Horse Sense

By Frank Rich

CASEY'S SHADOW Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Carol Sobieski

Any precis of this movie makes it sound like the stickiest entertainment since Shirley Temple retired from Sunnybrook Farm. Casey's Shadow is about a family --one crusty dad, three cute sons, no mom --that raises quarter horses in Cajun country. The family is dirt poor and luckless, until the day Dad gets his hands on a promising foal. He names the colt Casey's Shadow because of its attachment to his youngest son, and decides to race it in the $1 million All-American Futurity at Ruidoso, N. Mex. Will Dad be able to come up with the race's stiff entry fee by deadline? Will the horse recover from injuries it suffers during training? Will a mean old rival trainer try any hanky-panky? Will mighty Casey strike out in the stretch?

The answers are not terribly hard to guess. Casey's Shadow rarely disobeys the time-honored rules of its kid-and-colt genre. Yet the movie proves that those strictures, when applied with flourish, can still carry an audience across the finish line. While Casey's Shadow is aimed squarely at eleven-year-olds, it is likely to captivate any grownup whose idea of heaven is to steal a Saturday afternoon and secretly reread Black Beauty or Charlotte's Web.

Like Nancy Dowd's script for Slap Shot, Casey's Shadow continually proves that men do not have a monopoly on first-rate sports reportage. Writer Carol Sobieski, working loosely from a story by John McPhee, takes a cynical attitude toward her characters' obsession with winning, and she leavens her familiar narrative with gritty bits of lore from the backwaters of quarter-horse racing. She accurately re-creates the arduous rituals of training, the sweaty romance of jockeying and the cracker-barrel humor of the eccentrics who build their entire lives around long shots.

Her script is well served by Director Martin Ritt (Sounder, The Front), who has collaborated with Cinematographer John Alonzo and Production Designer Robert Luthardt to paint the colorful Louisiana and New Mexico settings in crisp detail. Ritt has the good sense to stretch out the tense race sequences (with slow motion, if necessary) and gallop by the story's mawkish father-son, brother-brother and child-horse confrontations. He even gets away with the overheated scenes that depict the star colt's birth and its mother's untimely death.

None of this would go down so easily if Ritt had cast heart-warming actors in the key roles; a few too many beaming faces onscreen, and the movie would curdle before our eyes. Luckily, the three sons -- Andrew A. Rubin, Steve Burns and Michael Hershewe -- are as obstreperous as they are attractive. Further spice is provided by Murray Hamilton and Robert Webber as dastardly villains, and by the stunning Alexis Smith, who turns up as a wealthy horsewoman. In her tight jeans and cowboy hat, Smith gives Casey's Shadow a welcome dose of hard-edged sexuality.

The director's most crucial ally, however, is Walter Matthau as the boys' father. Snarling in a bogus Cajun accent and exuberantly swilling beer, the star is a study in jaunty misanthropy. Matthau has lately become a kind of shadow W.C. Fields, and he is just the man to lure skeptical adults into children's movies like The Bad News Bears and Casey's Shadow. If Matthau can tolerate a pack of kid co-stars for a couple of hours, it's safe to assume that the little rascals are doing some thing right.

-- Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.