Sydney Pollack’s film of Horace McCoy’s novel manages to be the ultimate in both retro-Depression gothic and late-‘60s fatalism. Comparisons to Reality TV are inevitable in contemplating this movie’s subject today, if only to remind us that a taste of gawking, patronising exploitation in spectators entwined with a desperate need for attention and riches on the behalf of the participants wasn’t invented by Survivor and Big Brother. But They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is larger than a mere mordant satire on modish huckstering and carnivals of humiliation, becoming a metaphor for both a prostituted version of the “American Dream” and, finally, the human condition itself, asking how much any individual can be expected to withstand or see inflicted.
Bracing in its unblinking gaze on assailed humanity and even more depressing then you expect, Pollack and screenwriters James Poe and Robert E. Thompson can’t quite avoid overstating the themes, and dilute the finale’s dread import by telegraphing it all the way through, but in general they did an excellent job in transposing an almost unbearably Darwinian tale to the screen, communicating livid physical exhaustion and spiritually corrosive straits.
A marathon dance contest held in an LA pavilion pier pits hard-as-nails survivor Jane Fonda, dreamy wanderer Michael Sarrazin, platinum-haired wannabe starlet Susannah York, energetic but fragile old-timer Red Buttons, Oakie couple Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia, and sundry others in competition for $1500 and the chance of perhaps being noted by a Hollywood big, medium, or little shot. This horror show drags on for two months and grinds everyone down into pits of physical and moral exhaustion, a process watched over by Gig Young’s indelible Emcee, who mixes glimmers of compassion with a flimflammer’s casual psychopathy in such a way that eats away at without quite dispelling his slick façade.
The acting is uniformly excellent, sporting what is probably Fonda’s most sustained and forceful performance, with Dern maniacally convincing, York appropriately pathetic, and the later ill-used Sarrazin lucid as the young man whose idea of common feeling can encompass mercy killing. The film builds to hideous punchlines: Fonda dragging Buttons’ dead body on her back to win a “derby” race, York washing with her clothes on and cowering before Young’s soothing entreaties, and the final fade-out that leaves the Emcee’s hype ringing like the death knell of civilisation.
By comparison, the bullet Sarrazin puts in Fonda’s head really is merciful, for people for whom the competition has long since gone beyond being a means to end and has instead revealed all their secret weaknesses. What the film finally says is that although the marathon eats people up, it only speeds up the normal social process. If there’s a fault to all this, shared with works based in scabrous rage of the ‘30s, like Day of the Locust and Johnny Got His Gun, it’s that it so broadly reverses the Good Ship Lollypop for crushingly cosmic horror. Which is not an excuse to avoid it.
