Snowman Trots Into Cinemas

“Harry and Snowman,” Ron Davis’s multiple-award-winning documentary about a Long Island horse trainer and an unkempt plow horse he rescued and turned into a national show-jumping champion, will make its theatrical debut tomorrow at venues across the country, including AMC Loews Stony Brook 17.

Shown at the 2015 Hamptons International Film Festival, the film tells the compelling story of Harry de Leyer, a Dutch-born trainer who began jumping at the age of 9 and came to the United States in 1950, where he found work as a horse farm manager and trainer. In 1954 he became the riding instructor at a private school in St. James.

While looking for a schooling horse to carry his heavier students, he encountered Snowman at a Pennsylvania auction and purchased him for $80. The rest is history, now well known because of Elizabeth Letts’s book “The Eighty Dollar Champion” and Mr. Davis’s documentary.

The film follows Snowman’s success at a series of shows, starting with local events and quickly moving to the big time at Madison Square Garden, where he won one of his many show-jumping championships. Mr. Davis makes use of archival material from television, Movietone reports, and print journalism. According to the Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney, “Some of the most touching material is the footage of family beach trips, showing Snowman paddling in the water with multiple kids astride his back, or using him as a diving platform.”

Mr. de Leyer, now 88, owned the East End Stables off Oakview Highway in East Hampton before moving to Virginia in 2005. His son Andre still runs the facility with his wife, Christine. As for Snowman, he died in 1974 at the age of 28 and was inducted into the Show Jumping Hall of Fame in 1992.