Once Upon a Time In Westerns

The other night, The Doc and I were watching the new Tarantino movie and I had a hell of time figuring out who was who.  I’m face blind, and as far as I can tell, about half of the actors in all Hollywood movies are Brad Pitt, and this movie actually had Pitt in it, and Leonardo DiCaprio was his stunt double and made up to look just like him—unless it was the other way around—so the plot was sort of hard for me to follow at times.

To me, it looked like Brad Pitt was in all the movie scenes, except occasionally, when he was joined by Brad Pitt.  I was very surprised not to see Scarlett Johansen, since she is in almost every other movie I watch.  (Brad Pitt would understand all of this, since he, too, is face blind.)

What I did notice however, were the horses in the Western scenes.  I have no idea how many different horses were used in total, but most of the scenes featured the same three bays and a single sorrel.  There was even one particular scene where Brad Pitt was talking to Brad Pitt, and both were seated in front of what looked like a crowded corral of horses—BUT, if you watched carefully, there was a guy in the corral that would walk across the screen from the left leading a bay followed by a sorrel, then he walks back the other way leading the sorrel followed by a couple of bays….  If you pay attention, there are even a couple of scenes where Brad Pitt is riding the sorrel.  

It’s a good movie, Brad should get an Oscar for Best Actor.  And another one for Best Supporting Actor.  (The Doc just told me the movie came out last year and Brad Pitt got an Oscar for Best Producer.)

As a child of the fifties and sixties, with about a zillion hours of television under my belt, I have a Ph.D. in Westerns, so I have always known that it wasn’t all that strange to see the same horse in several different television shows.  Matt Dillon, for example, rode the same buckskin horse in Gunsmoke as Ben Cartwright in Bonanza.  Thankfully, so as not to confuse the poor animal, he was named Ol’ Buck on Saturday night in Kansas and just plain Buck when he was in Nevada on Sunday nights.  And Little Joe’s appaloosa would occasionally wander off the set of Bonanza and appear on The Virginian.  

If you looked close, a lot of movies in the early fifties featured Roy Roger’s Trigger.  Occasionally, the horse even showed up in the credits, but never using his real name.  Trigger was a stage name; the palomino was registered as Silver Cloud.

A few Western stars actually owned their own horses.  Besides Roy and Trigger, Dale Evans owned Buttermilk.  (This prompted the show’s co-star, Gabby Hayes to call Dale ButterButt on the set.)  Tom Mix owned Tony, Gene Autry owned Champion, and Hopalong Cassidy owned Topper.  

You could just about fill a phonebook with all the horses that John Wayne rode in various movies.  Wayne was pretty candid about the fact that he was not exactly a horse lover, though he was a good rider and spent a considerable amount of time in the saddle.  The only movie horse that he actually liked was one called Dollar, a chestnut quarter horse Wayne rode in several of his last movies.  Wayne, like most actors didn’t actually own the horse—by the time a horse was trained enough to stand the noise and confusion of movie set, the trainers were very reluctant to sell their talented animals.  Though Wayne claimed he didn’t particularly like horse, he did arrange for an exclusive contract so that no other actor could use Dollar in a movie.   And in several movies (in particular, The Shootist), Wayne had the script altered so the horse would be mentioned by name. 

The Duke wasn’t the only actor to get attached to his horse, when Bonanza ended, Lorne Greene was afraid that Buck would end up in the glue factory—the poor animal had been hauling two big men around the West for almost two decades and his career was about over.  Greene bought the horse and arranged for the animal to be used in horse riding therapy classes.   Buck lived longer than some of the stars that had ridden him, passing away at the age of 49—an unusually long life for a horse.

Perhaps no actor formed as close a bond with his equine co-star as James Stewart and a sorrel named Pie.  If you’ve watched a western with Jimmy Stewart, chances are you have seen Pie—they were together in at least 17 movies.  The exact number is a little confusing, since officially, the last movie Pie was in was Bandolero, but you can clearly see the horse (right) in Cheyenne Social Club, released two years later, when the horse was at least 30 years old.  Let’s just say the two were together a long, long time.

Stewart didn’t own Pie, though he tried to buy the horse multiple times.  The owner, a young girl whose family had been training horses all the way back to the days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart refused to sell the animal, since they made their living hiring the horse out to lots of assorted movies and television shows.  The sorrel was a trifle small for a quarter horse, and was supposedly difficult to ride—he almost killed Glenn Ford by running deliberately into a tree.

With Stewart, however, Pie was a different animal; the actor claimed the horse understood the business of making movies and always hit his mark, standing still until the shot was over.  In one famous episode, Pie was supposed to slowly walk down the middle of the street without a rider.  On the day of the shot, the trainer wasn’t around, so Stewart simply explained what was needed to the horse, who did his solo scene flawlessly.  You can see the scene for yourself in the 1954 movie, The Far Country.  

While they were filming their last movie together, Pie was obviously in bad health.  Stewart’s co-star, Henry Fonda was a talented amateur artist and while they were filming in Santa Fe, Fonda painted a portrait of Pie for his friend.  Shortly after the painting was finished, Pie passed away.  Though Stewart didn’t own the horse, he arranged for a private burial of the horse at an undisclosed location, so that no one would be able to bother the grave.   

It’s kind of sad that we don’t make many Westerns any more.  There probably aren’t that many trainers devoting the years it takes to produce horses like Pie, any more.  Out of work horses should start a union.

And I can already hear the criticism from my own family, “How can you tell these damn horses apart and you can’t remember which granddaughter you’re looking at?”

The horses are bigger and have four legs.