One of Disney's better live-action efforts of the decade was a family drama produced in Great Britain. Walt Disney had found European settings suitable for his favored period stories that often featured small children and animals (the Edinburgh-set Greyfriars Bobby (1961) is an excellent example). Disney found the U.K. a source for exciting actors, tapping Janet Munro and Sean Connery for his family productions. English films also provided Disney with his most successful new talent find, child star Hayley Mills.
The classically trained author Rosemary Anne Sisson had written 11 episodes of the well-remembered TV series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975) and had just penned the screenplay for Disney's Australia-set Ride a Wild Pony (1975). Disney chief Ron Miller then put Pit Ponies, a film of Sisson's tale, into production. After some story work by the American writer-director Burt Kennedy, she proceeded to adapt it for the screen.
Retitled as Escape from the Dark, the story predictably centers on cute children and animals in a period setting. But it also introduces an atypical sidebar storyline about labor unrest. In 1909 Yorkshire, the curmudgeon mine owner Lord Harrogate (Alastair Sim of A Christmas Carol, 1951) decides to install new machinery and orders that the mine's herd of ore-hauling work ponies be destroyed. The animals live their entire lives in underground stables. Harrogate's manager Sandman (Peter Barkworth) can deal with the miners' fear of new machines, but he doesn't realize that his take-charge daughter Alice (Chloe Franks) is taking steps to rescue the ponies. Alice enlists miner's children Dave and Tommy Sadler (Andrew Harrison and Benjie Bolgar), as well as the crusty old-timer Bert (Joe Gladwin) to haul the animals up with a winch. When the mine's lights go out, the beloved, intelligent 'lead' pony, Flash, herds the other animals through the darkened tunnels. The ensuing search for the missing children and ponies finally ends when their hiding place on the moors is discovered. Then a mine disaster occurs. Flash proves invaluable in leading the trapped miners to safety, just as he had his four-legged fellows.
Except for the veteran Alastair Sim (in his final role), the quality English cast was largely unknown in America. The accomplished Prunella Scales (Howards End, 1992) is Alice's socially conscious mother. The Disney organization did not promote its child actors, and little Chloe Franks' character Alice is a take-charge dynamo who shows no interest in becoming a fine lady, as her mother expects. Young Tommy is just old enough to idolize his brother Dave, who has an unusually dark family problem -- he thinks his stepfather may have abandoned his real father in an earlier mine cave-in. Tommy also makes continual cracks about boys being inferior to girls, which young Alice doesn't accept for a minute.
Director Charles Jarrott (1969's Anne of the Thousand Days) filmed the show at Sheffield's Thorpe-Hensley colliery. The old mine from 1889 was maintained just to pump water out so other diggings wouldn't flood. For music, composer Ron Goodwin conducted the local Grimethorpe Colliery Band, which lends the show an authentic period touch.
The film remained Escape from the Dark for its U.K. premiere in 1976. For its American debut a year later, it was given the cheery, 'cute caper' title The Littlest Horse Thieves and released with the animated compilation feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. It became the Radio City Music Hall's Easter attraction for 1977 and was greeted by critical praise for its realism and glorious Yorkshire locations. Critic Charles Champlin called it the best movie to carry the Disney label in years. Other positive reviews caught the socially conscious adjustments made to the Disney formula for light family fare.
But not all audiences exited smiling. One British reviewer witnessed under seven-year-old tots crying and sobbing as they left his screening. After rescuing the miners, Flash is left unattended and from force of habit returns calmly to his underground stable and is left below as the mine continues to burn. Lord Harrogate opens a pasture for the other 'pensioned' ponies and the children are left with the thought that, being blind, Flash would never have adapted to life in the open spaces. For co-author Rosemary Anne Sisson, Flash may have embodied the fate of pre-mechanized laborers, tied to old methods of living and incapable of adapting.
By Glenn Erickson
