They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? suffers from too much “art”. The picture has a haunting, bizarre, taken from true events premise: in the midst of the Great Depression, a punishing dance-off is staged. The contestants, a variety of the poorest and most desperate, subject themselves to weeks of unending shaking and twirling, punctuated only by fleeting naps; and meals in which they are required to move while chewing. There’s also, seemingly timed to perfectly coincide with the dancers’ most vulnerable moments, race-offs, which eliminate couples at a faster clip and further underline the human-as-cattle motif of the program. An announcer (Gig Young) periodically chimes in with contrived, chilling, “humanity”, which is pitched in rehearsed, energetic blasts of encouragement that further deflates and hammers, hammers, hammers. This is all endured for the promise of fifteen hundred dollars, or, slightly more likely, a chance at attracting the interest of someone of influence in show business.
The dance scenes, staged in graceful, flowing alternations of long and close shots, deliver the outrage and frailty with which Pollack is clearly aiming. Too bad then, that Pollack doesn’t trust his subject matter. There’s too much self-conscious, faux-important, arty-art moralizing going on here. The actors, including Red Buttons, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Susannah York, and Michael Sarrazin, are all too wide-eyed and heavily misguided naïve. One wonders if this contest is the first indignity these people have had to suffer.
The idea of the picture is appalling enough on its own, so it’s redundant and disappointing that our director should take our hand and guide us across the exclamation points. We feel the waste, the constriction, but in a way that’s overly worked out and partially accidental in equal measure. Pollack clutters the action, which should be focused and unrelenting and speaking for itself, and distracts with devices such as flashbacks of Sarrazin and overly theatrical back-stage lightening. The poverty manifested as game-show sanitized physical misery (the kind that distracts from other, more naturally arrived at, physical misery), and its ironic, unnerving, juxtaposition with the cheery pageantry backdrop, should be the first and only concern. The material begs for a macabre sense of humor, a tongue in cheek of the damned sensibility (one can only imagine what Altman would’ve done with it, or the Kubrick of Lolita) but Pollack seems to be too insecure, too insistent on proving he’s an artist, to allow himself to fully act like one.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? gets stronger and hotter as the story inevitably gets bleaker and bleaker though, and Pollack, surprisingly, lets the characters’ continued deterioration stand on its own. The film’s other actor is its ace: Jane Fonda, in one of her best performances, which is clearly saying something. Fonda doesn’t subject herself to the picture’s thesis governed m.o.: she’s hard, sexy, bitter, and closed-off: come-on within snarling come-on. Fonda, even at her nastiest, is exhilaratingly alive: her hostility channeled as white-electric current. Fonda leaves the broad stuff to the less instinctual actors, and gets at the run-down engine of America at the time-no critique can rein this woman in.
Jane is sometimes too un-fake-ably self-possessed to convincingly register as someone with mortal concerns, someone who’s susceptible to human needs and miscalculations (it’s a barrier that surrounds all of the Fondas) but there’s a scene here, near the end; that sells her panic with a conviction I’ve rarely seen in the actress, even in her frequently brilliant work. The Fonda character, Gloria Beatty, finds herself paired with an older partner (Buttons) who’s clearly on his way out of the competition. Another race is called, and Gloria fights, screams, claws her way beyond the disqualifying bottom three places. The race goes on and on, much longer than we’re conditioned by movies to expect; and Fonda’s cynicism, her sweat, her panic, her unbendable will, unite and pitch forward with pure animal abandon. This is a memorable study of survival.
Gig Young is also fascinating in his ambiguity; he’s a portrait of charm and “the show must go on” savagery disguised as sympathy that might still, somehow, house just a little bit of authentic sympathy anyway. Young calls the contestants “good kids”, even in private, apparently oblivious to the irony of his own advice and solace-but he also always has a but up his sleeve-a way to further harvest the characters’ misery in the service of furthering audience satisfaction and profits.
The second half of the picture takes off from Fonda and Young’s performances (the first half is too dependant on the inexpressive Sarrazin); and the little details, which are initially minute, or perhaps only slightly irritating, gain a nightmarish quality in repetition: The siren that signals the return to the dance floor (it sounds as if it would announce the arrival of the secret police in another society). The increasing cruelty of the races. The spectators’ throwing of pennies at the contestants. The self-delusional announcements. Pollack’s touch, ironically, becomes surer with each fresh turn of derangement; probably because, by this point, the scenario has gained enough obvious, tangible affect for him- it straightens his sensibilities.
Until the end that is, which, not to put too fine of a point on it, sucks (no reveal here-but consider the title). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? has a high-school short story ending: fatalistic and symbolic without the slightest consideration as to whether it fits the characters. On paper, the ending works-and it has effect in the movie too-but its stock, shock effect-melodrama that again distracts from the potent, despairing bulk of the story. The very final image is all that Pollack, and the audience, needed; a promise that the shop-‘til-you-drop madness is truly timeless, always shuffling, always racing, the music never ending. I’m playing devil’s advocate here to a certain extent, the picture is still a weird triumph- there are too many moments- and the subject matter is too strong, too readily lending to metaphor both past and present, for it not to be. But it’s also too fitting that the title to Pollack’s film should end with a question mark-the picture has unresolved issues about its unanswered questions.
