The three-part Ken Burns documentary on the life and works of Ernest Hemingway, aired April 5-7 on PBS, drove me inevitably to a well-thumbed copy of ‘In Our Time’, the writer’s first collection of short stories and vignettes, originally published in 1925. It’s still in print.
Once past the fishing and the bullfights and the war and the cat in the rain, In Our Time comes to My Old Man, the most perfect 6,000 words ever written about horseracing. Sure, there’s a fixed race and a dead horse and a bad ending – so what else is new? – but there is also a romantic innocence to the narration of the young boy whose father is a jockey on the skids. Here is a scene at the Parisian racecourse Saint-Cloud:
“I went around to the paddock to see the horses with my old man and you never saw such horses. This Kzar is a great big yellow horse that looks like just nothing but run. I never saw such a horse. He was being led around the paddock with his head down and when he went by me I felt all hollow inside he was so beautiful. There never was such a wonderful, lean, running-built horse. And he went around the paddock putting his feet just so and quiet and careful and moving easy like he knew just what he had to do and not jerking and standing up on his legs and getting wild-eyed like you see these selling platers with a shot of dope in them.”
Like so many of Hemingway’s novels and short stories, My Old Man was made into a film, in this case a made-for-TV movie that aired in the U.S. in December of 1979. The filmmakers were able to use Saratoga settings, which afforded a whisper of credibility to a screenplay that otherwise bore little resemblance to either the plot or spirit of the Hemingway original. Essentially, it was National Velvet, with Warren Oates as Mrs. Brown.
Sports movies usually get marginalized as genre pieces anyway, and racing movies usually are so far down the ladder in terms of quality and prestige that fans must wear a bag over their heads to attend.
Since the Academy Awards began honoring a Best Picture in 1927, only three sports films have won the ultimate honor: The boxing-themed Rocky and Million Dollar Baby, and Chariots of Fire, which at least had racing, although betting was discouraged.
Among the pile of racing movies, only Seabiscuit, in 2003, has been nominated.
The Oscars will be handed out again on April 25, via Zoom or Skype or some other sterile platform, with the nominees sitting at home in tuxedo jackets and sweatpants pretending George Clooney is out there somewhere and really cares. Safe to say that none of the eight Best Picture nominees is a racing flick, or even a movie with a sports backdrop, while the only horses to be found are ridden by the mounted police wading into the crowd of anti-war demonstrators in The Trial of the Chicago 7.
As far as public awareness is concerned, horseracing now occupies a niche within a niche. Little wonder that movies with a racing hook no longer attract either the production quality or the critical praise reserved in the past for The Black Stallion or Phar Lap.
In 2019, Ride Like a Girl was released in Australia and began making its way around the movie world. Working back from her historic victory in the 2015 Melbourne Cup, Michelle Payne and her rollicking family were the stars of a movie that was pleasant enough to watch but held no surprises nor special insights, although it didn’t really need to, given that she was the first woman to ride the winner of her nation’s most famous sporting event. Can The Rachael Blackmore Story be far behind?
The plight of jockeys, like Ben Butler in My Old Man, would seem to offer juicy grist for feature films. They are akin to bullfighters, only without the preordained death of an animal. Every step taken by the horse is irrevocably linked to the mortality of its rider. How’s that for living on the edge? Stir in the demands of weight manipulation, the turmoil with friends and family, and the drip-drip-drip of physical disintegration as the effects of inevitable injuries accrue, and you have a recipe for sweeping tales both harsh and inspiring.
In 2019, the National Geographic Short Film Showcase featured an official selection by Clara Tägtström that allowed Swedish champion jockey Per-Anders Gråberg to muse philosophically upon his profession, accompanied by appropriately dramatic images. Think Ingmar Bergman meets Joel Schumacher (see video above).
In September of 2020, Graberg suffered spinal column injuries in an accident at a track in Denmark. He hopes to resume riding this year.
In 2001, the German champion Andrasch Starke spent six months on suspension after testing positive for cocaine. In 2014 he was the willing subject of an award-winning short video called The Jockey (see video below) by director Tim Hahne that pulled few punches when it comes to the challenges of a difficult, unrelenting job.
9 Races (see video below) is a barely fictionalized account of a grim day in the life of a Quarter Horse jockey who grits his teeth through the increasing pain of a clavicle fracture suffered that morning. He can’t afford to stop riding to have the injury attended. He is offered medical advice from friends, drugs for the pain, and inspiration from a fellow rider who has bet he won’t be able to ride the card. It’s a fearless piece of filmmaking, and Luis Bordonada, in the part of the jockey, is heartbreaking. Watch it here.
9 Races was directed by Clint Bentley, the son of a jockey, and written by Bentley with Greg Kwedar. Now, Bentley and Kwedar have collaborated on a full-length feature called Jockey that made a splash at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival last January in Park City, Utah. Clifton Collins Jr, a veteran character actor who has been in such quality films as Traffic, The Last Castle and Capote, won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for best actor in the title role. The award is not given every year.
Jockey has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution. Hopefully, if it is anything close to as good as the critics who saw it at Sundance seem to think, it will get a chance to be seen far and wide.
In the meantime, another melancholy google search of My Old Man (see video below) took me to a long-forgotten short film of the same name from 1969. It was part of the Short Story Showcase sponsored by Encyclopedia Britannica that translated a selection of famous works into film, essentially using the texts as the screenplay. Among the stories chosen by filmmaker Larry Yust was The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, and Bartleby by Herman Melville.
This puts My Old Man in good company. Yust’s version hews so close to the story, and the settings are so true to the European racing atmosphere, that Hemingway surely would have admired the spare, pointed condensation of his dialogue and narrative to fit the screenplay. Like this, from his son, after his father bought a horse to train and ride himself:
“The first time he started with my old man up, he finished third in a 2,500-meter hurdle race. I felt as proud of my old man as though it was the first race he’d ever placed in. You see, when a guy ain't been riding for a long time, you can’t make yourself really believe that he’s ever rode. The whole thing was different now. I couldn’t hardly sleep the night before a race and I knew my old man was excited, too, even if he didn’t show it. Riding for yourself makes an awful difference.”
The difference, if a jockey is lucky, usually lies somewhere between life and death. That is where Cliff Bentley’s Jockey wants to go, and it looks like it might be a trip worth taking.