Enid Bagnold's daydreamy tale of a girl and her horse, and their date with destiny at the Grand National steeplechase, is the perfect movie for all little girls who love horses. (Those little girls, if any, who are excluded from that description may prefer to stay at home, nosing into Mom's and Dad's dresser drawers.) For older people, Clarence Brown's stoically restrained directing style -- with scenes stiffened into a sort of color-plate pictorialism -- happily prevents any bubbling-over of the inherent sentimentality. The performances he gets are almost unimprovable. The twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, in braces and rosy cheeks, must have broken many a heart, way back then, with her unfakable and unrecapturable freshness and eagerness; and the emotional effect in retrospect becomes the more heartbreaking with the added weight of all that the actress has undergone since -- the decades, the husbands, the pounds, etc. The complementary characters, too, have strong representation: Mickey Rooney's gentle, psychologically scarred wanderer (a nimble acting job overall, with an especially fine imitation of mush-mouthed, heavy-eyelidded drunkenness), Donald Crisp's docile father, and Anne Revere's straight-backed, straight-lipped mother. (1944) — Duncan Shepherd
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