Highly Overrated But Still Good

Best movie ever!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Sorry to say they just don't make 'em like this any more. Fine horse story back when animal pictures were popular in the late 40's. Beautifully photographed in Technicolor, the movie's a real eye-catcher, along with a fine screenplay and cast. I simply can't believe that it's the same Peggy Cummins (Carey) that the following year would terrorize the screen as the psycho-sexual Annie Laurie Starr in the noir classic Gun Crazy(1949). Here she's the perfect rural ingénue, sweet, innocent, and supportive, while she and Arthur (Ken) make an engaging young couple. Still, the contrast with Gun Crazy remains an incredible transition.Speaking of grabbers, the magnificent horseflesh of Thunderhead and Crown Jewel should get animal Oscars for their fine performances. Okay, at least their trainers should. Then too, when the two are together, the color contrast between white-white and black-black is a real grabber. The story blends in nicely as the two families try to settle their differences through a mutual admiration for race horses (trotters or pacers, I'm not sure which). For an over-weight old guy, Coburn does well in a physically active part, while the ending seems particularly appropriate. Add the tuneful interludes of Burl Ives, and you've got perfect family fare, even for the urbanized 21st century.

For this third and final film in the saga of the McLaughlin family out west all the roles were recast from My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead, Son of Flicka. The McLaughlin family is now parents Lloyd Nolan and Geraldine Wall with son Robert Arthur and young Arthur is starting to notice girls. The girl he's noticing is Peggy Cummins a new neighbor who lives with garrulous Grandpa Charles Coburn who has a bit of a drinking problem. Coburn was once a big name in the harness racing sport, but has fallen on bad times.The main problem that all of them are dealing with is white stallion Thunderhead who is giving out a mating call that all the mares from miles around are heeding. That includes a mare that Arthur has been raising for the harness racing circuit.The usual plot situations involving kids and horses are present in Green Grass Of Wyoming. And we get a few musical numbers that fit in nicely with the country atmosphere of the film, courtesy of Burl Ives who plays the McLaughlin ranch hand.Green Grass Of Wyoming is a nice family film that still holds up well for family viewing in this century.

Peggy Cummins, adopting an amusing Irish burr, plays one of those dungaree dolls who are crazy about horses and the neighboring teenage boy, wearing her blonde hair in tight pigtails and taking a stern hand with her hard-drinking, rough-hewn grandpa as if she were in-training to be his wife. The script for this family film, based on Mary O'Hara's book--and sort of a second-cousin to her popular sagas "My Friend Flicka" and "Thunderhead, Son of Flicka"--is perfunctory without being exciting, and the movie is so well-scrubbed it's beatific. Narrator Burl Ives also appears, playing a guitar-strumming ranch-hand (he entertains at the teen-dance singing the totally inappropriate novelty, "I Wish I Were Single Again") and Charles Coburn is Cummins' grandfather, who blames a mythic wild horse from running off with his mares. Charles G. Clarke's picture-postcard photography was Oscar-nominated, and deservedly so: his rich Technicolor panoramas display beautiful blue skies and vast mountain terrain, handsome ranch houses nestled in the hills and even horses who seem satisfied. The climax at the sulky races isn't a crowd-pleaser, but the film may placate animal-lovers even though it's all been done before. **1/2 from ****

This is a sweet little film, in glorious technicolor, about kids and horses - a sequel to a sequel of "My Friend Flicka". but with a different cast. Robert Arthur is charming as the lead boy and Charles Coburn as his rival is excellent. But Peggy Cummins is wretched as the love interest - so saccharine! Lloyd Nolan is good as always, but Burl Ives is wasted (and sings a truly woeful song).But the humans don't matter much because the horses steal the show. A beautiful white stallion is the star and the glorious black mare he kidnaps is the leading lady. Together they gallop through magnificent mountain scenery like salt and pepper against the green. The scene where he seduces her is intensely erotic, and when she becomes stuck in a bog their distress is completely believable. How they got the horses to do the things they do I'll never know (and I pray it was not cruel), but they are superb.