"He was a small horse, barely 15 hands"

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2007)

In the golden age of sports culminating in the late 30's, the three greatest athletes in 1938 were Joe Louis, Lou Gehrig and this "small horse" described by the narrator when he's first seen on screen.While there have been many outstanding films featuring animals in the title role (BIG RED, THE YEARLING, THE BLACK STALLION, to name a few), none have captured the era, the human characters and the four-legged star quite so well as in this warm and tender tale of the horse who "fixed us, every one of us." As a history buff, I'm distressed at how Gary Ross fixes the facts in this film, altering or deleting key elements. No mention in the film was made of Red Pollard's romance and subsequent 40-year marriage to the private nurse who cared for him in Boston while he recuperated from his leg injury. Ross admits that he changed the sugar cube given to Seabiscuit to an apple when he first meets Pollard, but he doesn't show the nudge of Red's shoulder which followed. Smith's training schemes could have been been detailed better, such as the use of an "entourage" of a cow pony, stray dog and spider monkey to help calm him.And the picture could have better explained how Red was blinded in a riding accident instead of an apparent boxing injury as this flick suggests. Perhaps Gary Ross made these changes to distinguish his work from the author's, to put his own personal stamp on the film. For all its faults, SEABISCUIT rates as one of the best feel-good movies of this or any other century. It truly deserves an honored place in any serious movie lover's film collection and is worth the effort to see it again on the big screen, as I recently did at my neighborhood Garland Theatre. Dale Roloff