Sa dernière course

Raoul Walsh's Academy Award-nominated "Salty O'Rourke" looks at the seedy side of horse racing, with the title character (Alan Ladd) having to pay a gangster (Bruce Cabot) $20,000. The title character hires a jockey to ride one of the horses, but when they both fall in love with a teacher (Gail Russell), some unpleasant complications arise.

The movie is a clever mix of film noir and athletics. It's not a combo that most people would imagine, but Walsh pulls it off. It's a shame that the movie isn't more well known. This offers a fine contrast to the average movie depicting horse racing as something nice and wholesome. If there's money to get made, then there's gonna be something ugly happening. It's not a masterpiece, but still a good one.

When the story begins, you learn that Salty (Alan Ladd) is in a fix. His partner absconded with $20,000 and the man that loaned Salty and his partner wants his money...or he'll make Salty pay one way or another! So, the fast-thinking gambler Salty hatches a plan. He knows of an incredibly fast race horse that is bound to be a big winner...but it's also supposedly unrideable. But Salty knows of a disgraces jockey who would control the beast...and so he buys the horse and plans on giving Johnny (Stanley Clements) a fake birth certificate and having him pose as a much younger jockey without a past! But an unforeseen problem arises when the birth certificate says the 22 year-old jockey is 17....and the racing officials won't let Johnny ride unless he enrolls in school!

The schooling offers some major problems....the biggest of which is Johnny is a larcenous jerk. Keeping him in school is practically full-time work for Salty, as Johnny seems to do his best to do his worst. In addition, Johnny is smitten with his school teacher (Gail Russell) and wants Salty to help him win the girl...no doubt a problem because she thinks he's only 17! But Johnny is a dope and he doesn't seem to understand that no woman would want a lunkhead like him. He's uncouth and tough to love....plus how will he explain the truth to her?! Plus, she seems much more interested in Salty than his hot-headed protege. And what about the $20,000...and the thug who seems more than ready to wrap Salty's legs around his head like a pretzel!?

So is this worth seeing? Yes....though I should point out that the story is pretty hard to believe. It's a 'turn off your brain and enjoy' sort of film....a lot of fun and well acted but very lightweight when it comes to the story and the finale.



By the way, based on performances like Clements had in this film, it's certainly understandable why he would be picked to replace Leo Gorcey in the Bowery Boys films when Gorcey quit the series in the late 1950s. In "Salty O'Rourke" he essentially plays a Leo Gorcey type character...though a much more larcenous one.

Paramount celebrated Alan Ladd's return from military service by giving him this racetrack story which got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Ladd plays the title character of Salty O'Rourke who is a racetrack character of sorts and a guy who is no better than he ought to be.

In fact he's got himself in a real jackpot with bookie Bruce Cabot. Ladd's former partner ran up a really big debt and skipped out and Ladd is holding the bag. He negotiates a deal with Cabot for a month's extension.

What he comes up with is a complicated scheme to obtain a spirited, but unrideable race horse and then to get a talented jockey who's been banned for gambling. Ladd and trainer William Demarest buy the horse and then go to Mexico to get jockey Stanley Clements who is leading a dissolute life south of the border.

Ladd and Demarest use the name of Stan's younger brother who is still a juvenile. But because of that the law requires he attend the school run at the racetrack. Clements balks at first, in fact he balks at just about everything. But one look at schoolteacher Gail Russell and he changes his mind. In fact Ladd takes an interest as well and therein lies the problem.

In a role where someone like Tyrone Power who specialized in playing hero/heels like Salty O'Rourke could have been the best casting, Alan Ladd does pretty well by the part. Standing out in the film though is Stanley Clements who was playing a character not too different from what he was in real life. Clements was the wild child and later wilder adult if tales are true. Spring Byington is also in the cast playing Russell's vapid and clueless mother.

Director Raoul Walsh got some racetrack atmospherics in the film and no doubt use of nearby Santa Anita or Hollywood Park was made to the limit. Salty O'Rourke proved that Alan Ladd still had box office appeal and was a good film to return from military service with.

Salty O'Rourke was a different Alan Ladd performance. Here he was a Steve McQueen type anti-hero , a character I never saw before from Ladd. I have seen him as villains like in This Gun For Hire, and usually he is an action hero but not here. He actually does well with the role. The best one in the movie was Gail Russell ( Barbara Brooks ( or as Ladd called her"Brooksie.")). She is the "Good Girl" here and like in Angel In The Badman, where she reforms John Wayne, she does the same here. Oddly enough like Quirt Evens in Angel and The Badman, Salty's best friend is his gun and he throws it away for her. There is one problem with this movie: Stanley Clements. I could not stand him as Jockey Johnny, he was a punk and acted like a bad version of James Cagney. To be honest this is not the best movie of Ladd's career. Shane, The Glass Key and The Badlanders come to mind. But it is worth watching ( especially for the beautiful Gail Russell). 7/10 stars.

SALTY O'ROURKE is one of those fine, unpretentious, smoothly paced films with accent on entertainment and slick production values that one has come to expect from director Raoul Walsh. Here we have a racetrack tale replete with Runyonesque lowlife characters who frequent the territory: gamblers, bookies, disgraced jockeys, and long shot thoroughbreds.

Starring Alan Ladd in one of his best performances, the story concerns a gambler, Salty O'Rourke (Ladd), who suddenly discovers that he has inherited a $20,000 debt left unpaid by his murdered partner and is given one month to repay it or pay with his life. He schemes to enter a fast, but relatively unknown, racehorse in the Darlington Handicap where he is sure to clean up and fulfill the odious obligation. To do this, he must enlist the services of the talented but obnoxious Johnny Cates (Stanley Clements), a jockey who has been barred from riding on American tracks but is the only one able to handle the temperamental animal. Further complications arise when the jockey, forced to go back to school as a condition of his reinstatement, manages to get himself expelled on the first day ("I got all the education I need and I ain't gonna overdo it," he sneers.). It is left to Salty to meet with the teacher, Barbara Brooks (Gail Russell), and trowel on the charm to induce her to allow Cates back into the classroom. Cates now falls for Barbara in a big way, but becomes extremely jealous when he learns that the she is attracted to Salty who, up to this point, has been biding his time merely as a conciliator between teacher and student. As the big day approaches and the jockey's animosity towards his employer grows, the outcome of the race is cast into doubt.

Ladd and Clements are excellent in their scenes together. Clements, in an early Cagney-styled performance, deliberately defies Psychology's posit that "There is no such thing as a bad boy." He lies, he steals, he breaks training, and he makes empty promises only to get Ladd off his back. Ladd, in turn, counters in ways that would embarrass Father Flannigan. The byplay of these two alone is worth the price of admission.

Ladd fans should love this movie. He can be dispassionate and cunning when dealing with his antagonists, yet breezy and engaging in the presence of Russell and her fluttery mother (Spring Byington). For my money, Gail Russell (with the possible exception of Lizabeth Scott) was Alan Ladd's best screen partner. Her unabashed charm and wide-eyed innocence perfectly augmented his hard edge and brought out another dimension in his character: a gentleness and civility that was seldom explored in the many tough-as-nails parts he played in the '40s. She humanized him.

Not that he got too soft. In the scene where he settles the debt with Doc Baxter (Bruce Cabot), you can just feel the temperature drop in the room even as they speak. This is the cold killer at his best.

SALTY O'ROURKE is a "must see" for Ladd fans and a "must own" for collectors of Alan Ladd movies.