Riding into film history

History has determined that Roman Emperor Caligula was crazy, but one moment suggests otherwise: He made his horse a senator. Of course, in doing so, he prefigured Shakespeare by about 1,000 years, literally turning his kingdom over to a horse. In Gore Vidal’s “Caligula” (1979), the emperor is assassinated on the palace steps, and as the blood drains from his body, the trusty steed Incitatus (Latin for “spurred on”) gallops across the set, stopping at his master’s feet to let out a plaintive neigh.

Only a horse, through the simple utterance of its native sound, could suggest that Caligula had a shred of decency. But in film, it often is a horse’s role to show us the best and worst of human behavior. Mute witness to everything from the beauty of uncharted territory to Indian massacres to cruel roundups, the horse is the most truthful of all mirrors even as it is pressed intomythologizing the country that was settled on horseback.

The horse has been part of the American cultural landscape, from portraits of George Washington on his white steed through “Seabiscuit.” But it predates Hollywood (and Rome) by thousands of years. Eohippus, or “dawn horse,” flourished in North America until the Ice Age; its modern descendant was reintroduced in the 16th century by Cortes with 16 horses.

Outside of explorers’ accounts, not much was written about the horse until it entered American mythology with Paul Revere’s famous ride. “The fate of a nation was riding that night / And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight / Kindled the land into flame with its heat,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

This week, echoes of that ride resonate through “Hidalgo,” a movie about a Pony Express rider and his mustang who enter a 3,000-mile endurance race across the Sahara Desert, taking on Arabian purebloods and proving that the scrappy American mixed breed can rumble with the best. Disney bills the movie as “based on the true story of Frank T. Hopkins,” although there is some controversy about whether Hopkins actually rode for the Pony Express and if the race he claimed to have run existed.

More important, this is the second movie in three years about a wild horse (the other was “Spirit”), marking the endurance of the greatest American film genre -- the western. Without the western, America would be a cipher, a land that casts no shadow. The West is our garden of eden, transcribed and spun by Hollywood into the western, our national Bible.

Like the country itself, birthed by an animal that carried us over mountains, plowed our fields, fought our wars, and served as food when we were hungry, Hollywood was built on the horse.

In 1894 Thomas Edison made possibly the first filmic intrepretation of a horse story -- 643 frames called “Bucking Bronco.” A few years later, the icon of the cowboy and his beloved horse was coined by silent films, beginning with heartthrob William S. Hart and his superstar red and white pinto, Fritz, who got more fan mail than Hart; today both are buried atHart’s ranch in Newhall, a Los Angeles County museum.

Many other equine icons (and their human partners) were launched during the ‘20s and ‘30s, including the Lone Ranger and Silver, Tonto and Scout, and Hopalong Cassidy and Topper. There was the great Tom Mix and his horse Tony, who for a time were the country’s most beloved couple, starring in “My Pal, the King” and “Cupid’s Round-Up.”

Superstars of the era were Mr. Ed’s progenitor, Francis the Talking Mule and Rex the Wonder Horse, which got this rave from Billboard: “This horse is a great deal more intelligent than some human actors we have seen.”

Singing cowboy Gene Autry knew this well; his career foundered until he teamed with Champion (there would be several), which could play dead, outrun cars and trucks, kneel in prayer and do the hula. From 1937 to 1942, Autry was the top-ranking western film star -- thanks to his horse.

Hollywood may have buddied up with the horse on-screen, but the filmmaking process was hard on the animals -- and sometimes fatal. When a black mustang was driven over a cliff during the shooting of “Jesse James” in 1939, there finally was a public outcry. The Humane Society, which was created to improve the lot of the horse and the orphan, began monitoring the use of animals in movies, although horses have died in Hollywood stunts as recently as 1980 in “Heaven’s Gate.”

As moviemaking became more sophisticated, so did westerns. From the ‘30s to the ‘60s, hundreds of them were produced, and horses figured in the narratives in many ways. Whether as a form of transportation, a buddy, a vehicle for redemption or a critter that is no longer needed, the horse has starred in many of the greatest moments in American history, cinematic or otherwise, shedding light on this country’s perception of itself.

In the 1931 film “Cimarron” (directed by Wesley Ruggles), the first western to win an Oscar for best picture, hundreds of horses and their riders reenacted the greatest land rush in history, the 1889 race across 2 million acres of Indian territory in Oklahoma that was seized and offered as homesteads. This epic made thousands of people driving horse-drawn covered wagons and stampeding mustangs across rivers and rocks look romantic and exciting, though in truth, claim jumpers had gotten to the land first and dozens of horses were trampled to death as their riders spurred them toward the American Dream.

‘Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt’

In “Red River,” the classic Howard Hawks film about the first cattle drive down the Chisholm Trail, horses are portrayed not only as modes of transportation but also as the only true way of life.

When John Wayne tells Montgomery Clift, “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” the audience is instantly transported to the American Dream time and we smell the sage, don chaps and assume the position atop a horse heading out into the great wide open.

Horses take us back to ourselves and render us gallant and noble, even those who don’t like them, such as the callous Glenn Ford in “Cowboy,” the 1958 cattle drive movie in which we see a darker side of America’s beloved range rider. “All that hogwash about a horse,” Ford tells a geeky Jack Lemmon who is thinking of heading west. “No sensible man loves a horse. He tolerates the filthy animal because ridin’s better than walkin’.... Did you ever taste horse? Hasn’t got a gamey flavor, hasn’t got a beef flavor, just tastes like horse.”

When the train replaced the horse and made the cattle drive obsolete, many real cowboys were out of a job. Their plight was used to explore the new West in films such as John Huston’s “The Misfits” (1961), in which Marilyn Monroe tries to prevent Clark Gable from carrying out a cruel mustang roundup. Gable’s character drowned his sorrows in booze; in real life, the plight of the horses might have killed him. The mustang scenes were so grueling that they were said to have contributed to his fatal heart attack, which came soon after shooting ended.

Honor among horses

Stalwart and forgiving, the horse gives us one more chance to get it right; society might not recognize honor but horses do. In David Miller’s “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), perhaps the greatest equine-cowboy love story ever told, latter-day cowboy Kirk Douglas sets off across the Arizona desert on his horse after breaking out of jail. Pursued by a reluctant and weary Walter Matthau, horse and rider have one more obstacle -- the interstate -- until they are free. But as they gallop across the wet asphalt, the horse slips and they are hit by a big rig carrying toilets. Douglas survives but his horse dies; Matthau lets him go, but where? He is nowhere without his horse.

In William Fraker’s “Monte Walsh” (1970), a wild mustang unwittingly issues a challenge simply by not being broken even as it is corralled and can no longer run free. Down-and-out cowboy Monte Walsh, played by Lee Marvin, approaches and says, “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna teach you some manners before you leave.”

Then he rides the bucking horse as it rampages through town, demolishing buildings and starting a cattle stampede, until the pair keel over in exhaustion. The steed rises and Walsh re-mounts; with head bowed he carries the old man into town, last step in the last waltz for the mythical West. “Yeah, well, thanks,” Walsh says.

Yes, thanks. Where would our cultural narrative be without Incitatus and Trigger and Mr. Ed and the battalions of horses with their shining breastplates that charged and died in the Light Brigade (the real thing and the movie) and without the horses that starred in “Gladiator” and “Ben-Hur,” or the steeds of the 7th U.S. Cavalry that were wiped out save one when Custer sent them to their doom at Little Big Horn?

In the age of the SUV, the American imagination still travels fastest and longest on horseback. Yet the few remaining wild horse herds that roam the Western states are under siege.

Not a month goes by that mustangs are not rounded up, killed with automatic weapons or shipped to slaughterhouses. In the movie “Equus,” a troubled boy, unable to stand the truth that the horse reflects, blinds six of them with steel spikes. His psychiatrist asks if it’s possible for a horse to “add its sufferings together ... and turn them into grief?”

That is the mustang story yet to be shot, and who better to do it than Hollywood, so beholden to the horse?

Deanne Stillman is writing a book called “Horse Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West” for Houghton Mifflin. She can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.