Our correspondent delves into the extensive equine-based oeuvre of a Hollywood movie legend
Mickey Rooney is not in every movie made about horse racing. It only seems that way.
In a career that spanned eight decades and 344 film and TV performances, Rooney wormed his way into every corner of show business.
For one generation he was Andy Hardy of the popular series, often found alongside movie sweetheart Judy Garland. In another era, Rooney was a reliable dramatic presence in any number of quality productions. As television matured, Rooney was a go-to talent tapped by prestigious writers and directors. In his later years, he took on just about anything that came his way – good, bad, and downright awful – as if compelled to keep his name and face in the public’s eye.
Rooney was a natural for the horse racing movie genre, and not only because of his 5-2 jockey-size stature and remarkable athletic prowess. He loved to play the ponies from a tender age and persisted throughout his life, gambling millions, he said, to win back the five dollars he lost on his first bet.
In Hollywood at the Races published by University Press of Kentucky, author Alan Shuback devotes an entertaining passage to Rooney’s racing films, his gambling, and his procession of eight wives, as well as his fling as a racehorse owner.
“With pots of money in the bank, Rooney’s appetite for the real thing seemed to be enhanced,” Shuback writes. “He became so adept at cinematic race-riding that he once galloped Seabiscuit during a morning workout at Santa Anita.”
Disgraced jockey
Rooney’s series of racing movies began at age 11 when he played Midge, the doting young pal of a disgraced jockey in Fast Companions (1932). Next came Down the Stretch (1936), an unnecessarily complicated tale of a boy tarred by his father’s reputation who finds redemption on horseback and then risks it all in a selfless act of racing larceny that turns out all right.
This was closely followed by Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), a tortuous 80 minutes of high camp and over-acting replete with low comedy and acres of racetrack cliches. Rooney rides and, thank goodness, Judy Garland sings.
In contrast, Stablemates (1938) offers a good story with only occasional lapses. Wallace Beery is back, echoing his character from The Champ (1931) but this time as a boozy veterinarian who has fallen from grace, rescued in spirit by Rooney’s stable lad with the help of talented horse and a well-played segment of equine surgery. The ending is redolent with inevitable schmaltz, but not really all that happy.
Rooney also plays an important part of two universally adored horse racing classics. The first of those was National Velvet (1944), a big-screen adaptation of the 1935 novel of the same name by Enid Bagnold.
As Velvet Brown, Elizabeth Taylor embodies every horse-loving girl that ever was or ever will be. As Michael ‘Mi’ Taylor, Rooney is her foil, a drifter with a murky backstory who clearly knows his way around a racehorse. Together they win the big one, while the movie nailed two Oscars.
Slings and arrows
In The Black Stallion (1979), Rooney is very much the American version of Mi Taylor, aged 35 years and thoroughly seasoned by the slings and arrows of a lifetime in racing. This is a gorgeous telling of the Walter Farley classic, and as Henry Dailey, Rooney distils his gambler’s love-hate relationship with the game into a character who still believes dreams can come true – as long as you’ve got the right horse. Rooney received his lone Oscar nomination, in the category of supporting actor.
In between the two classics, Rooney visited the racing genre only once, in a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s ground-breaking television anthology steeped in his literate tales of science fiction and fantasy. The title of the episode is The Last Night of a Jockey.
Rooney scored admiring reviews in Serling’s film version of his teleplay, Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), and the Twilight Zone episode was written by Serling with Mickey in mind.
The lone setting is a barebones, one-room apartment, decorated sparsely with winning race photos and cheap trophies. Rooney, as Michael Grady, lounges on a narrow bed surrounded by newspapers screaming headlines of his lifetime suspension from racing. A few minutes later comes Serling’s traditional interruption of the opening scene, lit cigarette in hand, as he tells the viewer where this sad character is heading:
“The name is Grady, five feet short in stockings and boots, a slightly distorted offshoot of a good breed of humans who race horses,” Serling begins.
Rotten apples
“He happens to be one of the rotten apples, bruised and yellowed by dealing in dirt, a short man with a short memory who’s forgotten that he’s worked for the sport of kings and helped turn it into a cesspool, used and misused by the two-legged animals that have hung around sporting events since the days of the coliseum.
“So this is Grady, on his last night as a jockey. Behind him are Hollywood Park, Hialeah, and Saratoga. Rounding the far turn and coming up fast on the rail ... is the Twilight Zone.”
Over the next half-hour, Grady runs the gamut, from self-pity and rage to a confrontation with a suspicious hallucination. His face, scrubbed and respectable, peers out from shiny surfaces, hectoring the jockey as his ‘alter-ego’ there to deliver a numeration of Grady’s many transgressions.
As promised, the piece eventually crosses over to the Twilight Zone, and Grady is doomed to learn the lessons of ‘be careful what you wish for’ the hard way. You’d like to hope that no real jockey ever went through such psychological trauma, but don’t bet against it.
Later on, Rooney had a small part as a horse owner in Bluegrass (1988), a made-for-TV soap opera, and revisited Henry Dailey in The New Adventures of the Black Stallion, a series that ran on the Family Channel for three seasons, 1990-92, that did nothing to enhance the memory of the original movie.
Rooney, who died in 2014 at 93, always hit his mark and rarely phoned it in. But at the end of his journey, as author Shuback noted in Hollywood at the Races, The Last Night of a Jockey may have been “the best performance of his life.”
• The Twilight Zone is available through several streaming services, including free access (with ads) on PlutoTV. Look for season 5, episode 5.
• Read all Jay Hovdey's features in his Favorite Racehorses series
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‘A bulletproof, gold-plated classic’ – Jay Hovdey on Let It Ride
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