National Velvet

As I mentioned in my entry on Elizabeth Taylor, I had never seen her star-making role in National Velvet. Tonight I took a look and, for the most part, I was charmed.

Made in 1944, when Taylor was twelve and already preternaturally beautiful, National Velvet is a classic of a familiar type of story--the girl and her horse. She plays Velvet Brown, the irrepressible daughter of a butcher in a seaside English town. A local man buys a horse that is too wild, and ends up raffling it off. Of course Taylor wins it, much to the consternation of her father, Donald Crisp.

But her mother, Ann Revere, was a swimming champion in her younger days (she swam the Channel), and encourages Taylor's dream of entering her horse, which she calls Pie, in the Grand National, a steeplechase that seems pretty dangerous to me.

She's helped by a traveling young man played by Mickey Rooney. His father was Revere's swimming coach, and at first he is interested in robbing the family, but is touched by their kindness and, more importantly, Taylor's belief in him. You see, he was once a jockey, but had a bad spill. Well, you can figure out the rest.

Oddly, the big race scene at the end is the most uninteresting part of the film. Rooney is set up as having his great moment of redemption, but instead Taylor impersonates a man and rides the horse herself, which means she will be disqualified even if she does win. Thus the film becomes about something other than winning prize money, which struck me as a little too dreamy.

Revere won an Oscar for one of the saintliest mother roles you're likely to see, and Crisp is great, too. The best scenes are the ones in which they try to rule over a brood of four children, which include a freckle-faced boy who carries around a bottle full of insects and another daughter that moons over boys (played by Angela Lansbury).

While Taylor are gone, Lansbury and Rooney are still with us. In fact, talk of Taylor being the "last movie star" is only true in certain respects. Really, Rooney is the only link to a part of Hollywood's past. I believe he is the last actor left who starred in silent films.