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Days and nights at the races. "Brother, it keeps my mind occupied, my blood boiling, my nerves frazzled, my purse empty." Opposite its spacious bustle is the rigidity of the corporate clan, where dinner is a board meeting. ("That's not a family, that's a disease," cf. Arsenic and Old Lace.) The hero (Warner Baxter) is in unhappy charge of a box factory, his passion lies with the derby horse, his kindred spirit is the rebellious sister-in-law (Myrna Loy). "Hang the emperor!" "Weeeell, another revolutionary." Walter Connolly as the patriarch points up the pendant to It Happened One Night, and there's a glimpse of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in Frank Capra's buoyant equations of dreaming lug and sprinting thoroughbred. The independent venture still requires funding, the penniless cohorts proceed from plush restaurant to hamburger stand to cook up ways to swindle racetrack hopefuls, "pick 'em and pluck 'em." (Raymond Walburn luxuriates in the role of the elegant colonel-conman, suddenly seized by a gambling urge when his fraudulent tip boomerangs back to him: "Bilked by my own chicanery!") Greedy wife (Helen Vinson), vivacious sidekick (Clarence Muse), shaky jockey (Frankie Darro), an acute gallery down to the Gogolian rooster. The makeshift home is a stable that gets nightmarishly leaky during storms, Capra caps the sequence with Loy in reassuring-despairing close-up illuminated by lightning. Kaleidoscopic word of mouth, the tenacious heart that literally bursts, the funeral after the finish line. "I read my fairy tales at night." The coda has an Ovidian view of the happy runaways as an equine couple reused by Buñuel in Belle de Jour. With Douglass Dumbrille, Lynne Overman, Margaret Hamilton, George Cooper, Ward Bond, and Charles Lane. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |