Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In the midst of the Great Depression, manipulative emcee Rocky enlists contestants for a dance marathon offering a $1,500 cash prize. Among them are a failed actress, a middle-aged sailor, a delusional blonde and a pregnant girl.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a brutal, relentlessly bleak allegory of Depression-era despair and capitalist exploitation. The plot is a pressure cooker of narrative inevitability — the dance marathon as a microcosm of survival-of-the-fittest desperation is brilliantly conceived and executed. Performances are extraordinary across the board: Jane Fonda delivers a ferociously committed turn, Gig Young won an Oscar for his oleaginous emcee, and the entire ensemble is harrowing. The ending — a mercy killing framed by Horace McCoy's source novel's famous conceit — lands with devastating moral weight and genuine tragedy. Novelty is high: the film's non-linear structure, its savage nihilism, and its unflinching portrait of human exploitation make it singular among Hollywood films of its era or any era. Cinematography, while competent and effectively claustrophobic, is the least exceptional category — functional rather than visually transcendent, keeping the film grounded but not elevating it to the level of visual artistry.