They Shoot Horses, Don't They

Released 1969
Stars Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Susannah York, Gig Young, Red Buttons, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Conrad
Directed by Sydney Pollack

"They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" is emblematic of society’s path of self-destruction. It showcases people’s selfishness and desperation, their struggle for success, and their need to know that someone else is worse off than they are. It makes a pageant out of primal instinct: survival of the fittest. Based on Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel, "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" is set in the dance hall marathon days of the dirty thirties. Only a decade after one war, the Great Depression saw mass unemployment, poverty and migration. While Fred and Ginger danced away their cares in Hollywood’s Shall We Dance, starving, hopeless people performed for pennies. It wasn’t until the era of the Vietnam war that director Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa, Tootsie) brought McCoy’s story of human suffering to the screen.

Like standing in line for food stamps, contestants jostle to complete their entry forms. The prize is $1,500 at a time when the average wage is $4 a week. The last couple standing wins. The sheer exemplification of human endurance astounds as the contestants are in “continuous motion” for 100 hours, 200 hours, and over 1,000 hours. The passion and desperation in the characters is mirrored in the dancehall audience that watches for entertainment, or wagers money for sport and profit. Pollack starts with a fundamental story of human endurance and ends with one of complete defeat. Like the propaganda-like films of the Second World War, "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" epitomizes the human condition of its own era, only this time the faces aren’t romantic heroes on the front line but vulgar, desperate washouts.

Summary by Elspeth Haughton

I was "on board" with this film for the first hour, but then it started to lose its credibility. I felt it was too unrealistic. I mean it's impossible to go over 1000 hours without sleep. It just seemed silly, especially after watching the fascinating documentary Hands on a Hard Body about a contest to win a truck. In that contest, the winner had to last a little over 100 hours. After seeing that I knew there was no way anyone could go anywhere near 1000 hours, let alone 1200 or 1500 hours without sleep. After watching the film, however, I watched the "making of" short on the DVD, and I was stunned to hear this was based on a book which chronicled the dance contests that were common in the 1930's. They really did take *weeks* to resolve. The main difference between those contests and the truck contest was the fact that contentants could sleep on the dance floor. One would sleep while the other held them up and rocked them back and forth. In the truck contest, contestants had to support their own weight and were forbidden from leaning on the truck. I wish I had known all of this, because it just seemed silly that it could go that long. It didn't help that most of the 10 minute breaks seemed to last an hour or more. In retrospect, that would be my one criticism. It wasn't clear on how the contestants dealt with the sleep deprivation. Other than that, it was a pretty interesting indictment of how people like to watch other people suffer. It also has a great ending; the type of ending that disappeared from American film somewhere in the mid-70's. It's also chock full of fabulous performances. Yowsa, yowsa, yowsa. --Bill Alward, August 27, 2001