Like The Carey Treatment, this other film I missed for Big Screen Boston is obscure. Even more obscure than Carey. The Tattooed Police Horse is a 1964 live-action Disney featurette that has never been released on video or DVD, and only recently became available on streaming services.
As with its length, TPH’s story about a harness-race-horse-turned-police-mount also has an in-between quality, mixing a documentary style with a fictional narrative and characters, and actors with people “playing” themselves. It’s clunky, with much dry narration. Like a lot of Disney, suited more for forgiving kids than adults (alas, some of the cast I assumed to be “real people” turned out to be actors who are merely clumsy). But it offers a nifty glimpse of a Boston that no longer exists. The story here is about a harness race horse, Jolly Roger, who can’t conform to harness racing’s trot stride. Time after time, he breaks into a gallop and gets himself disqualified from races.
The initial story traces Roger from the breeding farms of Kentucky and, after his owners (Shirley Skiles, William Hilliard) give up on his racing career and sell him to a stable hand (Charles Seel), to Arizona, where there’s some condescending treatment of the local “Injuns.” For our purposes, things get more interesting once stable hand Ben sells Roger to a horse broker, who brings the horse east, where Boston Police Department Captain Martin Hanley (Sandy Sanders) purchases him in an auction.
The cool thing about the subsequent Boston action is the dinginess. What we see is mostly in the Back Bay, which we never think of as dingy today. But, in the 1950s and early 1960s, you could have made the case that the dissipated Back Bay was as worthy of demolition as the New York Streets and West End neighborhoods that were bulldozed for urban renewal, but that the Back Bay survived because, however rundown, it was not an immigrant neighborhood that was easily marginalized. Here, the mounted police unit is described as being in a “dim Boston alley”–and it turns out it’s between Boylston and Newbury Streets, behind the old Division 16 police station. Pretty swanky territory by today’s standards.
Roger’s arrival causes one of the fellow cops to exclaim to Capt. Hanley, “Mahty, he’ll make the best-looking hoss on the police foss.” Other local color comes from Roger’s training, which includes a walk around the block and trips further afield, including to a Bunker Hill Day parade. You can glimpse the Exeter Street Theater, Haymarket and the under-construction Prudential Center, among other things. Real locations like this, as well as those in Arizona and Kentucky, are the saving grace of The Tattooed Police Horse. Roger’s trip to another real location, Foxboro race track, turns out to play a crucial part in the story’s resolution.
If you can’t conceive of Back Bay as dingy, this is an interesting watch. Disney released TPH in theaters in 1964, then aired it on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1967. The latter version is the one Turner Classic Movies showed a couple of years ago, and the streaming version appears to be the same length. I have not been able to determine whether this version is the same that played at moviehouses in 1964.
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