Most spectacular horses in film.
Did you see Sex and the City?
Minor nit: the real War Admiral was NOT a tall horse. He was actually a bit shorter than average for a Thoroughbred, at 15.3 hands (just one inch taller than Seabiscuit). The movie’s decision to portray War Admiral as a monstrously tall horse is one I really don’t like.
Documentaries/news clips about miniature guide horses are always fascinating. These horses are taught to retrieve objects for blind people and lead them around on errands. They wear sneakers so they don’t scuff up the floors of public places.
The horse in The Walking Dead is one of the more memorable characters. I admire how he and Rick Grimes were able to keep calm among the hordes of zombies up until the last second. (I wish things had turned out differently for the horse.)
If cartoons and unicorns count, I’d add The Last Unicorn.
This has always been one of my favorite paintings. When I was a little girl, I had a Childcraft book of art, and this was in it. I used to sit outside and look at it for hours, memorizing everything about it and dreaming about stepping into that painting and choosing one of the horses for my own.
Other wonderful horse movies:
The Man From Snowy River
Return to Snowy River
Secretariat
Casey’s Shadow-I am so totally in love with that big ol’ Quarter Horse!
The Horse Whisperer
Rhinestone Cowboy
Rustler’s Rhapsody
The horses in the Lord of the Rings movies were very pretty horses, and the info on them in one of the many DVD features was interesting. Shadowfax could never live up to the description in the book though.
It’s the one I came in to mention.
Ol’ Tom Horn’s horse was a good one too. He sure messed that guy up when he shot it out from underneath him.
Also, the whiskey corn eating roan in The Rounders that about broke Fonda and Glen Ford was pretty memorable. Course any horse would have looked good in old Sedona.
Then there’s Captain Call’s The Hell Bitch.
A helluva spectacular horse in The Misfits too.
I think you’re getting your movie guys with Italian names mixed up. It was directed by Carroll Ballard (and produced by Francis Ford Coppola).
You mean that chick who has a face like a foot? :dubious:
Well then, A Dash For the Timber.
While I agree that it’s a brilliant movie–the most beautiful, poetic and majestic horse film ever made, Carroll Ballard actually directed it, and Francis Ford Coppola was the executive producer.
How right you are. I must have it filed under “surprisingly arty” next to “Romeo & Juliet” which was Zefirelli. 
thanks for setting me straight.
To bring it all home, Walter Farley based his match race between Cyclone and Sun Raider on the Seabiscuit/War Admiral match race. In fact, I’ve seen an early edition of the Black Stallion that names the match race horse WarRaider. Apparently he found that too obvious.
And, Seabiscuit and War Admiral both had elite race breeding. Seabiscuit was the grandson of Man O’war, War Admiral was a son. Seabiscuit certainly had some setbacks, but they both had a top racing pedigree.
Most of the horses in the Game of Thrones series have been big warmbloods and draught crosses, very European and fun to see. Danerys (sp?) rides more hotblooded Arab types, which would make sense with the desert setting. I always try and look out for the same horses in different scenes - in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice mini series, which I just rewatched yesterday, there’s a certain chestnut with a wide blaze that is alternately ridden past as “local colour” in Mereton, and one of a matched set pulling Darcy’s carriage from Pemberley to London.
Thanks for all the input. I’ll have to watch The Black Stallion, I’ve never seen it.
An actor in that film, Denys Colomb Daunant, made a documentary called Dream of the Wild Horses (Le Songe des Chevaux Sauvages) about the Camargue horses in White Mane (which I had not heard of and thank you for the reference).
I saw it in 1966 I think, and it still haunts me. These horses are just little guys apparently, but in the movie they are like gods.
You’re in for a treat! The movie’s gorgeous (and not just because of the horse).
Another movie with some very impressive horses in it I just remembers: Kingdom of Heaven. Beautiful, beautiful Barbs and Arabs!
I just adored the very beautiful horse who does the dance at the end of Django Unchained. My google fu isn’t up to finding a picture however.
Clint Eastwood always seemed to ride the most beautiful horses in his movies. One had a dapple grey horse, maybe the movie where he protects some miners, that was just gorgeous.
The white stallion on the train in Lawrence of Arabia is beautiful too. I love the scene where it leaps off the train and goes galloping off with Anthony Quinn.
Kelly Reno, who was in The Black Stallion, was also in **Hosszú vágta ** a few years later: with John Savage as an American bomber pilot hiding from the Germans among the Hungarians. As the Hungarians were one of the great horse cultures, the movie is filled with them.
If anyone ever made a big-budget movie about the War of the Triple Alliance,when Paraguay committed suicide by declaring war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, it would be a spectacular horse movie. I read somewhere that, like the wars of the Eurasian Steppes, the war on the Pampas had more cavalry than infantry. But, if you want to see gauchos anyway, they play Cossacks in the Yul Brynner version of Tarras Bulba.
The teams of Messala and Judah Ben Hur, though that yegua in Sex and the city had a fine muscular rump…