The Thoroughbred (1930) User Reviews

Filling Out the Field

[boblipton · 4/10 · 16 February 2015]

This is pretty much a stock racetrack movie filled with stock battling Irishmen, young love and crooked gamblers. If it had been made at MGM, it would have starred William Haines, but this was Tiffany, a Poverty Row producer, albeit an ambitious one, so there are some points of interest.

One is the camera-work. Director Richard Thorpe was famous for his cheap way of shooting scenes interestingly; he would start shooting a scene in a long shot, then as takes were blown, he would have the camera move in and continue. In this one, DP Max DuPont is more ambitious and manages some limited moving shots to show off the sets. Some of the ambitions are greater than ability. In the opening scene, when Wesley Barry and Onest Conley -- he was the real life son of Madame Sul-Te-Wan, with whom he has a couple of scenes -- are hoping for a job, they imagine Barry as a jockey riding Conley as a horse. It doesn't work, alas.

One scene that does work is the picnic scene. It looks like it was a pick-up scene, shot to bring the movie up to length. It doesn't make the movie good, but it is a pleasantly shot interlude. It's scenes like that that got Thorpe from Poverty Row to MGM.

A disappointment that truly could have been groundbreaking.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 21 May 2021]

This film really could have been much better with some deeper writing involving the friendships between two jockeys, one white and one black. Wesley Barry and Onest Conley are inseparable, and the way they treat and confuse in each other is fine until halfway through the film when Barry gets a little too fancy, as does Conley, rejecting his own black friends in an uppity manner yet accepting however Barry treats him. It's a confusing twist in the friendship, quite maddening and out of the blue, with Conley hiding his hurt in front of his new girlfriend, Mildred Washington, playing a character named Purple, even though he's just done the same thing to his own fellow black friends.

Judith Barrett plays Barry's girlfriend, that is until the rich Pauline Garon comes along and turns Barry into a snob. Robert Homans gives a stereotypical performance as a cliched Irishman, Barrett's blarney reciting father, while Madame Sul-Te-Wan is a bit more restrained as Conley's mother. The idea that this is an integrated story with equal time spent between the white characters and black characters really could have been delightfully liberal during a conservative and troublesome era, and at least it is rather brave that Tiffany studios, an independent B, attempted something different, but 90 years later, even with the reality that Barry in all reality would play Judas to his friend, something feels missing, and that makes this film a disappointment and missed opportunity.

Horrible even for a very early talkie.

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 4 June 2015]

I have seen a ton of old films. So, I realize that a very large portion of the early talking pictures are poor films when you see them today. They're often too talky and stilted. However, even for one of these films, "The Thoroughbred" is a terrible film in many ways--so terrible, I wouldn't waste my time with it.

The film is a very formulaic race horse film. All throughout the movie, I could predict exactly what was going to happen because it was so familiar. However, I cannot fault it completely for this. After all, as an early film, it might represent an early form of the formula. But what I cannot get past is the slapdash way this is handled as well as the painfully racist elements in the movie.

The picture, if you bother seeing it, is about two friends. One (Todd) is a nice-guy jockey looking for work. The other is his black friend who is only there as comic relief. It's sad, as the film COULD have been interesting because of this relationship but it fails because nearly every horrible stereotype of the era is in the film--such as watermelon and fried chicken eating as well as the black folks in the film all seeming amazingly servile and stupid. It's also sad because Todd goes from being a nice guy to becoming a fat-headed jerk almost instantly. Had this slowly and realistically occurred, the film might have made more sense. At it is, he goes from treating his black friend fine to treating him like something he just scraped off his shoe! All in all, a terrible film made much worse due to horrible pacing, one-dimensional characters and poor writing.