The above image is from the 1944 film National Velvet starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney, which is based on the 1935 novel of the same name, written by Enid Bagnold. In it, Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a 12 year old girl from a working class background who wins a horse in a raffle. Rooney is Mi Taylor, a former jockey, now a hired hand for the Brown family. The horse, or "The Pie" as Velvet calls him, is renowned in the area for escaping his field by jumping high fences and running amok which is why his previous owner raffled him off. Velvet sees this ability as a feature, not a bug and dreams of training the Pie to run in the Grand National, an annual steeplechase in Britain. Mi, the former jockey, comes in handy with this training although, due to a track incident, he is now afraid to ride himself. They secretly train the Pie, though they eventually take Velvet's mother- who swam the English channel when she was a teen- into their confidence, because they need money for the entrance fee for the Grand National. She gives then the prize money that she has saved all these years from her swim. Mi hires a professional jockey to ride for them, but after seeing him on the Pie, Velvet says that he doesn't believe in the horse and will lose. She fires him and determines to ride in the National herself, which is a problem because at the time girls weren't allowed to race. In the above scene Mi is helping Velvet disguise herself as a jockey by cutting her hair short. The movie is fine, but as is often the case, I had read the book before seeing it and didn't appreciate a lot of the changes they made for the film. For example, Mi was actually supposed to be quite a bit older than Velvet and more of a mentor. Also, in the book the Pie was called that because he is a piebald, while in the movie Velvet calls him that because his former owner refers to him as a pirate. Which is cringe-y and really makes no sense. How hard could it be just to find a horse with piebald markings? Also, as I mentioned in my post about Boys Town, Mickey Rooney has a tendency to overact during emotional scenes. No scenery is safe from his chewing. Still and all, National Velvet has some fine moments and is well worth watching. But the book is better.
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