Slow Trot

By Frank Rich

INTERNATIONAL VELVET Directed and Written by Bryan Forbes

Now that Tatum O'Neal is no longer a kid, what is to be done with her? At 14, this actress is too old to make another Paper Moon or Bad News Bears, yet too young to sashay about in an R-rated remake of Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Tatum is in a real fix, all right, and International Velvet doesn't offer her any help.

In this sweet-spirited but misconceived film, she must play a bratty child who evolves into an 18-year-old bride by the final credits. She loses all the way around. When acting younger than her age, Tatum all too consciously plays a role; both Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner can impersonate little girls better than she can. As an 18-year-old, Tatum is ridiculous. Her body has matured a bit, but she still has a way to go before she can pass for a sexually aware young woman. With her cherubic face and light voice, she even lacks Brooke Shields' ability to portray jailbait.

Poor Tatum is not totally responsible for the failings of International Velvet. A belated sequel to National Velvet (1944), the movie has a leaden gait that no actress could quicken. The blame belongs to Writer-Director Bryan Forbes, who seems to be unduly embarrassed about making a horse-race picture. Rather than tell his hokey story in a crisp manner, he has gussied up the action with dreary psychological motifs and pseudoliterary writing. International Velvet should have had the exhilarating spirit of the recent quarter-horse-race film, Casey's Shadow--or at least the plodding charm of National Velvet itself. More often than not, Forbes' movie looks like a ponderous heterosexual rejoinder to Equus.

As the original Velvet Brown, the young and glorious Elizabeth Taylor ran her horse Pie to victory in England's Grand National. Now, Velvet is a high-strung middle-aged woman (Nanette Newman) who lives in sin with a blocked novelist known as John (Christopher Plummer). Tatum plays Sarah Velvet Brown, a recently orphaned niece who ar rives from Arizona to live with her aunt. Once she meets Pie's latest foal, history very slowly but surely repeats itself.

Unfortunately, Sarah's path to an Olympics gold medal is strewn with Freudian booby traps. Aunt Velvet, it seems, has still not recovered from a miscarriage she suffered after being thrown by Pie years earlier. John has not only problems at the typewriter but a patho logical fear of marriage. Both these characters discuss their neuroses at great length, often in voice-over narration that accompanies Forbes' extensive travelogue footage of British scenic vistas. Young Sarah, meanwhile, finds herself unable to make friends among her peers. In one gratuitously jarring incident, a cruel class mate presents her with a dismembered Vietnamese finger as a practical joke.

When the Olympics sequences finally arrive, they clear the movie's air. The horses take spectacular yet graceful leaps.

Humans come off less well: with the exception of Anthony Hopkins as an Olympic team trainer, all the performances are flat. It's particularly sad that Elizabeth Taylor was unavailable to resume the role of Velvet. Even at her latter-day worst, she's a far more compelling presence than Nanette Newman. Better still, she might have given Tatum more than a few pointers about how to grow up gracefully on the big screen.

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