Sydney Pollack (1979)
Ten years on from the ballroom marathon, Sydney Pollack brings you ‘They Dope Horses, Don’t They?’ This otiose satire on the advertising industry – debunking fallen heroes who never had far to fall – soon (and fortunately) gives way to the genial mountain meanderings of Robert Redford and Rising Star, his equine partner. Redford is Sonny Steele, an ex-rodeo champion deflected from his descent (via tequila) into skid row by the commercial world’s abuse of him and his horse: Rising Star has been doped with bute and steroids in order to appear in adverts, with Sonny on board, for a breakfast cereal called Ranch. Man and horse escape to the wilds but soon find they have Jane Fonda in tow. She is a television news reporter again – this one more self-defensively probing and edgily ingratiating than the character Fonda played in The China Syndrome. Fonda’s Hallie Martin is hyperactive but always at least one step behind what Redford’s Sonny is thinking and where he’s heading. The film itself is in rhythm with its hero’s relaxed resignation and harnessed to his ultimate lack of direction.
The screenwriters, Robert Garland and Paul Gaer, seem to know even less about racehorses than I do about cowboys. Rising Star is supposedly the world’s most valuable stallion, with a stud value of twelve million dollars; Seattle Slew, the 1978 Kentucky Derby winner, was syndicated recently for twenty million and he wasn’t the first. Sonny Steele is so disgusted by the mistreatment of a beautiful equine athlete, who has a filled tendon as a result of the drugs pumped into him, that he trots Rising Star out of a recording studio, through the neon maze of Las Vegas and into the mountains, determined to set the horse free among a herd of mustangs. Racehorse trainers the world over must be crying out for a vet as effective as Sonny. Rising Star, in spite of his ballooning tendon, survives a head-to-head with assorted police vehicles that makes the Grand National look like a spot of dressage. With Sonny looking after him, the horse’s injured leg heals during their long, rocky odyssey.
Why would the owners of such a precious commercial commodity lease him to a business conglomerate? As Sonny points out, it’s absurd to dope Rising Star since his fertility will likely be impaired as a result. It must therefore be a very lucrative advertising contract if it’s worth jeopardising the stud visiting fees of the consignment of forty or fifty mares the stallion would cover each season – at around a hundred thousand dollars per covering. Why anyway would Rising Star’s owners want to see him publicly associated with a has-been like Sonny Steele? The film seems to assume that cowboy types and horses just kinda go together. Imagine an equivalent British advert for Hunts tonic water with a scarlet-coated, jodhpured toff astride Mill Reef.
Sonny Steele is portrayed as an apostle of an idealised Old West, even though rodeo has become a C&W-flavoured emblem of the cheapening of Western culture into showbiz. The Electric Horseman would be more honest and more coherent if it teased apart the two strands of Sonny’s mission in the story – if it showed that, while he could embarrass the ‘system’ that has exploited him and Rising Star, he couldn’t recapture the ever-receding Old West. The script and Sydney Pollack fight shy of making clear that Sonny’s dream of successfully returning the finely-bred racehorse to ‘his own kind’ is a dream – a fantasy that epitomises the severed connection between Sonny and the Western roots that he covets. The commercials powers-that-be in the film are made to look ridiculous chiefly by over-the-top playing of them. Although the public is entranced by Sonny’s idealism, they lionise him by boosting the sales of Ranch.
The film makes a head-in-the-sand beeline for a happy ending but it lacks the vulgar sentimentality required and loses the courage of its escapist convictions inside the final furlong. Redford drifts off into an uncertain future, a horseless cowboy. Fonda returns to the journalism that has seemed both to mask and to sharpen her extrovert vulnerability. Rising Star joins the mustangs, among whom he’s going to have, to say the least, acclimatisation issues. The cast also includes Willie Nelson, Valerie Perrine and John Saxon, as the head of the advertising consortium that ends up with more cash in the bank than egg on its face. Perrine is lively as Sonny’s ex-wife. Saxon is a Machiavellian with Mephistophelean eyebrows. One of the friends with whom I saw The Electric Horseman reckoned it wouldn’t full satisfy aficionados of equine, romance or adventure films but had just about enough to keep all three groups in their seats. It also has Redford and Fonda: Sydney Pollack depends a lot on the charm of his stars and the almost tactile emotional contrasts they supply. Even so, the film is only mildly enjoyable and a bland diet for two hours – somewhere between a breakfast cereal and a tranquilliser.
[1980]
