Today's quarantine title is one of the greatest family films of all time

Trust me. You'll like the way this one plays right now.

However bad or weird things are today for you, just remember… at least you’re not trapped on a desert island wearing only your pajamas.

Carol Ballard’s The Black Stallion was a landmark moviegoing experience for me as a kid. I was nine when it came out, and it was the first movie we went to see in 70MM. At the time, that was still a relatively new process, and there was a huge theater in downtown Chattanooga that booked the film. I remember the experience distinctly, almost like something that happened to me rather than something I just watched, the images so much larger than any movie image I’d ever seen.

Just last week, I got in a batch of stuff from the Criterion Flash Sale, and one of the titles I got was this family classic. The Blu-ray transfer is exquisite, but however you watch this movie, it is a visual treat. Ballard is an enormously gifted visual storyteller, and there are long stretches of The Black Stallion with no dialogue at all. It’s never less than absorbing, though. The film is very much meant to be a tactile emotional experience from a child’s perspective, and I love how powerfully it evokes the way the world feels when you’re a kid. There’s real magic to the simple relationship between Kelly Reno and the Black Stallion, and considering how hard it is to direct kids and to direct animals, you have to wonder what kind of miracle work Ballard is. Each step in this friendship is delicately etched, carefully built.

In many ways, it’s two different films. I prefer the first chunk, when it’s just the two of them alone, learning to trust one another and bonding, but I think the second half is incredible as well. Mickey Rooney gives one of his very best performances here, and Teri Garr is lovely and genuine as the mother to this kid, so profoundly changed by his experience.

I’m only going to recommend one film today because this is about as close to the ideal of a film for all ages as you can get. I watched it at the age of nine and lost myself in it, and I watched it again at the age of 49 and lost myself in it. Melissa Mathison, who went on to write E.T. for Spielberg after this, says she learned much of what she believed about screenwriting from the experience she had on this film, and I certainly see some of that movie’s DNA in the way this movie plays its drama. Even though it reaches for some huge emotional crescendoes, the film is very gentle in the way it actually tells its story. It’s very much about behavior and the small moments and the way things feel.

I went out this morning for a grocery run, my second time out since last Wednesday, and it’s definitely weird out. Some people are acting like the actual Apocalypse is happening, and other people seem utterly unaffected. Things were largely fine. They were limiting how many people walked into the store at any given time, but once we were inside, it was very much a normal shopping experience. The world’s definitely not ending when you hear someone yell across you in an aisle, “Do you want the chocolate chip pancakes or the Cinnabon ones?”

I know there are places where it is shockingly bad at the moment, and places where absolutely nothing has happened, and that’s part of what is so weird about this particular moment. We are seeing systemic disruption on a level we’ve never seen before, and I suspect it’s going to get way weirder before it gets better.

So, yeah, rather than ramp up my own anxiety, I am doing my best to program films that make me feel other ways, and The Black Stallion was a huge, beautiful release in the middle of all of this. It is a timeless movie, set during the ‘40s but very much a product of the New Hollywood of the ‘70s, both art and commerce in equal measure. I haven’t seen this film in a long time, but I feel like it should be in the regular rotation for me and for my family. It may be the best movie with an animal lead character that I’ve ever seen, and it’s certainly one of the most peaceful, calming movies I’ve seen in a while.

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Image courtesy MGM/UA Home Video