Word: theys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a strenuous attempt to make that marathon a metaphor for man's fate. The contestants are the populace of a wasted nation. One girl, Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia), is pregnant. Gloria (Jane Fonda) is a brassbound bitch from the Dust Bowl. Robert...
At this melodramatic point, the film achieves its peak. Sailor's face empurples, his lips work and bubble, his body goes limp. "Walk, you son of a bitch, walk!" screams Gloria, carrying a corpse on her back, defying Rocky, circumstances, the Depression-and finally life itself in a racking...
Gloria arbitrarily accepts Rocky's put-down as her epitaph. Out on the boardwalk and out of the marathon, she aims a pistol at her temple. Then, for the first time, her temerity falters. "Help me," she begs Robert, and Robert obligingly turns the attempted suicide into a murder...
Devoid of motivation and imprisoned in the dance hall, the movie hungers for some message from the outside world. The contestants are soon reduced to figures without a landscape, whose despair is often expressed but seldom reasoned. Even Director Sydney Pollack seems to sense the claustrophobic atmosphere-and he restively...
Still, as a footnote to American history, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is invaluable. The entire cast-particularly Young and Fonda-understands the era when existence seemed one long bread line. The penciled eyebrows, marcelled coiffures and bright, hopeful faces change by degrees into ghastly masks; the bodies...