Word: shadows
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CASEY'S SHADOW Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Carol Sobieski...
...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...
...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...
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...
There is as much put-on as defiance in such a posture, much striving after the long shadow of one's own legend. Zevon is shrewd enough not only to realize this but also to acknowledge it, both in his songs (one hell-raising rocker is called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead) and in casual conversation. "The fundamental idea that everything's going to be all right appeals to me less than the simple notion of bonehead justice," Zevon told TIME'S correspondent James Willwerth...