They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

A year after Romero's apocalypse, "walking dead night" at the Depression ballroom. The dance marathon, a grinder equipped with bleachers for gawkers who "just want to see a little misery out there so they can feel a little better." Equine euthanasia, human cattle, the drifting calf (Michael Sarrazin) paired up with the hard-bitten no-hoper (Jane Fonda). "Suppose we did win... What would you do with the money?" "Maybe I'd buy some good rat poison." Other contestants include wannabe Jean Harlow from London (Susannah York), destitute Oakie (Bruce Dern) and pregnant missus (Bonnie Bedelia), old seaman (Red Buttons) with vaudeville pizzazz and bum ticker. Putting a grinning face on the scabrous endurance test is the emcee (Gig Young), who knows how to whip suffering into spectacle for audiences. "And isn't that the American way?" Nothing like a sledgehammer human-condition allegory to bring out the raw nerves behind the craftsman's polish, Sydney Pollack's visualization of Horace McCoy's Thirties pit is just the agonizing arena for ushering in the Seventies. Depleted bodies competing to stay vertical beneath the glitter ball, a bleary camera on roller skates, ragtime accompaniment pierced by blaring sirens. "The Best Things in Life Are Free" for pennies, slow-motion for the derby that ends with a corpse dragged across the finish line. "I may not know a winner when I see one, but I sure as hell can spot a loser." (Tinseltown dreams abound, Mervyn LeRoy is a celebrity guest possibly researching Hard to Handle, Sternberg is said to be casting for "an all-peasant talkie.") The capper pours through Fonda's fierce eyes as a reversal of the salvation from the director's own The Slender Thread. "Don't give me no sunshine lectures!" Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust takes the template and stomps it into the ground. Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. With Michael Conrad, Al Lewis, Robert Fields, Allyn Ann McLerie, Madge Kennedy, and Severn Darden.