If Wishes Were Ponies

Misty (20th Century-Fox) is as long on sentiment as most horse pictures, but mercifully shorter on plot--it may be the first children's film made completely without benefit of villainy. The setting is the tiny island of Chincoteague, off the coast of Virginia. Near by is another island, Assateague, where herds of wild ponies live. Each year the Chincoteague volunteer firemen round up the ponies, swim them to their island and sell the foals. Paul Beebe (David Ladd). a spratling who lives on Chincoteague with his sister Maureen (Pam Smith) and a couple of story book grandparents (Arthur O'Connell and Anne Seymour), is desperate to own one of the wild ponies, a sorrel mare named, as horses in all properly run children's movies should be, The Phantom.

When the firemen round up The Phantom on Pony-Penning Day, there is a dividend--a beautiful white foal named Misty. Paul and Maureen rush to buy the pair with the $102.40 that they have saved up. But they are too late; The Phantom and Misty have been sold. Sensitive ten-year-olds may be assured that matters right themselves, and that Paul and The Phantom are soon outracing an uppity out-of-town boy on a big brute of a horse named Black Comet. Sensitive parents will be glad to know that the whole thing is handled with skill and taste, and that saccharinity--although Grandma Beebe does say once that Paul is "kin to the wild things"--is kept to a minimum.

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