National Velvet

Velvet Brown lives in a town on the English coast. Her family are butchers; her father is orderly, her mother silent. Velvet is obsessed with horses. There is a horse in the town nobody can hold; bad tempered, it jumps fences and its owner wants rid of it. Velvet wins it in a raffle. Mi Taylor is a drifter who comes to the town; he was once a jockey and gave it up after an incident. Velvet puts an idea to him: the horse will run in the Grand National. The difficulty is that a woman cannot ride in that race. Clarence Brown directs. Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet, Mickey Rooney plays Mi and Anne Revere her mother; Donald Crisp is in the cast. The source is Enid Bagnold's novel. Anne Revere won an Oscar for the part; the film also won for editing. Elizabeth Taylor learned to ride for the part and had a fall during the shoot. The mother is its most interesting side; in her youth she swam the Channel, and that fact becomes the turning point of the story. The matter it treats is whose ambition it is; the mother sees her own past in her daughter's decision. The racing was shot in the studio and on a real course together. The ending withholds the expected prize and the narrative does that deliberately. Its limit is pace; the first half is slow and the narrative gathers itself in the second. Who it is for: viewers who like classic family films and racing stories. Who it is not for: it is long, the pace uneven, and the emotional register high.