There have been some excellent horse racing movies over the past 30 years, most notably the Australian, Simon Wincer’s take on “Phar Lap” (1983), which was glorious in its widescreen version but which lost much in translation to a TV format. Who can ever forget that shot of Phar lap being paraded before the Melbourne Cup, in a shimmering, tasseled, red satin blanket, asks Jimmy Lithgow.
More intensely focused and downbeat was the British director, John Irvin’s ”Champions” (1984), an account of jump jockey Bob Champion’s battle with cancer, and his ultimate triumph aboard the game Aldaniti, in the Grand National. The human drama was foremost in that movie but the steeplechasing scenes were superbly filmed, from some imaginative vantage points.
Best of all, perhaps, was “Seabiscuit” (2003), directed by Gary Ross and co-produced by former South African, Gary Barber, who is a shareholder in SA Derby winner, Irish Flame. “Seabiscuit” meticulously re-created the deprivations and the downtrodden spirits of Americans in the Depression era, using the story of an underdog racehorse, which rises from ignominy, to become a national hero, to represent the great American Dream.
The latest racing movie to come along is “Secretariat”, from the Disney stable, for which I had no great hopes, given its pedigree, but which turns out to be a wire to wire winner. This is in no small measure to the smashing performances of Diane Lane, in the role of Penny Chenery Tweedy, “Big Red’s” blue-blooded but feisty owner, and John Malkovich, an actor who sometimes irritates me, but who is both hilarious and touching as the horse’s unconventional trainer, French-Canadian, Lucien Laurin.
It is something of a travesty that neither actor figures in the nomination list for this year’s Golden Globe awards, and will likely be overlooked for Oscars. In a very different and more subtle way, Lane is every bit as good, if not better, than Sandra Bullock was in her award-winning performance in “The Blind Side”, last year. She perfectly captures the heartache of a suburban, Denver mother, who has to sacrifice her husband and children’s interests in the pursuit of her father’s long-cherished dream of breeding a Kentucky Derby winner.
The movie also benefits by an outstanding ensemble cast of well chosen character actors, who all strike exactly the right note, from James Cromwell’s wryly observed depiction of the patrician owner, Ogden Phipps, to a delightfully loud-mouthed Nestor Serrano (one of those faces who pops up in just about every American detective series on TV), as Pancho Martin, the trainer of Secretariat’s arch rival Sham.
The script is out of the top drawer, having been penned by Mike Rich from a book entitled “Secretariat: The Making Of A Champion”, by celebrated racing journalist, William Nack. Miraculously, it gets the racing details right in every respect, and despite the fact that most audience members know that Secretariat emerged triumphant in his bid to win the Triple Crown, the director, Randall Wallace (who wrote “Braveheart”) manages to inject an amazing amount of tension into the proceedings.
There’s the question of pedigree, for example, though the reasoning here is a little fuzzy. In the movie, racing pundits are of the view that Secretariat’s sire, Bold Ruler, has no hope of ever siring a Belmont Stakes winner, and that the final leg of the Triple Crown would prove a bridge too far. This is a view which is not discounted by the horse’s trainer, who agonises over whether he should train the horse as hard as possible for the Belmont, or lay off him slightly, to keep him fresh. The owner, Penny Chenery, was always of the view that the stoutness of his damline – he was out of the Princequillo mare, Somethingroyal, a one-time winner – would pull him through.
Given that Bold Ruler himself won the Belmont Stakes, and was a strong front-runner, who could go 10 furlongs at full stretch, a fact which is never mentioned in the movie, the doubts expressed concerning his ability to sire a Belmont Stakes winner are not entirely convincing.
There’s also the question of the famous “Coin Toss”, which decided which of two foals by Bold Ruler would go to Ogden Phipps, the sire’s owner, and which of them would go to Chenery, whose father had sent two prized mares to be covered by the great stallion. In the film, the winner of the Coin Toss gets to choose between the unborn offspring of a young mare called Hasty Matelda and an aging matron called Somethingroyal. Phipps wins the toss and chooses Hasty Matelda’s foal, much to the delight of Chenery. In actual fact, he chose a weanling filly out of Somethingroyal, and Penny Chenery, acting on behalf of her ailing father, was left with a colt by Hasty Matelda and the mare, Somethingroyal, in foal, once again, to Bold Ruler, as her part of the deal. The resulting foal was Secretariat.
These minor quibbles aside, and perhaps the fact that Disney seems to have skimped on hiring extras for the trackside scenes, and cast a singularly stoic looking chestnut to play the close-up scenes involving Secretariat, the movie is beautifully filmed by the vastly experienced Dean Semler (“Dances With Wolves” and “Apocalypto”), with low angle shots providing some awesome views of racehorses in full stride.
Hopefully the film will be decently promoted by Ster Kinekor and embraced by a wide audience in this country, because, God knows, racing in South Africa could do with a huge PR injection. In a country which is seemingly tuned in only to soccer, rugby and cricket, and whose citizens remain totally ignorant of horse racing’s very existence (a couple of people interviewed in a recent street survey thought Mike De Kock was a Platteland pop star), I have my doubts that a film called “Secretariat” will register even a faint ripple of interest at the box office. More’s the pity, because “Secretariat” is one of the most entertaining movies to come along in quite a while, and does credit to what was arguably the best horse who ever raced.
