Talkie Tuesday: Hidalgo

"Nobody hurts my horse."

Hello everyone!

So for today, I decided to dig up an older movie, because I got sidetracked from my regular list yesterday night. Thing is, it often happens that I tend to think about which movie I want to type up for my Tuesday blogs, and then Monday evening rolls around and I turn on the TV, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Yesterday night I was trying to cheer myself up after the abomination that was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, so I was channel surfing, searching for something, when FOX Movies blurred through.

There was a beautiful paint horse on screen, and a very blonde Viggo Mortensen.

Obviously, I stopped doing whatever else it was I had been doing at the time, dropped the remote, and tucked myself in to watch.

The movie I'm talking about is titled Hidalgo, released in 2004 in the wake of the Lord of the Rings success when all the actors and actresses who had taken part in that production were prety much the hottest thing in Hollywood.

There are definitely three reasons to watch this movie; in no particular order, these are the horse that plays Hidalgo, Viggo Mortensen, and the legendary Omar Sharif.

Hidalgo is a biographical western film recounting the tale of long-distance rider Frank Hopkins and his mustang, Hidalgo. The movie itself begins with the cowboy-horse pair as part of a Wild West show, where they are acclaimed as 'the world's greatest distance horse and rider'. Trouble begins when, on orders from the Sheikh, his side-kick, Aziz, demands that the show drops the title, or else that Hopkins and Hidalgo come prove themselves in a race called 'Ocean of Fire' (literally: a 3,000 mile survival race through hell on Earth).

Hopkins accepts, but in addition to prejudice between the East and West, he also faces incredibly stiff competition both in the form of Beduins with their carefully-bred Arabs, and an English lady, Lady Davenport, who wants to secure breeding rights to al-Hatal, the Sheikh's horse who, in her own words, is 'equine perfection'.

Of course, to make things even MORE complicated, the Sheikh has promised his only child, Jazira, in marriage to the prince who will ride al-Hatal through the race, should he win.

Jazira is a skilled and daring rider herself, but being a woman is forbidden to enter the race, so instead she gives both information and help to Hopkins, to save herself from a fate she despises and to help the man she comes to respect through trial and error (error being that at one point Hopkins almost loses his family jewels because the Sheikh and his croonies believe he's done the unspeakable with Jazira ... OOPS).

Hopkins stubbornly refuses to quit, regardless of the obstacles thrown in his way, and it is later revealed that he himself is a half-breed, with a Native American mother, and feels partly responsible for the Wounded Knee Massacre, to which he had brought a dispatch earlier.

He finds a measure of peace while speaking to Jazira, who sympathizes because in her culture, women must always hide themselves, just as he is hiding his heritage.

Things come to a boiling point when the Sheikh's nephew, who would literally sell his mother and his soul to gain control of the al-Khamsa breeding line (of which al-Hatal is the current, and most prominent, progeny), raids the camp, kidnaps Jazira, and threatens to kill her should his uncle fail to deliver the horse.

Hopkins steps in to save the day, tricking the Sheikh's nephew by colouring a different Arabian coal black, and manages to rescue Jazira, though at the cost of her losing the servant and protector who had been as close to her as a brother or another father figure. This now over, the race continues, but the nephew keeps butting back in, eventually injuring Hidalgo in a trap they had dug in the desert, which enrages Hopkins.

While previously, he had wished to aid, and eventually did in fact aid another rider (which is apparently against the rules of the race), he now doesn't hesitate in killing the nephew on the grounds that his horse is sacred to him.

Delirious and parched, with Hidalgo wounded and slowly losing the battle against the Arabian climate, he imagines the Lakota elders chanting around him as he can't bring himself to shoot Hidalgo.

While al-Hatal's rider gloats, the mustang surgers back to his feet, as stubborn and proud as his rider, and the last three competitors (the last being Davenport's mare) gallop towards the finish line.

Miraculously, it is not al-Hatal who wins, but Hidalgo who gives a last spurt of speed, flying on American wings towards the ocean with Hopkins riding bareback. Even the prince then has to admit that Hidalgo is an exceptional horse, which shows that he does, in fact, know how to concede gracefully when eventually beaten.

Hopkins thus wins the respect and admiration of the Arabs, going so far as to having the Sheikh offer him a place to stay, but the cowboy politely refuses, instead leaving behind his Colt revolver as a gift to a new found friend, and saying farewell to Jazira before returning West.

Upon his return, he uses the money he won to save a herd of mustangs about to be shot, an order that came at the beginning of the movie, also releasing Hidalgo back into the wild.

The epilogue states that he remained a distance rider and activist for the mustangs until his death, and that Hidalgo's descendants still run free in and around Oklahoma.

Horses being my favourite animals means I will devour any movie, story or TV show about them, and this was no exception. I loved the pacing of the movie and the intrigues, and while people have critiqued that it might not be based entirely on a true story, I think for entertainment value and simply for the legend itself, it was what it was. Not to mention, watching Arabian horses run in their natural habitat? Breathtaking.

There is something about Viggo Mortensen that draws a person into the movie he's cast in, regardless what it is, and this one was just the same. I certainly enjoyed watching him ride across the screen! And of course, Omar Sharif was amazing as the venerable, but slightly naive Sheikh.

There are far too few movies like this out there nowadays, which is probably why I keep going back to the old, good ones. I'll definitely be rewatching this!

xx

*images and video not mine