The Thoroughbred

This is pretty much a stock racetrack movie filled with stock battling Irishmen, young love and crooked gamblers. If it had been made at MGM, it would have starred William Haines, but this was Tiffany, a Poverty Row producer, albeit an ambitious one, so there are some points of interest.

One is the camera-work. Director Richard Thorpe was famous for his cheap way of shooting scenes interestingly; he would start shooting a scene in a long shot, then as takes were blown, he would have the camera move in and continue. In this one, DP Max DuPont is more ambitious and manages some limited moving shots to show off the sets. Some of the ambitions are greater than ability. In the opening scene, when Wesley Barry and Onest Conley -- he was the real life son of Madame Sul-Te-Wan, with whom he has a couple of scenes -- are hoping for a job, they imagine Barry as a jockey riding Conley as a horse. It doesn't work, alas.

One scene that does work is the picnic scene. It looks like it was a pick-up scene, shot to bring the movie up to length. It doesn't make the movie good, but it is a pleasantly shot interlude. It's scenes like that that got Thorpe from Poverty Row to MGM.

I have seen a ton of old films. So, I realize that a very large portion of the early talking pictures are poor films when you see them today. They're often too talky and stilted. However, even for one of these films, "The Thoroughbred" is a terrible film in many ways--so terrible, I wouldn't waste my time with it.

The film is a very formulaic race horse film. All throughout the movie, I could predict exactly what was going to happen because it was so familiar. However, I cannot fault it completely for this. After all, as an early film, it might represent an early form of the formula. But what I cannot get past is the slapdash way this is handled as well as the painfully racist elements in the movie.

The picture, if you bother seeing it, is about two friends. One (Todd) is a nice-guy jockey looking for work. The other is his black friend who is only there as comic relief. It's sad, as the film COULD have been interesting because of this relationship but it fails because nearly every horrible stereotype of the era is in the film--such as watermelon and fried chicken eating as well as the black folks in the film all seeming amazingly servile and stupid. It's also sad because Todd goes from being a nice guy to becoming a fat-headed jerk almost instantly. Had this slowly and realistically occurred, the film might have made more sense. At it is, he goes from treating his black friend fine to treating him like something he just scraped off his shoe! All in all, a terrible film made much worse due to horrible pacing, one-dimensional characters and poor writing.