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Directed by Randall Wallace
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Secretariat First
of all, there never was a race horse like Secretariat. The movie “Seabiscuit”,
a few years ago, was a good film about a very good horse, and that is
fine. But if you like
Thoroughbreds, and like to go to the track, as I do, you know that Secretariat
was a race horse that no other horse ever equaled. Since 1973, when he won the Triple
Crown, no one else has done it.
The reason is simple; horses need to rest between races. With rare exceptions, most can’t
run a mile or more without at least a couple of week’s rest, and the
better horses usually go at least a month between races. The Triple Crown, though, is for
3-year-olds, who haven’t even gotten their full musculature yet, and it
begins with the Kentucky Derby, a mile and a quarter, then two weeks later
comes the Preakness, a mile and three-sixteenths. And then, just three weeks after that,
comes the hardest challenge of all, the Belmont, at a mile and a half. If you win the Triple Crown, and only
nine have done it in more than a hundred years, you are regarded as a super
horse. And
the super horse among super horses is Secretariat, because he not only won
the Triple Crown, he won the Belmont by 31 lengths; and set a record while
doing it, something no horse in history has done. Okay;
I’ve gotten that out of my system.
Now what about the movie “Secretariat?” Well, it’s a pretty standard
Disney production: Wife
(that’s Diane Lane) inherits a Virginia horse farm, wants to keep it in
spite of he husband’s and brother’s
objections, has a foal which her friend names “Secretariat,” sees
that he has the makings of a great horse, hires a trainer (John Malkovich), is redeemed when the horse is named
‘horse of the year’ as a 2-year-old, doesn’t have the money
to enter him in the Derby, gets it by selling shares of his stud fees, and
wins, wins, and wins again. End
of movie. So,
is it good? Of course it’s
good. It’s a little too
Christian for my taste, but Dean Semler’s
photography of the races is gorgeous, and that almost makes up for the bad
dialogue, the unspoken racism, and the accident at a Calgary track a few
years later that made jockey Ron Turcotte a cripple
without a penny to his name. And
there is one thing I haven’t mentioned: Six horses were used to play
Secretariat, which is common in films, but the real Secretariat had a
beautiful white blaze on his forehead.
Some of the six have a blaze, some don’t, so
the blaze kept appearing and disappearing, then appearing again throughout
the film. It drove me crazy. |