(I watched the film for the first time tonight on Turner Classic Movies--December 23rd, 2002.)
Mickey Rooney is My Taylor, a young drifter in rural England during the decade of the 1920s, who happens along the town where Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor, age 13) lives with her father--a butcher--mother, brother Donald, and dog (the name, while significant, escapes me). Taylor is a horse trainer, and Velvet just happens to be enamored of horses herself, and a pretty good rider, too. Whether the star horse is My Taylor's or belongs to the Brown family is not clear--at least in my memory--but, somehow, Velvet grows attached to one brown and white horse that she names "The Pie". One day, the gelding gets away from My and Velvet and, fearless of the danger, leaps a six-foot wall. Astonished, the Rooney character conceives the idea of running the horse in the Grand National steeplechase contest in London that year. Velvet, of course, goes along with the plan, and soon Rooney and Velvet are on their way to London in search of a jockey for the horse.
Well, no jockey can be found; it is, after all, the night before the big race, and who'd take a chance on a 100-to-1 shot? Velvet herself agrees to ride the horse in the race, and, during one heartbreaking scene, nearly all of her beautiful brown locks are sheered off by Rooney, so that the young beauty will look like an adolescent boy. The race--which might have been interminable in another director's hands--is just long enough to rivet the attention of even those who've never seen a horse race, and Velvet, riding #28-- "The Pie"--wins the race by a neck. Unfortunately, she is so stunned by the magnitude of her win--and overcome by physical exhaustion--that she faints and falls off the horse only a few yards beyond the finish line. "The Pie" is disqualified from winning, of course, but the media have a field day with the story of the first GIRL to win the Grand Nationals, and Velvet's father receives countless offers from Hollywood and the world's major media centers to place his 12-year-old!
Though intrigued by these possibilities, Velvet herself seems intent mainly on protecting her beloved Pie, and the film ends with the Rooney character hitting the road, leaving Velvet and her family to plan their future around the glory he helped them win, without him. The film was nominated for 5 Oscars in 1945 and won two, including Best Supporting Actress, Anne Revere. A very young Angela Lansbury plays Velvet's sister.
