The post-war Baby Boomers, upon entering adulthood in the 1960s, carried the unique burden of being the first generation reared in an age of seemingly boundless progress and prosperity. For them, the harrowing trials of their parents and grandparents—the breadlines, the Dust Bowl, the existential dread of the Great Depression—felt like relics of a distant, almost mythic past. Their understanding of that era was filtered largely through Hollywood’s stylised lens, where even hardship was often softened by melodrama or moralistic triumph. By the late 1960s, however, the American film industry itself was in flux: the rigid studio system had crumbled, the Production Code’s puritanical shackles had loosened, and a new wave of filmmakers sought to excavate history with unflinching honesty. The result was a cluster of films that stripped away nostalgia, presenting the 1930s as a crucible of despair. Among these, Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) stands as one of the most unrelentingly bleak—a visceral indictment of human exploitation that remains a definitive cinematic portrait of the Depression’s psychological toll.
Adapted from Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel of the same name, the film draws on the author’s firsthand experiences as a bouncer at Santa Monica’s dance marathons. In 1930s these grotesque spectacles, which masqueraded as entertainment, were in reality desperate survival mechanisms for a society teetering on collapse.
Set against the sun-bleached decay of Santa Monica Pier in the early 1930s, the film centres on a dance marathon orchestrated by the merciless emcee Rocky Gravo (played by Gig Young). The contest promises a $1,500 prize to the last couple standing, a sum that lures a motley crew of the desperate and deluded. Among them are Harry Kline (played by Red Buttons), an US Navy sailor deemed too old to re-enlist; James (played by Bruce Dern) and Ruby Bates (played by Bonnie Bedelia), refugees from impoverished farmland with a child on the way; and Alice LeBlanc (played by Susannah York), a British actress clinging to Hollywood fantasies. At the narrative’s core is Robert Syverton (played by Michael Sarrazin), a taciturn drifter paired with Gloria Beatty (played by Jane Fonda), a caustic would-be starlet whose nihilism hardens as the marathon grinds on.
The contest’s rules are as dehumanising as its setting: dancers must remain in motion for 45 minutes each hour, subsisting on scant food and sleep, their bodies and minds eroding under fluorescent lights. Elimination rounds—dubbed “derbies”—force couples to race around the floor until the weakest collapse. Deaths, breakdowns, and betrayals punctuate the spectacle, all cheered by an audience numbed to cruelty. Pollack’s direction refuses to sanitise the horror; close-ups of blistered feet and vacant stares underscore the participants’ degradation, transforming the marathon into a metaphor for capitalism’s vampiric appetite.
The film’s path to the screen was as fraught as its subject matter. In the early 1950s, Charles Chaplin acquired the rights, envisioning an adaptation directed by Norman Lloyd (former protégé of Orson Welles) and starring Marilyn Monroe alongside his son, Sydney Chaplin. Yet this vision crumbled under the weight of Cold War paranoia. J. Edgar Hoover, weaponising McCarthyist fervour, orchestrated Chaplin’s exile from the U.S. in 1952, scuttling the project. While tragic, this thwarted iteration might have paled beside Pollack’s later version. The 1969 film, liberated from the Production Code’s demand for moral uplift, embraces an unsparing realism that Chaplin’s sentimental tendencies might have diluted.
Pollack’s film opens with a flashback: Robert Syverton recalls a wounded horse being euthanised—an act of mercy that haunts him. This vignette bookends the narrative, intercut with flashforwards of Robert’s interrogation for an unspecified crime. The structure imbues the story with inevitability, transforming the marathon from a contest into a death march. There are no redemptive arcs here, only the grim calculus of survival. When Gloria, her spirit shattered, begs Robert to end her suffering, the film delivers one of cinema’s most harrowing conclusions—a moment that shatters any illusion of hope.
Though Sydney Pollack would later become synonymous with the polished dramas of New Hollywood, They Shoot Horses reveals a director grappling with European influences while prioritising accessibility. His earlier works flirted with the freneticism of the French New Wave, but here, his approach is methodical, almost clinical. The camera lingers on the dancers’ exhaustion, framing them as specimens under glass. Even the use of slow motion—during the derbies—eschews melodrama, emphasising the surreal banality of their torment. This restraint amplifies the horror, forcing viewers to confront the spectacle without aesthetic buffer.
Philip H. Lathrop’s cinematography renders the marathon hall a purgatorial space. The dancers are bathed in harsh, artificial light, their shadows stretching like spectres on the walls. Outside, glimpses of the Pacific Ocean taunt them with unattainable freedom. Johnny Green’s soundtrack compounds the dissonance, weaving jaunty 1920s and 1930s standards like “Easy Come, Easy Go” into the fabric of the film. The contrast between the music’s buoyancy and the characters’ anguish creates a queasy irony, mirroring the audience’s complicity in their suffering.
Paradoxically, the film’s leads—Sarrazin and Fonda—are its weakest links. Sarrazin’s Robert is a cipher, his passivity rendering him more observer than protagonist. Fonda’s Gloria, while ferociously bitter, occasionally veers into mannered abrasion. It is the supporting players who etch themselves into memory. Susannah York, as the unraveling Alice, delivers a masterclass in psychological disintegration. Red Buttons infuses Harry with tragic dignity, his quiet resignation a counterpoint to the surrounding hysteria.
Yet it is Gig Young’s Oscar-winning turn as Rocky that anchors the film. A carnival barker with a predator’s grin, Rocky oscillates between faux compassion and sadistic manipulation. His real-life trajectory—Young struggled with alcoholism and died in a murder-suicide in 1978—lends the role a chilling prescience. Rocky isn’t merely a villain; he’s a reflection of a system that commodifies despair, a figure as trapped by his role as the dancers themselves.
Over half a century later, They Shoot Horses feels unnervingly prescient. The dance marathon’s DNA is visible in reality TV’s voyeuristic trials, social media’s performative suffering, and the gig economy’s erosion of dignity. In an era where “content creators” monetise their breakdowns and audiences feast on humiliation, the film’s critique of exploitation resonates with renewed urgency. For modern viewers, the Great Depression may no longer be an abstraction, but a looming shadow in an age of austerity and algorithmic dehumanisation.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is not a film one “enjoys”; it is a film one survives. Its power lies in its refusal to offer catharsis, its insistence that some wounds defy closure. If the Baby Boomers saw in it a cautionary tale from a bygone era, contemporary audiences may recognise something darker: a mirror held to our own complicity in the cycles of exploitation. In this, the film achieves a grim immortality—a reminder that the dance, in one form or another, never truly ends.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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