{"id":6374,"date":"2013-04-07T01:27:53","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T05:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mondomark.com\/wordpress\/?p=3918"},"modified":"2013-04-07T01:27:53","modified_gmt":"2013-04-07T05:27:53","slug":"tyrone-power-is-the-pony-soldier-from-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=6374","title":{"rendered":"Tyrone Power is the Pony Soldier from Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the Australian campaign, it seemed Fox felt the pic would sell better if Canadian + Mounties were present in the revised title. Naturally, this illustrated moment of guy-girl bonding between a radiant Canuckle and his decolletage'd babe NEVER HAPPENS. She's not even blonde, nor wears a green cocktail dress while held hostage in a teepee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyrone Power made a lot of movies for Fox, but most of his work from the fifties is largely unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray, perhaps due to the perceived (and sometimes real) variable quality of those films.<\/p>\n

A good case in point is Pony Soldier<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1952), newly released by Twilight Time on Blu with another isolated score track (this time featuring Alex North, a composer’s who’s benefited quite a bit in TT’s other releases, such as The Sound and the Fury<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] and Desir\u00e9e<\/a> <\/strong>[M<\/a>]).<\/p>\n

Pony <\/strong>is essentially a B-movie, and it’s rather odd to see Power in something generic when every so often Fox would drop him into a prestige picture, like King of the Khyber Rifles<\/strong> (1953) and The Sun Also Rises<\/strong> (1957) – both sporting superb scores by Bernard Herrmann and Hugo Friedhofer, respectively.<\/p>\n

In any event, the real curiosity for Power fans is seeing one of his smaller films which likely received little play on TV; and for Canadians, there’s seeing Hollywood transplanting the western genre to the borderland between Canada and the U.S.<\/p>\n

Power plays not only a Mountie, but a Mountie freshly graduated from Toronto! Pity Fox didn’t see fit to send a second unit up here to capture some local scenes in Technicolor, but it was a surprise to hear the city mentioned in a 1952 Hollywood film. Then again, you’ve got Project Moon Base<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1953) in which the starring space stud and space bunny fly off to an orbiting station in the spaceship Canada<\/em>. For a city known for doubling as other places, when I hear “Toronto” in a movie, my first reaction is sometimes a great big ‘What did I just hear?’<\/p>\n

Pony Soldier<\/strong> has some interesting casting, and fans of Fox’ fifties films will chuckle when they hear Michael Rennie (Desir\u00e9e<\/strong>) delivering yet again some uncredited narration. In Mel Gussow’s hysterical and informative bio on Darryl F. Zanuck, Don’t Say Yes Until I FinishTalking<\/strong>, I think there’s an anecdote of how the Fox production bigwig cast films based on a big personnel spreadsheet on his immense desk. I gather under Rennie’s name, Zanuck may have scribbled “His voice is good. USE IT.”<\/p>\n

Coming next<\/em>: soundtrack reviews of some action heroes, a review of Twilight Time’s quite out of print Night of the Living Dead <\/strong>+ Synapse’s Document of the Dead <\/strong>(this is called ‘themed review positioning’), and some Japanese naughty movies from Impulse Pictures.<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com <\/strong>( Main Site<\/a> \/ Mobile Site<\/a> )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New review of a little-known Tyrone Power western – Pony Soldier (1952) – where the charismatic actor plays a by-the-books, calm & cool Canadian Mountie from Toronto, sent to the U.S. to bring 1000 Crees back to Canada. Released by Twilight Time on Blu-ray, the disc also features an isolated score track of Alex North’s bouncy, modernist score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1960,4212],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1EO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}