General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Black Stallion Returns

The Black Stallion Returns is a 1983 American family adventure film directed by Robert Dalva, the sequel to The Black Stallion (1979), in which teenage Alec Ramsay travels to Morocco to recover his stolen Arabian stallion and rides him in a desert race held by the tribes of the Sahara.¹^•² It was adapted from Walter Farley's 1945 novel of the same title, the second book in his Black Stallion series.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	March 25, 1983 (United States), 103 minutes, rated PG¹
Source	Novel The Black Stallion Returns by Walter Farley (New York, 1945)¹
Director	Robert Dalva, in his directorial debut; he had received an Academy Award nomination for editing the 1979 film¹
Principal cast	Kelly Reno, Vincent Spano, Allen Garfield, Woody Strode, Ferdy Mayne, Jodi Thelen, Teri Garr³
Key crew	Screenplay Richard Kletter and Jerome Kass; cinematography Carlo Di Palma; music Georges Delerue; executive producer Francis Ford Coppola¹
Box office	$12,049,108 domestic gross on original release⁴
Critical reception	Metascore 34 (generally unfavorable); Rotten Tomatoes audience score 72%⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in 1947, one year after the events of the first film. Berber chieftain Abu Ben Ishak (Ferdy Mayne) and his granddaughter Tabari arrive in New York to reclaim the stallion, originally named "Gitane," which was stolen from them years earlier and specially bred for a race held every five years by the tribes of the Sahara, in which the victor wins the finest horses of the defeated tribes.¹ Ishak calls the horse Shetan.²

Alec (Kelly Reno) stows away on a flight to Casablanca and, aided by Raj (Vincent Spano), a young member of the Tuareg tribe, is reunited with the Black. Ishak refuses to return the horse because he intends to run him in the tribal race, while Kurr (Allen Garfield), ruler of the rival Uruk tribe, schemes to make sure the Black does not run.² Realizing Alec is the one rider the horse trusts, Ishak asks him to ride in the race.²

In the climactic race Alec rides against the horses of other tribes and against Raj on his horse Sagr. Kurr pursues the riders in a truck, shooting at them; Alec and Raj elude him by splitting to the sides so that the truck crashes in a ditch. Alec and the Black win, Ishak spares Sagr, and in the final scene Alec releases the Black to the desert, saying "he belongs here."²

Production

A June 1981 announcement said executive producer Francis Ford Coppola would begin production that September on a sequel, with Kelly Reno and Mickey Rooney reprising their roles. Principal photography began September 14, 1981, with a release planned for summer 1982.¹ Rooney's obligations to his musical revue Sugar Babies and his television series One of the Boys made travel impossible, and he does not appear in the film.¹ Kelly Reno and Teri Garr were the only returning cast members from the original; Garr appears as Alec's mother in what one contemporary account calls a "blink-and-you'll-miss-her role."³^•⁷

Locations and scale. End credits state that the film was shot on location in Italy, the Kingdom of Morocco, and Djanet, Algeria.¹ The fan site maintained by Tim Farley, son of the author, describes the shoot, starting in Zagora, Morocco and ending in Tunisia, as one of the most demanding horse films ever made.⁸ The climactic race was filmed in the Sahara over fifteen days with 400 background actors, 100 horses, and fifty camels, using the Terra Flite Image Stabilization System, a remote-control camera on a twenty-foot arm that could take close-up footage of a galloping horse without frightening the animal.¹

The horses. The title role was shared by Cass-Olé, the Arabian stallion from the first film, and El Mokhtar, a famous Egyptian racehorse; El Mokhtar died of colic during production.⁹ The end credits identify the Black as portrayed by Cass-Olé, owned by San Antonio Arabians.¹

A news item in July 1981 mentioned a planned second sequel, referenced as Black Stallion II, but no second sequel has been made.¹

Reception

The film earned $12,049,108 domestically on its original March 25, 1983 release, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with an opening weekend gross of $2,923,297; a 2002 re-release in France added $406.⁴

Critics were largely negative. Metacritic records a Metascore of 34, generally unfavorable, based on seven reviews.⁵ Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, gave it two and a half stars, praising Reno's "poker-faced way of underplaying scenes" and the desert photography while faulting a final race "botched by so many parallel story lines that we lose track of where the stallion stands."¹⁰ Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it funny, unpretentious, and fast-paced, while Variety dismissed it as "a contrived, cornball story."⁵ Audience measures diverged from the critics: Rotten Tomatoes reports a 72% Popcornmeter score from more than 5,000 ratings against a small critics sample.⁶

The sequel is generally measured against its predecessor, which won a Special Achievement Academy Award for sound editing and was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.⁹ Turner Classic Movies notes that the sequel "does not attempt to recreate the mystical power of the original, but presents itself as a straightforward family adventure film," while retaining sweeping cinematography by Carlo Di Palma and music by Georges Delerue.³ A visible discontinuity drew comment: the story begins about a year after the first film, but four years passed between productions, and Reno, about 11 in the first film and 15 during the second, appears to have aged four years instead of one.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Franchise and series entries as standalone works › Animated and family franchise film entries › Comedy and adventure entries

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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