They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? showed Hollywood how to market human misery

Picture a pair of dancers looking like pale-faced zombies. They’ve been on their feet for days in the forlorn hope of winning a $1,500 cash prize that would lift them out of poverty. The rules are simple: don’t stop dancing. What they don’t realise is that the competition is rigged. Nobody is going to get any money.

Welcome to the Depression-era dance marathon that forms the backbone of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 masterpiece, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It’s a tough watch – intentionally so. The film, which the BFI is reviving as part of its “Discomfort Movies” season, refuses to offer audiences any consolation. At the point you think its two central lovers are finally going to kiss, the woman (Jane Fonda) gives the man (Michael Sarrazin) a pistol and asks him to kill her. Like someone putting an injured horse out of its misery, he obliges. The dance marathon goes on without them.

“It’s a metaphor, in a way, for American society, greed. And the desperation of people who don’t have money and privilege,” Fonda later said. Watching the film, we are in the same position as the spectators, taking a morbid pleasure in the extreme suffering of the participants – but also sometimes sharing in their stress and panic.

Ironically, Sydney Pollack’s punishingly dour film very nearly turned out to be a comedy. The film is based on a 1935 novel by Horace McCoy, a former bouncer in a marathon dance hall, who made a precarious living as a vegetable picker and politician’s bodyguard before eventually establishing himself as a novelist and screenwriter. (His credits include the screenplay for Nicholas Ray’s 1952 modern-day western The Lusty Men, starring Robert Mitchum and Susan Hayward.) The original book was a bestseller but publisher Simon & Schuster once claimed that those who bought it were “persons who enjoyed hating it from the first page to the last”.

Charlie Chaplin bought the rights to the novel in the early 1950s and tried to adapt it with Norman Lloyd, the actor and producer famous for his work with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Chaplin reportedly wanted the emerging talent Marilyn Monroe to star in the film.

The legendary comedian might not have been such an outlandish choice. You can easily imagine the story being done slapstick style; there’s a certain comic freneticism in all those scenes of characters racing around the dance floor that reminds you of the silent era work of Buster Keaton and co. However, Chaplin was in no position to make the movie. In 1952, at the height of the anti-communist witch hunts, he was exiled from the US when immigration authorities refused to allow him to return to the country after a trip abroad.

“It’s a tragedy because his ideas for the picture were fabulous … [Chaplin] knew about dance marathons. He used to go to them,” Lloyd told the LA Times in a 2009 interview.

So directorial duties were passed to Pollack, a former student of Method acting guru Sanford Meisner. He made They Shoot Horses as a psychodrama that foregrounded the agony of the dancers. The film has a strange dreamlike quality: the action takes place in Santa Monica, right beside the ocean, but we hardly catch a glimpse of daylight. Inside the dance hall, it is a permanent night. The men and women have separate dorms. They’ll have a quick shower or grab a few moments of sleep but then the siren wails out again and they drag themselves back to the dance floor.

During the 1920s and 1930s, these dance marathons really happened. You can find archive footage of them online – tottering couples in a state of complete exhaustion propping each other up as nurses prowl the dance floor, waiting for them to collapse. They sometimes lasted weeks on end, offering “free food and free bed as long as you last and a thousand dollars if you win”.  The events drew very big crowds.

“They just want to see a little misery out there so they can feel a little better, maybe,” Rocky (Gig Young), the event’s MC, says at one point, explaining why the audiences flock to the contest. It’s arguably the same reason the movie was such a box office hit, earning nine Oscar nominations and a Supporting Actor win for Young. Although critics dutifully unpicked its allegorical meanings, it was clear that the real enjoyment here was in seeing the big-name stars like Fonda, Susannah York and Red Buttons put through the wringer.

Fonda talked about trying to “go as far down the dark hole as I possibly could” to play the tough but despairing would-be movie starlet Gloria. In tackling the role, she drew on the grimmest moments from her own private life, including the suicide of her mother. “The presence of my mother was with me,” the star recalled in the 2018 documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts. “I had to get myself to a point where I really felt, ‘Why go on?’”

Strangely, despite the excoriating misery endured by so many of its characters, the movie is often exhilarating. “The main driving thing for me in the film is the derby sequences when they have the dancers racing to stay in the competition,” says Kimberley Sheehan, BFI events programmer and curator of “Discomfort Movies”. Explaining the rationale behind the season’s title, she continues: “You have this rising jolly band music that is speeding up constantly and is contrasted with the very grim images of people running, sweating, in pain. You see people running in the background but you also see people out of focus, crossing in the foreground. You feel like you’re in it. You can hear Jane Fonda whimpering but you can’t always find her in the shot because it is quite chaotic. That adds to your panic because your heart is with Fonda but you can’t find her in the frame.”

Sheehan believes that the film will have a very strong resonance for contemporary audiences. “It sounds a bit mad but I do say to any of my friends who will listen that I see an absolutely relevant parallel to things we watch today… to something like Love Island,” she says. “You have contestants going on that show who are vulnerable, who may come from working-class backgrounds. They’re promised fame and fortune in the same way the contestants in the dance marathon are promised the cash prize.”

The film marked a step change in Fonda’s career. The role transformed her from the sex symbol best known for movies such as Cat Ballou (1965) and Barbarella (1968) into one of the most intense and formidable actors around. Gloria is cynical, foul-mouthed and obnoxious –  a Hollywood wannabe desperate to succeed. Nonetheless, there is a huge pathos about her. We want her to win; her grim fate is nothing short of devastating.

In adversity, many of the characters here behave with tenderness and delicacy. Sarrazin plays Gloria’s dance partner Robert, a passer-by who wanders into the dance hall and is press-ganged into competing. He’s a chivalrous, self-sacrificing figure. You wince at the cruelty shown to Susannah York’s Alice, who has her dress stolen and shredded because she is looking too glamorous. But the same characters who torment her in one scene will treat her very solicitously in the next, as she comes close to a breakdown. They’ll also fuss over Ruby, the young pregnant woman played by future Die Hard star Bonnie Bedelia, who has enlisted in the competition against better medical judgement.

At first glance, They Shoot Horses may look like a strange choice for the “Discomfort Movies” season. This is a mainstream, star-driven movie made by the same producers (Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff) who went on to work with Sylvester Stallone on the Rocky franchise. It’s not as obviously extreme as other titles in the season –  surreal body horror dramas such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) or Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2022). Nonetheless, Sheehan notes the “strong visceral emotions” it elicits. This is one of the great feel-bad movies of its era and it still makes for cathartic viewing. If you have a job you hate and a boss you despise, you can console yourself with the fact you’re not as badly off as those despairing souls dying such slow and painful deaths. It might not be murder on the dancefloor – it’s something even more sinister.

‘Discomfort Movies’ is on at BFI Southbank from 1-31 July