Hidalgo, Disney’s “true story” starring Viggo Mortensen as a legendary cowboy who, with his Mustang, takes on 100 Bedouin and their Arab purebreds in a 3,000-mile endurance race across Arabia has ridden into cinemas around the Middle East.
It’s showing on five screens in Dubai and in Saudi Arabia DVD versions are, no doubt, available on a sidewalk near you.
Hidalgo has already been screened across North America and Europe and kicked up controversy there. Its arrival on Arab shores is untimely.
Mortensen is Frank Hopkins, a green-eyed cowboy who, with his victorious Horse of America, Hidalgo, is riding north across Arabia against a motley crowd of stereotyped Arabs.
The story is that Hopkins in 1890, took part in an annual trans-Arabian horse race from Aden across Arabia to a finishing line in Syria.
Omar Sharif plays an Arab Prince, the Sheikh of Sheikhs, Sheikh Riyadh.
Disney apparatchiks , Mortensen, scriptwriter John Fusco and sundry gullible equestrian enthusiasts all insist it’s based on a true story and that the trans-Arabian horse race actually took place.
Fusco claims he spent years researching the story of Frank Hopkins: “I am the author of nine major motion pictures and a two-time recipient of the National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage Award and so I do not take research lightly,” he has said.
The fallout from this hippodrama has been both messy and embarrassing. Critics, academics, equestrian writers, historians of the Arabian peninsula, anthropologists, curators, researchers of the Wild West and Native American history (the film starts with the massacre at Wounded Knee) have combined to denounce and lampoon the $100-million movie.
The magazine American Cowboy this week released its 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, asking readers, “Why does America need the cowboy?” The magazine’s PR release quotes Fusco providing answers: “While our culture might sell out, the cowboy stays true to his values — and his horse... When our children watch the Twin Towers crumble on CNN, they worry for our security, our future, our very foundation. The cowboy represents that foundation, that self-reliance, survival instinct, and integrity.”
Trouble is, Fusco’s man Frank Hopkins is no ambassador at large for the American Cowboy and what he is supposed to represent. According to a raft of experts Hopkins was a fraud, his achievements entirely fabricated.
“Hopkins should have been awarded the World’s Greatest Liar award,” says Dr. Vine Deloria Jnr, a leading Native American scholar and author. “Hopkins is a phony. He was obviously just repeating stories he had just read. We don’t know of any contemporary sources that even mention him,” says Leo Remiger, co-author of the “Encyclopedia of Buffalo Hunters and Skinners”.
Dale Yeager, a criminal psychologist who has examined Hopkins’ writings determines that he is “a narcissist with sociopathic tendencies.”
Mortensen has been wheeled in for interviews to prop up Hopkins and Hidalgo. Riding on the back of his Lord of the Rings acclaim, he has on several occasions ridden into quicksand over Hidalgo.
One interviewer, Peter Ross, writes in the Scottish Sunday Herald. “Although Disney is pitching Hidalgo as based on a true story, some sources have cast doubt on its authenticity, even suggesting it is anti-Muslim. This makes Mortensen furious, and he spends a good chunk of our interview ranting about it.”
“Hidalgo could have been an exercise in jingoism. It could have been the American goes to Arabia and kicks ass,” admits Mortensen to Ross. “That would have been repulsive and exploitative. But on a lot of levels it is gently subversive. Just the fact that you have an American heroic protagonist who goes to a third world region and behaves himself.”
Gently subversive is an understatement according to one American reviewer. “Hidalgo is insulting, imperialist Al-Qaeda-fodder,” writes Anthony Allison in the Las Vegas Mercury in his review. “As we foist yet another piece of jingoistic twaddle on a hapless world, Hidalgo raises just one, rhetorical question: Why are we surprised, post-9/11, that many aggrieved fanatics in the Muslim world want to destroy Western civilization?”
Much of the film’s action follows the Arabian Ocean of Fire race. The desert scenes, filmed in southern Morocco, grandly evoke Arabia. But, horses aside, renowned Hollywood stereotypes abound: devious and stereotyped Arabs parade about in bizarre costumes, some kitted out in jackboots and World War I goggles. There are repeated references to infidels and unbelievers. Hopkins is provided by Riyadh with a stock clown, an Arab goat-herder, Yusuf, as his sidekick. “After I stole sheep I had a choice, either to work with you or lose my left hand,” he tells Mortensen.
Sheikh Riyadh opens up his leather bag of shining instruments and threatens to castrate poor Viggo for chatting with his daughter, Jazeera. She later offers Frank and Hidalgo a Bedu desert trail-mix of camel butter (sic) and dates.
Arab horse aficionados who pop up throughout the film, from the Wild West to Arabia, are all projected as malevolent, sneering at the beloved Mustang. A wicked English aristocrat, Lady Anne (Louise Lombard), prances in and out of her billowing linen tent, a new hat for every appearance, turning her nose up at Mustangs, and goes all out to charm or harm Hopkins and his mount from winning.
And just how does Lady Anne manage to keep up and ahead of the galloping riders as they trot across the Empty Quarter? She’s there at the finishing line, perched with a brass telescope on an elegant lofty wooden tower (no doubt part of her camping kit) gulping as the cowboy races ahead down the finishing straight in Syria. It is here in Damascus where, in a final piece of Hollywood ignorance, the victorious Frank rides his Hidalgo into the waters of the Mediterranean.
All this and more constitute a pile of fodder for classrooms too. Disney Educational Productions offers a Hidalgo package complete with an Educator Guide for Grades 8-12, designed to help launch “lessons that will hone core writing, research and critical thinking skills.” The guide reminds teachers that Frank is faced with “deadly opponent tactics” and prompts discussion with such item as “In Saudi Arabia he encounters prejudice for being half white.”
Liar and fraudster he may have been, but Hopkins was more sympathetic to the Arabs than the scriptwriter and media conglomerate taken in by his tall tales. “I will say of those people they were fair in every way — no trickery amongst the judges nor the riders,” writes Hopkins in his own account (1941) of the race that never was.