In his latest visit to the movies, Jay Hovdey revisits a faithful celluloid rendering of a dark and disturbing short story from the literary canon
The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)
written and directed by Anthony Pelissier; starring Valerie Hobson, John Mills and John Howard Davies
With a certain amount of tunnel vision and imagination, the movie-going horseplayer could perhaps delight in The Rocking Horse Winner as a fantasy of the highest order, depicting an ideal world in which successful gambling on the races can be reduced to inspiration derived from intense exercise and concentration on the pari-mutuel challenge at hand. Also, a little bit of fairy dust helps, just to make a difference in photo finishes.
Sorry to say, but The Rocking Horse Winner is not that movie. The film presents a faithful telling, at least in spirit, of a dark and disturbing short story by D.H. Lawrence meant to condemn everything from obsessive behavior and greed to sloth, self-delusion, and bad parenting.
The Rocking Horse Winner is not a horror story, per se, but it is a horrible story wrapped in a beautifully shot, sublimely acted, and confidently directed movie that stands apart from the mid-20th century fare served up by the film industry on both sides of the pond.
A child devoted to saving his family from financial ruin sounds like a quaint, Andy Hardy kind of plot. But devoted to the point of self-harm, in the face of parents so woefully distant and pathologically selfish? Now we’re talking.
Lawrence’s story was published in 1926 in Harper’s Magazine. By then, readers who had signed on early for the Lawrence ride were awash in The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the near-horizon. In 1930 Lawrence was dead, at 44.
As the 1930s dawned, the young Brit, Anthony Pelissier (right), son of a producer and an actress, had embarked on an acting career of his own. It was not long, however, that he discovered his future was behind the camera.
Routinely banned for explicit sexual content
As a screenwriter and eventually a director, he leaned toward adaptations of quality popular fiction. Fine, but to that point no one had attempted to film any of Lawrence’s novels, which were routinely banned for their explicit sexual content.
Apparently, The Rocking-Horse Winner was safe, asexual territory, even though there is a whiff of the Oedipal coursing beneath the surface of the young protagonist, Paul, who dotes on his unsympathetic mother.
As a writer, Pelissier’s greatest challenge was to flesh out the spare, allegorical tale into 90 minutes of cinema, which he solved with the invention of sharp, literate scenes only suggested in the text, accompanied by vital passages of key Lawrence dialogue.
“Is luck money, mother?” wonders Paul, as his mother shops for antiques she can’t afford.
“No, Paul, not quite,” she replies. “It’s what causes you to have money.”
“Oh.”
“If you’re lucky, you have money,” she says. “That’s why it’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you can always lose your money. But if you’re lucky, you’ll always get more money.”
“I think my father understood that point of view quite well,” said Joe Pelissier, whose Pelissier Communications group based in Oxford, UK, offers services in branding, market strategy, and media coaching. “He considered himself an artist at heart who had no interest in the accumulation of wealth, but always required enough money to maintain a certain lifestyle.” Anthony Pelissier died in 1988, at age 75.
The concept of luck threads throughout the Lawrence story, which is why betting on the ponies acts as both the perfect solution and the poisonous pill.
The racing theme also provides some of the film’s most enjoyable moments: Paul being taught by handyman Bassett, an ex-jockey, how to properly sit his brand new rocking horse; a montage of Paul going to his first racecourse, joining the throng, receiving his lapel badge, looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars until his Uncle Oscar sweetly turns them around; Paul and his uncle sitting on a riverside bench as an excursion boat cruises by, blaring the call of a race at Doncaster in which they have a vital interest.
An appreciation of racing was second nature to the British of the era, but Joe Pelissier offers a family connection that gave his father a particular interest in the tale.
“My father had just left school and was having tea with my grandmother at Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly,” Pelissier said. “Noel Coward was also having tea there – he was a friend of my grandmother’s.
“Apparently she said to Coward, ‘What are we going to do with Tony?’ Coward replied, ‘He must come acting with me!’
“He did, and ended up in a New York production alongside an actor who would become my godfather. His name was Edward Underdown, who was also an accomplished gentleman jockey.”
Otherworldly knack for picking winners
As the film unfolds, Paul’s otherworldly knack for picking winners has its price, prompting his mother to conclude: “All this horse racing isn’t good for you – you get far too excited.” Thus does the film reach its climax, with Paul chanting his winning vision for the upcoming Derby – “It’s Malabar! It’s Malabar!” – before collapsing.
The Lawrence story comes to an abrupt and pitiless end. So does the film, in its own way, although Pelissier created a coda that would seem superfluous were it not for the contributions of John Mills, as Bassett, and Valerie Hobson, as Paul’s mother.
At 41, Mills already was an internationally respected performer with enough clout to sign on as producer of Pelissier’s directorial debut, The History of Mr. Polly, and then The Rocking Horse Winner.
His best films are impossible to miss, beginning in 1942 with In Which We Serve and continuing through the decades in The End of the Affair, King Rat, Ryan’s Daughter, and Gandhi. Mills died in 2005, at 97, still working.
Valerie Hobson first came to notice in 1930s horror films like Bride of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London. She escaped that niche, and by the time The Rocking Horse Winner came around, Hobson had attained stardom in Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Alec Guinness, and Great Expectations, directed by David Lean. Later, Hobson married the scandalized British MP, David Profumo.
John Howard Davies plays Paul as a variation on his role as the title character of Lean’s Oliver Twist, released in 1948. Hugh Sinclair, the father, was a veteran character actor with a narrow but effective range. Ronald Squire, as Uncle Oscar, was a go-to Englishman for a number of Hollywood productions as well as roles on stage and screen in his native land.
“They were great mates, my father and John Mills,” Joe Pelissier said. “At the time, people expected Mills to play handsome, romantic leads, rather than a groom-gardener. But my father typically cast him in character parts because he thought that was more interesting. That was possibly why the film wasn’t as successful as it should have been.
‘Very proud and rather amazed’
“I must have been 18 or 19 when I saw it for the first time,” Pelissier added. “The main thing I was struck by was the photography and the editing. And the darkness of it. I remember being very proud and rather amazed realizing that technically it was so very good, in terms of what my father was doing.
“We didn’t have any long conversations about the The Rocking Horse Winner, but I think it was the film he was most proud of. I’m pretty certain of that.”
The Rocking Horse Winner was respected by critics but shunned in the third version of the UK’s BAFTA Awards, for films of 1949. The Third Man took the top prize – no argument there – but the other nominees included three Ealing comedies, yet another post-war drama, and a horror flick.
Granted, the Lawrence story could be a tad off-putting, as Bosley Crowther noted in the New York Times upon its US release, while still giving credit to Pelissier & Co. for a cracking good film:
“But for all its integrity and technical polish, The Rocking Horse Winner is not a pleasant picture to watch,” Crowther wrote. “It is a heavy, depressing entertainment and even the jocular cynicism of Uncle Oscar is not enough to compensate for the suffocatingly morbid nature of the story.”
In a more recent appreciation – last July as a matter of fact – Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph waxed lyrically about The Rocking Horse Winner, describing it as possessed of a “highly intelligent script laced with cynicism and a darkness rarely seen in British films” of the period.
“That it has aged so well reflects how ahead of its time it was,” Heffer wrote. “And it features exceptional performances by some of the greatest actors of the era, another reason for one’s mystification at how neglected it is.”
Neglected, perhaps, but thankfully not hard to find, either to rent/buy on Amazon Prime or watch for free in sharp enough versions on either Internet Archive or YouTube.
• View all Jay Hovdey’s features in his Favorite Racehorses series
Horse racing at the movies: The Killing is a polished gem in a poisonous setting
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