Review of White Mane

White Mane (1953)
6/10
Interesting B&W images from the man who did "The Red Balloon"...
1 June 2008
Although this was an award-winning French film that won honors as Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival, there's really nothing that memorable about this B&W odyssey about a wild stallion and a small boy who tames it.

The background music is pleasant, the photography is pleasing enough and the boy is a natural actor, but the story seems to be lacking something in spirit and seems rather bland by the time it winds up its tale in 43 minutes with a rather ambiguous ending.

ALAIN EMERY is the boy, Falco, who befriends a white stallion in Camarque, arid lands in the south of France, much to the displeasure of a group of men who were trying to capture the animal themselves. Once the horse accepts him as a rider, he spends the rest of the film trying to avoid capture by the men on horseback who chase the boy and the horse all over the dunes and finally the beach, where boy and horse ride off into the waves.

That's the story. Whether it captures your attention completely or not is debatable, but it is definitely well made and worth seeing at least once.

Trivia note: The main page at IMDb specifies that the film was photographed in Eastman Color but the print shown on TCM was in black and white.
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