actor’s life comes from Mix’s third wife, Olive Stokes. She claimed to have spotted the colt one day in 1914, as he followed a chicken cart being pulled by his dam along Glendale Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles. She contacted Pat Chrisman, Mix’s horse trainer, who lived a few blocks away. He liked what he saw and paid the cart driver $14 for the future Wonder Horse. Mix bought Tony from Chrisman in 1917 for a reported $600. Although the actor boasted that Tony did not have to be trained, just shown what to do, Chrisman taught Tony the many tricks that made him famous.

Tony appeared with Mix in a 1917 Selig film, The Heart of Texas Ryan, when the horse was three years old; it was not until Old Blue’s demise in 1919, however, that the actor began using Tony as his main movie mount. A sorrel with a long blaze and snip and two hind stockings, Tony appears to have been an American Quarter Horse type. He was highly intelligent and, like his master, had a quirky personality. According to director George Marshall: “Tom was temperamental, but it ran in streaks. Oddly enough, the horse, Tony, was very much like his owner. Pat Chrisman would rehearse him in some tricks for a picture and he would perform beautifully, but when it came time to shoot—nothing! He could be whipped, pulled, jerked, have bits changed, but still no performance. Come out the next morning and he would run through the whole scene with barely a rehearsal. Then he’d look at you as much to say: ‘How do you like that? Yesterday I didn’t feel like working.’”

On screen, however, Tony was always a loyal comrade. He was probably the first movie horse depicted as possessing a sophisticated knowledge of the English language, not only simple phrases such “whoa” or “good boy” but also whole sentences, usually directing him to perform some task. While horses can be trained to respond to certain repetitive phrases, this anthropomorphizing was pure fantasy. Audiences loved it, and from then on many actors talked to their horses and the horses were shown responding as if they really understood.

Tony, “the Wonder Horse,” was expert at helping Mix out of jams, rescuing damsels, and participating in thrilling stunts. Mix was well known for performing his own stunts. This was partly myth; the actor did have doubles for certain stunts. So did Tony. His doubles, made up to mirror his distinctive markings, performed jumps and falls in his place. A large mare, Black Bess, was used in long shots as her size read better on film. Still Tony often took risks along with his master. On one film, a dynamite blast, ill timed by the special-effects man, threw Tom and Tony 50 feet and knocked them unconscious. Tony suffered a large cut; Mix’s back reportedly looked as if he’d been hit by shotgun pellets.

For his efforts, Tony, “the Wonder Horse,” commanded costar billing and received his own fan mail. One letter addressed simply to “Just Tony, Somewhere in the U.S.A.” was duly delivered to the Mix ranch. He was the first horse to have his hoofprints imprinted in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, alongside the foot and handprints of Mix and other biped movie stars. Tony’s popularity was so great that three Mix films used his name in the titles: Just Tony (1922), Oh! You Tony (1924), and Tony Runs Wild (1926). Tony even “contributed” to a 1934 children’s book, Tony and His Pals.

Tony was utilized in many publicity campaigns and in one gag shot was shown getting a manicure and permanent wave for his appearance at New York’s Paramount Theater. He accompanied Tom on a 1925 European publicity tour, during which, according to a letter from Mix to his fans in Movie Monthly magazine, “Tony was patted by so many people it’s a wonder he has any hair left.”

Among the first stars to be merchandized, Tom Mix and Tony were immortalized as paper dolls.

Tom Mix and Tony make a handsome pair.

After placing his hoof prints in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Tony waits for his man Mix to sign his name.

Tony Jr. Takes OverAlthough Tony’s retirement was officially announced in 1932, his last credited role was in FBO Pictures’ The Big Diamond Robbery in 1929. When Mix returned to the screen in Universal’s 1932 talkie Destry Rides Again, he rode a new mount, Tony Jr. (no relation to his namesake). Like his predecessor, Tony Jr. was a sorrel, but he was more striking than Tony, with a wider blaze and four high stockings. He may have been sired by an Arabian and purchased by Mix from a florist in New York in 1930. Tony Jr. made his first known appearance on January 6, 1932, in a publicity shot with Mix, who was recuperating from illness at home on his fifty-second birthday. Despite the obvious differences in the horses’ markings to the trained eye, Universal passed the new horse off as “Tony” and continued to bill him as such through the first half of 1932. Tony Jr. finally received billing as himself in a fall release.

The newcomer achieved his own popularity with audiences and critics. In a 1933 review, a New York Times critic wrote, “Tony Jr. was as fine a bit of horse flesh as ever breathed.” Unfortunately, Mix was on his way out when Tony Jr. arrived on the scene, and it is unclear what became of him after Mix’s death in a solo auto accident in 1940. The original Tony, however, had been provided for in Mix’s will and survived his former costar by two years. On October 10, 1942, the failing thirty-two-year-old movie horse was put down in his familiar stall at the old Mix estate.

Tony Jr. poses with Tom and director B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason during Mix’s last film, a Mascot serial titled The Miracle Rider.

Buck Jones and Silver

Another veteran of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show who transitioned to the silver screen was a rugged bronc buster and trick rider named Charles Gebhart. For the movies, he was rechristened Buck Jones.

While touring with the Millers’ show in 1915, Buck married fifteen-year-old trick rider Dell Osborne in a horseback ceremony. During World War I, Buck broke horses in Chicago for the Allies’ cavalry units. After the war, he and Dell performed in several Wild West shows and the Ringling Brothers Circus as trick riders. With a child on the way, they decided to settle in Los Angeles, where Buck found work in the movies as a bit player and stuntman, sometimes doubling his eventual rival and friend Tom Mix.

Buck had his first starring role in Fox Studios’ The Last Straw (1920), and his career skyrocketed. To compete with the other cowboy stars, however, he needed a special horse. His first horse, a black, unfortunately died in a filming accident. However, in 1922 Buck spotted a beautiful gray on the set of Roughshod and knew he’d found his movie mate. He bought the horse for $100 and named him Silver. He was to become almost as famous as Fritz and Tony.

Although Buck preferred action to cute antics, Silver got to perform enough tricks to satisfy audience anticipation while also providing thrilling images as he and Buck streaked across the Western terrain. Silver was so intelligent that he learned to perform stunts, such as leaping through fire, with only one rehearsal. His skill as a one-take actor became legendary.

Buck owned two other horses, Eagle and Sandy, who often doubled Silver. Eagle was usually used in long-shot galloping sequences; he can be easily identified as he swished his tail when he ran. Sandy was always used for rearing scenes. Almost indistinguishable from Silver, Sandy had a more photogenic head and was also used for close-ups. Buck loved all his horses and would never subject them to real danger. For hazardous stunts, unlucky rental horses from the studio stables served as doubles.

Buck Jones Productions produced only one film, a non-Western, before folding. The intrepid Jones rallied to put together the traveling Buck Jones Wild West Show. The Great Depression ended that enterprise prematurely, but the actor rebounded and returned to the movies. Though semiretired, Silver was occasionally brought in to do specific stunts. Eagle received billing in some of Jones’s later films, and Sandy was billed as Silver in the Rough Riders series at the end of Buck’s career.

Eagle, always prone to scours, was put down in 1941 after a particularly bad bout left him too weak to recover. When Buck returned from a trip to find Eagle gone, he shut himself in his bedroom and cried. Jones’s own life came to a tragic end in 1942, when he perished in a fire at a party being held in his honor in Boston. He died heroically while trying to rescue other guests.

A few months later, Silver began to fail. According to Dell Jones: “It seemed he missed Buck and stopped eating. He would bow his beautiful head and grieve. He was very old for a horse—thirty-four years.” Sadly, Dell had the old horse put to sleep. Sandy passed away a few months later.

The rugged Buck Jones with his elegant other half, Silver.

From the left, Buck Jones and his trick-riding stuntwoman wife Dell and their matching white horses at the 1939 Santa Claus Lane Parade on Hollywood Boulevard. Next to Dell is singing cowboy Ray Whitley and on the far right, astride the paint, is the trick-riding cowboy star Montie Montana.

Ken Maynard and Tarzan

Buck Jones’s chief rival was Ken Maynard, a native Texan known throughout the Wild West show circuit as an incredible trick rider and roper. He had made a brief attempt to steal Dell away from Buck, and the men never became friends. Maynard made his name in films aboard a palomino mount called Tarzan.

In 1926, Maynard purchased a ten-year-old gelding at a ranch in Newhall, California. The palomino was what would now be considered a National Show Horse, an Arabian/Saddlebred cross, and was given the name Tarzan at the suggestion of Maynard’s acquaintance Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the novel Tarzan of the Apes. The popular film with the same title had come out in 1918, thrusting the name Tarzan into the minds of audiences throughout America.

Former circus trainer Johnny Agee taught the gelding a repertoire of tricks. Tarzan often had the opportunity to display his talents on screen, thanks to Maynard, who wrote such moments into the script. His humanlike qualities allowed the palomino to rescue Maynard from danger on more than one movie occasion. Like Tony, he was billed as “the Wonder Horse,” by all accounts an apt, if not original, nickname.

Tarzan was often doubled by one of eight palominos in Maynard’s stable. Though a daredevil rider whose stunts awed audiences, Maynard rarely put the real Tarzan in serious danger. Instead, the actor pampered his star horse and transported him in a custom trailer emblazoned with his name. Maynard and Tarzan successfully transitioned from silent to sound pictures, although the horse’s training in verbal cues, rather than visual signals, did create some production challenges.

Tarzan made his last movie in 1940, a film called Lightning Strikes West, when he was twenty-four. He was retired to Maynard’s ranch soon after and died that same year. Maynard buried him in an undisclosed gravesite, reported to be under an elm or a Calabash tree in either the Hollywood Hills or the San Fernando Valley. The grieving Maynard kept Tarzan’s death a secret for years. The actor never again achieved the success he had had when the great palomino carried him to stardom.

Fred Thomson and Silver King

Fred Thomson was a college athlete who won the national All-Around title at Princeton University in 1913. He eschewed the Olympics to pursue the Presbyterian ministry and became interested in movies while prescreening them for the Boy Scouts. In 1921, after a brief stint in the military, he became an actor. Inspired by Tom Mix, the handsome Thomson became a skilled equestrian, performed his own stunts, and made a star of his horse, a striking gray 17-hand Irish stallion named Silver King. True to his name, the stallion was one of the most spectacular horses to ever grace the silver screen.

The story of how Thomson and Silver King became partners may raise a few eyebrows given today’s emphasis on gentle training methods. Thomson was visiting a friend who owned a New York City riding school. Silver King caught the eye of Thomson, who was warned that the stallion was difficult. Undaunted, he took the horse for a ride in Central Park. When Silver King attempted to unload his rider by bucking, whirling, and trying to scrape him off on trees, Thomson responded by throwing the horse to the ground using a cowboy trick of tying his legs with one end of a rope and striking him repeatedly with the other end. Thus Thomson earned the respect of the spirited stallion, and the two became closely bonded. A week after this incident, the actor took Silver King to Hollywood, determined to make him a star. Stabling the stallion at his home, Thomson taught him many tricks, including sitting down, bowing, and performing the strutting Spanish walk. The stallion was a quick study and loved to show off. One of his admirers was the Thomsons’ friend Greta Garbo, who loved to sit on the corral fence watching Fred put the stallion through his paces. Once his lessons were learned, Silver King was ready for his close-up.

The stallion loved the camera, and although he seemed bored during rehearsals, he came alive once the director called “Action!” He played significant roles in Thomson’s films, and in keeping with the anthropomorphic trend, he appeared to understand and execute abstract demands. A natural box-office draw, he received costar billing. The advertisements variously read: “Fred Thomson and His Wonderful Horse—Silver King,” or “Fred Thomson and His Famous Horse—Silver King.”

In one of Thomson’s two surviving films, Thundering Hoofs (1924), Silver King shows his stuff by rearing on command, bowing, kneeling at a gravesite, untying ropes, and nudging Thomson toward his love interest. In the film’s most frightening sequence, Silver King is condemned to a Mexican bullring as a matador’s mount after Thomson’s character has been unjustly jailed. The giant bull gores the stallion, who appears doomed. In the nick of time, Thomson’s character breaks out of jail to save his horse by wrestling the bull to the ground. Silver King’s bravery in working with the bull can be attributed to the fact that one of his stablemates, and probable costar, was Thomson’s pet bull, Muro.

Silver King’s antics garnered plenty of attention from the Hollywood press, and the stallion often made headlines with his temperamental behavior. He reportedly threw tantrums if one of his doubles performed a stunt, and while docile as a lamb working with children on camera, he might kick the set to smithereens after “Cut!” was called. When Silver King showed up on a nighttime set wearing sunglasses, the gossip columnists went wild with speculation. Had Silver King gone “Hollywood”? It turned out that the glasses were intended to protect his eyes from the bright Klieg lights used in filming after he had shown signs of temporary blindness. Compresses of cold cabbage leaves and ten days in a dark stall reportedly cured him of “Klieg eyes.”

Silver King’s brilliant career was cut short when Thomson passed away suddenly in 1928 following a brief illness. Shortly thereafter, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about Silver King’s mourning his master. The article called him “the most famous horse in the world.” Several years later, Thomson’s widow, the screenwriter Frances Marion, sold Silver King, and in 1934 he returned to the screen in low-budget films with Wally Wales, a little-known cowboy star. The marvelous Silver King received billing and was featured in publicity materials to attract audiences to the seven films he made with Wales.

In 1938, Silver King starred as Silver, The Lone Ranger’s horse, in a fifteen-episode serial. Directed by John English and William Whitney, the series was filmed in the famous Alabama Hills in Lone Pine, California, the setting of many B Westerns. Silver King, then likely in his twenties, received top billing, a testament to his enduring star power. Since the existence of Silver as The Lone Ranger’s horse has been traced back to 1938, it is even possible that he was modeled on the great Silver King.

Silver King traveled in a customized trailer emblazoned with his name.

Other Cowboy Duos

Many more real cowboys rode the silent celluloid range. Another veteran of Wild West shows to achieve stardom was Jack Hoxie, whose lesser known actor brother Al sometimes doubled him. A fan of the Appaloosa breed, Jack Hoxie became popular along with his most famous mount, Scout, a handsome leopard Appaloosa with black spots.