Marathon '32

The mirrored chandelier whirls, the trio blares Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, and the master of ceremonies booms, "Yow-sah, yowsah, yowsah." The place is the Aragon Ballroom in Los Angeles, the time is the Depression, and the event is an extravagance of sadomasochism known as the Marathon Dance.

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 (Michael Sarrazin) is an open-faced kid from a farm. Sailor (Red Buttons) is a Navy veteran whose ship has gone out. The man running the marathon--and carrying the movie--is a dime-store Barnum named Rocky (Gig Young). The son of an itinerant faith healer, Rocky has read the book on corruption and added footnotes of his own. Disgusted at what people--including himself--will do for money, he articulates the film's message: "There can only be one winner, folks, but isn't that the American way?"

Carrying a Corpse. Ironies like that are easy to manufacture, and Scenarists James Poe and Robert E. Thompson operate an assembly line. Ruby tunelessly chants The Best Things in Life Are Free, then crawls for the pennies people throw her way. A Harlow-eyed blonde (Susannah York) is in the contest not for the $1,500 prize, but for a chance to be seen by a movie talent scout who might elevate her to bearable unreality. When the marathon begins to drag, Rocky dresses the participants in track suits and has them race around the floor--an event that literally causes the ancient mariner's heart to break.

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 finish that leaves the spectator as weary, and in a sense, as degraded as the participants. But it is precisely because of Gloria's inexhaustible drive that the film buckles. The dancers stay up for more than a thousand hours. The hall becomes a human zoo where legs, spines and, finally, minds fail. Rocky extends a typically cynical offer: Why don't Gloria and her new partner Robert get married out there on the floor? They can get divorced afterward, can't they? After all, warns the M.C., "I may not know a winner when I see one, but I sure know a loser."

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. The farm boy's explanation to the police: "They shoot horses, don't they?" Yes, they do--but only when the animal is broken. As Fonda plays the part, Gloria is a born survivor, a cork of a woman who would bob to the surface of a sewer or an ocean.

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 punctuates the nonhappenings with slow-motion scenes and rapid flash-forwards. Seldom effective and much too mannered, they serve only to bring the wrong kind of poverty to the project.

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 seem to pull against a gravity that wants them six feet underground. The music goes round and round, and so do the actors, in a coruscating dance of death. It is a pity that the picture is not left to them. The film makers should have known better than to cling to undimensional symbolism and stylistic conceits. They shoot movies, don't they?

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