THE SHAMROCK HANDICAP (1926)
Starring: Janet Gaynor, Leslie Fenton, Willard Louis, J Farrell MacDonald, Claire McDowell, Louis Payne, George Morris, Andy Clark, Ely Reynolds
Writer: Peter B Kyne (story), John Stone (scenario)
Cinematography: George Schneiderman
Music: SILENT (piano solo score by Philip Carli)
B&W, 1h 06m. 1.33:1 presentation.
Released on: May 2, 1926 by Fox Film Corporation.
My experience: YouTube
The Shamrock Handicap is a smaller scale movie than John Ford's most recent work at the time, and while very simple in story (as many of his movies at the time were), it was far more entertaining than I had expected it to be. It is, in fact, more of a comedy than anything Ford had done, at least since Bucking Broadway. I believe this is the first story to indulge Ford's Hibernophilia. Much like his previous surviving film, Kentucky Pride, it all comes down to a horse race. The one here is easier to follow, thanks to insert shots that keep us in the race rather than watch at a distance. More of which, later.
We begin our story in County Kildare in olde Eire (west of Dublin) where wealthy landowner Sir Miles O'Hara (Louis Payne) presides over his estate and employees, who include his handyman Con O'Shea (J Farrell MacDonald) and his wife Molly (Claire McDowell), and his horse trainer Neil Ross (Leslie Fenton), who has eyes for O'Hara's daughter, Lady Sheila O'Hara (Janet Gaynor). Ross' feelings are reciprocated by the boss' daughter, but when wealthy American Orville Finch (Willard Louis) comes to town looking to buy some horses, Sir Miles (who is starting to owe money in estate taxes) has no choice but to sell some of them off, including his prize-winning favourite, Dark Roseleen. He also offers Neil a job with him in America as a jockey. While sorry to be parting, Neil promises Sheila he'll come back with money to help save the estate and win her hand in marriage, natch.
Neil's time in America starts off with a bang, as he gets into a fight with a fellow jockey, Chesty Morgan (Andy Clark). While that bout is successful, he subsequently breaks his leg in his very first race, and Sheila and her father come to America themselves (having sold their property in Ireland to afford the trip). Con and Sir Miles get jobs digging ditches to earn money, while Neil mopes about feeling sorry for himself. Finch comes back into the picture with Dark Roseleen, and everybody pools their resources to back the filly in the Shamrock Handicap, a $25,000 steeplechase race at 20 to 1 odds. But when Dark Roseleen takes a fright and throws his jockey Ginsburg (George Morris) off, breaking the man's leg, it's left to Neil to man up and "win his feet," as the doctor said.
Reading the plot summary on IMDb and Wikipedia, I figured this would be a story about class, and that the title Shamrock Handicap would be about the struggles of the Irish. While to an extent this is true, the title is effective on multiple levels. Firstly, the main race is called the Shamrock Handicap. As well, a handicap in horse racing is basically horses carrying different weights based on their rating. But it also nods to Neil Ross' situation, in which he becomes not just physically but for a certain amount of time emotionally handicapped as well.
Ford never needed any persuasion to indulge in his love of sentimentality. We see this from the beginning, as all the scenes in Ireland are filled with pastoral simplicity and are shot suffused with hazy borders, as if in remembrance of a long-forgotten dream. It's a nice set up into the world of the film, and a good contrast with the scenes in America, in which the full image becomes clearer and the scenery is much less romanticized. The sentimentality remains fully present, however, and Ford mixes it very nicely with some fairly hilarious comedy. Case in point: a little girl who Sir Miles sponsored to come to America with her father when her mother passed away recognizes him as he's being insulted by a couple of goons at the worksite, and it's a truly heartbreaking moment -- leading to hilarity when her father (now a policeman) comes by and begins assisting Sir Miles and Con in putting those same goons in their place. The stakes of comedy are then raised when the cop tells them there are a few family members who would love to say hi -- quick cut to Sir Miles, Con and the little girl surrounded by about twenty police officers, followed by a title card in which a half dozen names (O'Conor, O'Reilly, O'Flaherty, etc) come onto the screen in successive order. It's a great way of incorporating title cards for comedic purposes.
Ford loved his secondary characters, and indeed throughout his filmography he sometimes seems more amused by what the sidekicks and supporting players are doing, rather than the leads. In The Shamrock Handicap, while we get to see Leslie Fenton as Neil a lot (since he's at least in name the linchpin the story hangs on), he's pretty much a cypher, with only the most basic emotions; smile grandly, or look despondent. The romantic lead, Janet Gaynor, is almost a nonentity in this one, which surprised me, as I am more familiar with her work in more meaty roles, such as The Wife in FW Murnau's Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans and Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester in William Wellmans' 1937 A Star is Born.
While the leads in this one (and some of Ford's future endeavours) are somewhat nondescript, the supporting characters are given their moment in the spotlight. Ford once again features one of his favourite (and mine) character actors, J Farrell MacDonald, who in this one keeps up a running gag with his pet gander Brian Boru (the name itself perhaps a reference to the famous Irish king, who saved the land from being invaded by the Vikings). MacDonald is also given a little bit of room to stretch his dramatic muscles, and bounces back and forth between comedy and pathos with the greatest of ease.
Another one of the supporting players is Ely Reynolds, who plays Virus Cakes (that name, though!), a member of Finch's entourage who becomes close with Ross. While he is stuck in the type of stereotypical "darkie" role that was all too prevalent in classic Hollywood films, he is almost able to transcend that role with a performance that is both hilarious and somewhat eerie. In fact, this is one of the earliest produced films I've seen that leaves the main story all together and follows the travails of a supporting black character. We literally see things from his point of view for a portion of the film, and the scenes in the hospital and later in Roseleen's training montage (which culminates in Reynolds' character thinking up a brilliant way to train the horse in a true LOL fashion), while somewhat tangential to the plot, are literally about him and his experiences. That is very rare for a film of this vintage, and while some of the mannerisms can be chalked down to a product of their time and age, and even though it's only for comedic effect and for a few minutes at a time, I still must commend Ford for attempting to put the audience in the shoes of a black man all the way back in 1926. Historical note, however: these scenes would have been drastically edited or entirely omitted in the Deep South.
The Shamrock Handicap is shot fairly straighforwardly, and while there are no grand, epic shots that knock you off your feet, each frame is painterly in the positioning of its characters within the scenery. I have mentioned the hazy effect around the borders in the Ireland-set scenes of the film, but there is a beautiful shot when Ross and Sheila are saying their farewells shortly before he leaves for America that is glorious in its pastoral romanticism. The two lovers are positioned against a waist-high brick wall, framed on either side by the low-lying limbs of an oak tree, while sheep roam a field in the background. The aforementioned scene in the hospital with Virus Cakes features firstly some experimental darklight photography, leading into some blurred visuals, followed by an extended shot in slow motion, in which the camera would have been cranked at twice the speed as usual to achieve the effect. There is another innovative use of title cards when the Jewish jockey Ginsburg falls off his horse and the title card appears in Hebrew. A judicious use of swearing, perhaps? I'm not familiar with the language so I can't say (please feel free to comment if you do know the language), but surely it would have gotten a laugh in 1926.
The race itself was filmed with inserts of the riders, which allows us to become more personally involved in the race instead of standing back watching horses run around from afar. Ford would take this lesson and in his future Westerns use it to great effect. It's funny that Kentucky Pride and The Shamrock Handicap, released eight months apart, featured horse racing as their theme. Perhaps Ford was going through a bit of an obsession with equestrian sport, or perhaps his intent was to tell a similar story from two sides of the same coin (the former from the horses' point of view, the latter from the humans'). Either way, I found The Shamrock Handicap quite a bit more entertaining than I had expected, and would recommend it heartily.
Seven frenetic fillies out of ten.
No comments:
Post a Comment