LAST WEEK a friend and I made our way to Hollywood Park to watch a horserace--for the first time in our lives. Anticipating the glamour of the sport of kings, we found the charm of a littered Greyhound Bus terminal. Horseracing now is a bygone sport, a washed-up relic of the days when people thronged to the track in their smartest clothes to see equine stars of fabulous speed and beauty. Such a horse was Seabiscuit, who ran during the late 1930s. Millions of fans followed his exploits by radio, and tens of thousands turned up at the tracks every time he ran. The horse's story was a classic one of triumph over adversity, as Gary Ross makes clear in his new film version of "Seabiscuit," based on Laura Hillenbrand's bestselling book, "Seabiscuit: An American Legend."
Back when Seabiscuit was thundering around the track, horseracing in America was in its golden age. Mechanical starting gates, saliva testing for doping, totalizator boards, and photo-finish cameras brought the sport into the modern era, and horseracing was one of the only industries not affected by the Depression. Legal betting suited down-on-their-luck citizens, and state governments eagerly accepted tax revenues from parimutuel gambling. Between 1929 and 1939, twenty-four new tracks were built across the country, an increase of over 70 percent. The racetracks were places to be seen for the social smart set and movie stars. Record crowds would turn out to see such star horses as War Admiral and Omaha.
As the sport became entrenched in the general culture, it also became a staple in movie theaters. Not only would theaters show newsreels of the races, but an astonishing number of Hollywood feature films focused on horseracing. In the 1930s alone, at least 115 movies featured horseracing of some kind. The sport found its way into such franchise cinema as the Marx Brothers' "A Day at the Races" (1937) and "Charlie Chan at the Racetrack" (1936), and it was the subject of screwball comedies, family dramas, and musicals.
For most of these films, the themes were the same. They capitalized on the notion that horseracing was a redemptive sport that could save one from financial troubles--and, more important, rehabilitate the reputations of both the horse and rider. Take "National Velvet" (1944), for instance, perhaps the archetypal horseracing movie. In that film, twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor stepped into movie history by cutting her hair short, donning jockey silks, and riding a horse called "The Pie" in the Grand National, a prestigious British hurdle race. Her fall from the horse only seconds before she reaches the winning post loses her the winner's trophy and purse. But that scarcely matters. Velvet rides purely because she believes in her horse, a beast she has tamed out of its obstreperousness with great dollops of love and trust.
"National Velvet" is a sentimental Hollywood confection that today seems cloying, but the notion of the purse being an adjunct to the rehabilitative powers of the track is a staple of horse films before and since. Such movies as "Broadway Bill" (1934), "Pride of the Bluegrass" (1939), "The Great Mike" (1944), and "Black Gold" (1947) were all tales of men, shunned by society, who managed to find redemption through a steed's run around the track. Occasionally an interesting horseracing movie would burst through, like the brooding "Boots Malone" (1952), a noir look at the world of jockeys, or "The Return of October" (1948), about a girl who believes her horse is her dead uncle. But for the most part the genre is as bland as old lettuce, the characters and the plot indistinguishable from one movie to the next.
The races lost their footing in the movies as national interest in the sport waned. In the decades since Seabiscuit was a national hero, sports fans have turned their attention to basketball and football. Other forms of legalized gambling, such as casinos or lotteries, diverted betting away from the tracks. The sport maintains a core group of fans and even something of a presence in popular culture (in Dick Francis's many racetrack mystery novels, for example), but there's little left in horseracing to rope in the uninitiated. A racetrack form guide reads like a sheet of hieroglyphics, and the intricacies of the races are lost in the blur of speed. It is also a sport that produces few reliable constants. Great horses, like Secretariat in 1973 or Funny Cide in 2003, blaze down the track for only a season or two before they are retired or put out to stud. Even in leading racing states such as Kentucky, tracks struggle to get the people through the turnstiles and have had to resort to installing slot machines on the grounds to boost attendance.
One of the reasons that Ross's "Seabiscuit" is so good is that it shows the racetracks' glory years. It is also a finely crafted movie about a horse that was the living embodiment of all the old horse-movie themes. This current version of Seabiscuit's story (there was an earlier one, "The Story of Seabiscuit," a 1949 film that put Shirley Temple in an Irish accent and deleted all the interesting parts of the horse's story) recalls something of the visual poetry of Carroll Ballard's great 1979 film "The Black Stallion," and the cinematic exhilaration of the 1983 Australian horseracing classic "Phar Lap," the story of a cheap horse trained by his stable boy to become one of the greatest horses in history, only to die in mysterious circumstances.
ROSS'S FILM is unfortunately not as detailed as Hillenbrand's book, which is a sharply realized account of the horseracing world. Hillenbrand chronicles the lives of jockeys who starved, purged, swallowed tapeworms, and exercised in rubber suits to keep their weight down in order to perform in a sport where a silk cap lined with cardboard was the only protection against life-threatening injuries. Hillenbrand explores the seething and explosive mixture of politics and intrigue among racing stewards, horse owners, trainers, and journalists. Her second-by-second account of Seabiscuit's races explicates both the complexities of those two minutes down the track and the balletic lyricism of the rides, and her adroit use of cliffhangers (Is Seabiscuit lame? Will his jockey's shattered legs heal? Will War Admiral agree to a match race?) makes for a thrilling narrative.
Seabiscuit was a horse that almost didn't happen. His sire, Hard Tack, was so unruly that no breeding farms accepted him for stud and his owner was forced to use him on her own mares. The resulting colt was a short, fat, and lazy horse who ran with an "egg-beater" gait--his legs flying all over the place--and he struggled to finish in cheap claiming races (where horses can be entered for a specific price and can be purchased for that price). Seabiscuit was finally sold for the rock-bottom price of $8,000 to auto magnate Charles Howard, who employed the taciturn equine miracle-worker Tom Smith to train him.
Smith nurtured Seabiscuit's body with specially cultivated calcium-rich feed and dressed his legs with homemade liniments and knee-high bandages that protected them from cuts and bruises. He used Pavlovian methods to condition Seabiscuit to racetrack readiness. When Seabiscuit threw himself around in the starting gate, Smith bravely stood in front of him and tapped him firmly on the chest until he stopped, and then repeated the exercise until Seabiscuit was able to associate the starting gate with standing still. Under Smith's tutelage, Seabiscuit ate up the track. Even with enormous weight imposts, he outran almost everything that competed against him and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in purse money. In 1938 there were more newspaper column inches devoted to Seabiscuit than to Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini.
"Seabiscuit" the movie is beautifully shot, moving, and compelling. Like the book, it is more a human story than a horse one. It concentrates on the lives of Howard (Jeff Bridges) and Seabiscuit's jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), both men who carry shattered hearts when they come upon the horse. Howard's son had died in an accident, and Red had been abandoned at the racetrack as a teenager and forced to fend for himself in the violent and incorrigible world of horseracing. Bridges plays Howard as the garrulous showman whose boisterous antics are palliated by his pensive melancholy, and Maguire's Red is a study of quick-tempered fury and intensity.
SEABISCUIT'S VICTORIES give them something to hope for. Not only do they ease Howard's pain and Red's anger, but, as the film argues through its use of black and white still shots of the Depression, they gave a suffering country something to hope for. "Everybody thinks we took a broken down horse and fixed him," says Red. "But they were wrong. He fixed us. Every one of us."
The film glosses over many aspects of the story, omitting altogether the long-standing rivalry that Howard had with the racing stewards over the large imposts that Seabiscuit was made to carry in the races. The film captures few of the tensions that pervaded the Howard stable: The four-year quest to win the "Hundred Grander" Santa Anita Handicap was a prolonged exercise in frustration for the Howards, and Seabiscuit's inability to run on muddy tracks meant that he was often scratched right before the races, leading to excoriation from the press, and disappointment from all his fans.
The script also ignores the flamboyance of the real Marcela Howard, who, like her husband, courted the press with her wild antics such as shooting a lion on safari. In the film, Marcela (Elizabeth Banks) seems only to be a decorous piece of period-clothed eye candy, whose main job is to stand next to her husband and smile.
BUT THE FILM'S SUCCESS comes from its assured hand in demonstrating the greatness of the sport. Together Red and Seabiscuit are a centaur, and the shots of them flying across the tracks recall some of the great mythical and historical partnerships of man and steed. In the racing scenes, the camera moves from wide shots of the horses thundering down the track to extreme close-ups of Maguire working the reins, the images shot from side on and front, the choppy editing allowing the thrill of the ride to ripple through every shot like an electric current. These scenes manage to capture the velocity of being astride a thousand-pound creature that moves with grace and agility at dizzying speeds. And then, to temper the excitement, the film evokes the catch-in-the-throat realization that through these races, and through this horse, these physical and emotional cripples can become whole men.
"Seabiscuit" is a film worth seeing. It captures the glory of a former time and charges an undistinguished film genre with a shot of adrenaline. The movie carries the audience through the fiery roar that rises up from the racetrack crowd when the horses make the final turn. It transports us, too, with lightning speed, away from the tawdriness of the tracks today and down the straight to redemption.
Gaby Wenig is a writer in Los Angeles.