Hidalgo (2004)

Genre:
Action-Adventure Arabian-Western!

Written by:
John Fusco

Directed by:
Joe Johnston

Produced by:
Casey Silver

Distributed by:
Disney (movie / Touchstone Pictures (DVD)

Actors:
Viggo Mortensen - Frank Hopkins, half Lakota, half white, all cowboy!
Omar Sharif - the Sheik.
Zuleikha Robinson - the Sheik's beautiful daughter.
Louise Lombard - Lady Anne Davenport, owner of another horse in the race.
Louise Lombard - Aziz
Saïd Taghmaoui - Prince Bin Al Reeh
Silas Carson - Katib
Harsh Nayyar - Yusef
J.K. Simmons - Buffalo Bill Cody
Adoni Maropis - Sakr
Victor Talmadge - Rau Rasmussen
Peter Mensah - Jaffa
Joshua Wolf Coleman - The Kurd
Franky Mwangi - Slave Boy
Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman - Chief Eagle Horn (as Floyd Red Crow Westerman)

Released:
Mar 5, 2004

Running time:
2 hours and 15 minutes

Box office:
$67.2 million

Frank Hopkins really existed - that's a fact. But did he really race across Arabia in 1891 in a race called the Ocean of Fire? Well, that's questionable.

Even before the movie was released this was brought into question by Anuj Desai in his article, A Mirage in the Desert: Viggo Mortensen's Hidalgo is based on a not-so-true story. He stated, "But what shocks those who have looked into the Ocean of Fire in the Middle East is that the race itself didn't exist. Peter Harrigan, a journalist stationed in Saudi Arabia, saw an early Hidalgo script and began to wonder about the epic race. While writing a series of articles about it in the Arab News, Harrigan contacted Yemen's Ghalib Al-Quaiti, the last ruling Sultan of the area including Aden and an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian. His blunt conclusion about the race: "There is absolutely no record of any horse race in the past staged from Aden or from anywhere in that part of Arabia. Southern Arabia has never been known for its horses."

Should we care whether Frank Hopkins' memoir, written in the 1930s with his wife Gertrude's help, was accurate? Should we care if it was just an old cowboy's tall tale - perhaps something dreamed up while working on a southwest cattle ranch?

OR

Should we be questioning Frank's memoir and calling it nonsense? All this second-guessing - is it needed at all?

His mother was Lakota; his father was white. The Lakotas called him "Blue Child" or "Far Rider". Yet he feels responsible for the massacre at Wounded Knee.