Sydney Pollack (1969)

Working from a screenplay by James Poe and Robert E Thompson (adapted from Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel about a dance marathon contest taking place on the fringes of Hollywood during the Depression), Sydney Pollack is brutally overemphatic from the word go.  A semi-prologue cross-cuts between the protagonist Robert Syverton preparing to enter the dance hall in Santa Monica and recollecting the incident in his childhood that gives the film its title and its primary metaphorical image.  Each of the fragments of memory – featuring a fine black horse, galloping free until it falls and sustains mortal injuries – ends with a startling loud noise that merges with a noise from Robert’s adult situation.  These noises culminate, of course, in the gunshot that ends the horse’s life.   The equine sequence is remarkably badly done:  the animal’s progress is tracked by a man and a boy – the man holds his shotgun in a way that suggests he’s primed for lethal action well before the horse needs to be put out of its agony.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is gruelling – but this less because of its subject matter or our intense involvement with the dance contestants or because the film is relentless and claustrophobic, than because it’s monotonous.  (The first hour seems to last for ever.)  And since it’s clear from an early stage that the marathon is going to be a metaphor for the human condition – the dance hall master of ceremonies’ spiel is increasingly explicit about this – you soon realise the style of the piece isn’t going to change and its themes won’t enlarge or deepen.   The siren that calls the competitors back from their short breaks to resume the contest certainly works on your nerves but it’s chiefly Pollack’s approach to the material that locks you in – and growing resentment of this produces some odd effects.  I grew anxious for any kind of change so that – like the audience in the dance hall who, as the competition organisers realise, need the occasional highlight – I was practically grateful for the two ‘derbies’ in which the dance couples are required to take part.  (They do endless circuits of the hall, the band playing faster and faster, until the MC calls time and the couples at the back of the pack when the music stops are eliminated.)

We learn eventually that the contest is rigged so that no one wins – the victorious couple will have the management’s running costs docked from their $1,500 prize money.  You could argue that, in allegorical terms, this implies the universe isn’t absurd and meaningless but rather that a controlling agency is making things worse than they have to be.  But we’re no doubt meant to think simply that this heartless exploitation is clinching evidence that life is crap – a view expressed repeatedly by the story’s heroine, Gloria Beatty.    Except for one elderly woman who supports the Gloria-Robert partnership, the dance hall audience – who follow and place bets on the contest – is presented as a voyeuristic monolith, avid to watch other people suffering in public.  The effect is bluntly misanthropic.  Of course we understand that the masses’ desire for this kind of entertainment is sharpened by their own impoverished situation, and the need to see other people confirmed as worse off than they are themselves – but we’re not encouraged to feel any sympathy for the audience members.

I’ve read the McCoy novel and I’d seen the film once before – I guess in the mid- to late 1970s.  I remembered how the story ended but not the structure of the film.  Watching it again, I took to be flashbacks what turn out to be flash forwards – to Robert in custody after he’s carried out Gloria’s final plea that he shoot her.  (The intensely blue-toned inserts look so unrealistic that in fact you wonder if they might be the young man’s imaginings rather than his memories.)  These bits don’t work at all:  because the film fails to make Robert interesting, let alone the central consciousness of the story, they don’t build up any curiosity.  (They function in effect as the film audience’s own rest breaks.)  Michael Sarrazin is a serious weakness.  We gather that Robert has unfulfilled aspirations to becoming a film director but Sarrazin is so meekly benign and inexpressive that he doesn’t suggest much of a character at all – except, perhaps, a half-wit.  That appears to be the only explanation (hardly a satisfying one) of why he accedes without much difficulty to Gloria’s extraordinary request.

There are three characters each of whom strikes you, from their very first appearance, as designed to deliver a melodramatic resolution to their individual fate.  It’s somewhat to the film’s credit that in one case this doesn’t happen.  The veteran sailor Harry Kline (Red Buttons), who does a spirited tap dance before the contest proper gets underway, has a fatal heart attack during the second of the derby races.  (This is very well staged.)  An actress-on-the-skids called Alice LeBlanc – feyly melancholy, in a staring world of her own – duly goes over the edge (Susannah York is too quickly bonkers but her climactic scene in a shower is impressive).    A heavily pregnant young wife (Bonnie Bedelia) doesn’t, however, either give birth or lose the child she’s expecting or expire (not during the film anyway – the contest is still continuing, after more than forty days, as the final shot fades out).  Instead, to earn a few extra bucks, she sings ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’ – affectingly, if surprisingly strongly, given her condition and exertions.  As her husband, Bruce Dern is hard to ignore but (from this distance in time, anyway) unsurprising.

Jane Fonda plays Gloria with formidable intensity and consistency:  as Pauline Kael says (in her magnificent review – a treat after the dismal, largely disappointing film), she has the skill and magnetism to draw us in, even though the character of Gloria often makes us recoil.  Fonda’s relentless bitterness can seem too much – I think this is not because she overdoes it but because she’s such a dominant presence; even so, the strength of Gloria’s convinced defeatism pre-empts what happens in the contest and this reinforces the film’s monotony.   In her final scene, Jane Fonda is great:  asking Robert to shoot her, Gloria’s unhappy eyes light up – the imminent prospect of death gives her, for the first time in the film, hope.   The best scenes in They Shoot Horses are the laconic, backroom exchanges between Gloria and the MC Rocky (and the striking scene in which Rocky talks with Alice, when she’s gone crazy and is standing, in her dress, in the shower).  Gig Young as Rocky has an advantage over the rest of the cast in having the opportunity of showing different sides on and off stage – and takes it.   (He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.)  You get the sense that the MC’s ringmaster energy is sourced from the same jadedness and almost frightened self-disgust which, when he’s not performing, weigh him down and show in his face.   (We catch the occasional glint of panic in his eyes on stage as well, too momentary for anyone in the dance hall to notice.)  Because we come to see there’s more to this man than his public persona, it makes the ironic moral-of-the-story lines the screenwriters supply him with (somewhat) less hard to take.  The glitterball in the dance hall ceiling has certainly stayed with me:  I realised watching the film again that, whenever I see one of these, on Strictly or anywhere else, it brings They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to mind.

22 February 2011