The story of an audacious grift by a Benadryl-addicted Dean Jones.
One of my favorite movies to watch with my parents is an obscure Disney movie from 1968, a “light comedy” called The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit.
It’s about a girl named Helen and her horse, plus a love story between Helen’s father (Dean Jones) and her riding instructor (Diane Baker, Silence of the Lambs). At no point is any aspect of equestrian sports accurately or faithfully represented. Kurt Russell is there as a love interest for Helen, and he pulls an entire horse trailer around with a sports car the size of a thimble. This was Russell’s third Disney movie, and he really has it down by this one. He puts his heart and soul into yelling “Gee” at Dean Jones. His name is Bobby, or Robby, possibly both or neither.
The three of us love this movie because my mom has competed in horse shows for her entire life, and is a 50’s baby who lived through the culture Horse is trying to portray, down to Helen’s father and aunt wandering around a venue in immaculate Sunday dress and having a full, stocked bar in their horse trailer.
She’s also taught riding for decades, so we’re obsessed with the bonkers character that is Helen’s riding instructor, S.J. Clemens. S.J. is the most ineffectual coach ever portrayed on film. She makes the guy from Air Bud look like he really had a handle on things.
Horse first introduces you to Dean Jones as Fred, an adman on Madison Avenue. Despite being successful enough to own a giant landed home in Connecticut and commute to Manhattan for work, Fred’s life is a disaster. His daughter Helen has a horse habit he’s so allergic to that his secretary handing him a saddle nearly kills him, and somehow he’s in crushing debt from paying for her lessons, because financially Fred comes to us via 2009.
In real 1968, the economy was booming and the middle class were living like kings. In Fred’s 1968, he is being eaten alive by the subprime mortgage on his Kennedy-esque compound. How much was a horse lesson back then? Ten bucks? Doesn’t matter, because Fred cannot cope. At Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, he’s trying to sell an off-brand Alka-Seltzer called Aspercel, and failing miserably. His boss is a human cigar, Tom Dugan, who hates the very sight of him. At home, his wife is dead, but this is barely established and never elaborated on, just business as usual for a Disney flick.
Fred gives a terrible pitch for Aspercel. His work husband Charlie (Buddy from The Dick Van Dyke Show) has, Dr. Frankenstein-like, built an animatronic mannequin torso with a see-through stomach so you can put a giant prop Aspercel in and then watch as it goes down and soothes the mannequin.
Dugan hates it. He puts a golf ball in the torso’s mouth, wisely murdering it before it can come to life and wreak havoc on New York.
Then, in a moment of criminal insanity, he says that he wants this indigestion medication to somehow specifically appeal to “jet-setters”. He gives Fred 24 hours to accomplish this.
Workday over, Fred slinks back to Connecticut and makes his way to S.J. Clemens’ farm, where Helen is receiving a terrible lesson. There are about seventeen girls in the ring and S.J. is giving them all the same two-word instructions, like, “Heels down.” These lessons clearly aren’t worth Helen’s time, much less sending her cash-poor father to debtor’s prison.
Once their worthless lesson is over, Helen’s friends crowd around S.J. to insist that she sign on with Helen bullying Fred into buying her a horse of her own. Every woman in this movie is a lobbyist for Big Horse.
Helen demurs but clearly agrees, because she doesn’t realize he is one happy hour away from Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The plot needs Helen to be mousy, but she comes across as a well-adjusted and well-liked fifteen-year-old.
Fred arrives in a really good station wagon. Wood panels! He thinks the “S.J.” he’s been making checks out to is a man, because Helen always refers to her coach as Suzie, not her nom de guerre. He finds S.J. and asks who runs this pirate’s den, her father? In a win for feminism, S.J. reveals herself to be the pirate king who is robbing him blind. Helen literally flees the scene from secondhand embarrassment, but Fred turns up the charm, because Suzie’s cute.
S.J. basically tells Fred he’s a deadbeat for not coming to see Helen ride more often. She must not have heard about his addiction to antihistamines. Even though Fred was pretty polite after the mistaken identity, she clips him in the gut with a swinging gate, calls him a child and then flounces away. On their way out, Helen tries to use the technique her friends taught her, which is to flatter your dad, liquor him up, then ask for a horse, but she completely blows it. Fred is confused and at this point, just begging for alcohol. He is kind of a dark guy, as we’ll continue to see.
At home, Helen enlists her live-in great-aunt to come work for her as a consultant at Big Horse. Meanwhile, Fred is having a mental breakdown trying to make Pepto-Bismol sexy and classy. I can’t blame him, I couldn’t do that either.
Fred yells for Helen and Aunt Martha to quit lurking around outside his man cave, which is the size of three football fields and has a fireplace. They barrel in and pitch him the horse idea. Fred has a complete meltdown and starts taking antihistamines at the mere mention of a horse.
Helen is distraught at her own selfishness (not at the fact that her father seems determined to live beyond his means and is a raging Benadryl addict) and runs out of the room crying. In her absence, rookie recruit Martha swings for the fences. “If she had her own horse, she could graduate to hunters!” she says. “Uh, they jump over fences and things, dear.” This is exactly how horse people who don’t do hunters talk about hunters. Aunt Martha is fast on her feet. Dugan should put her on the Aspercel account.
Fred doesn’t get why the horse thing is an issue. “If she had a boy problem, I could help her!” he says, marking the first and last time a dad in a Disney movie ever expressed that sentiment.
“She does have a boy problem!” Aunt Martha cries. “She’s terrified of boys, she thinks she’s homely!”
For some reason this whips Congressman Fred on board with Big Horse. Helen’s alleged lack of confidence can only be cured by horse, as diagnosed by every woman in her life. Fred agrees to help and sends Martha away: “This mess is what’s left of my career, so just go on to bed and let me pull the temple down around my own shoulders, all right?” She offers him a glass of warm milk. “Wouldn’t help!” he cries, then when she’s gone, murmurs to himself in despair, “Goodnight Fred Bolton.” This guy needs an emotional support horse way more than Helen does.
He mulls the horse thing over as he continues work on the Aspercel pitch, which leads to, in my opinion, the funniest line of the entire movie:
Fred draws a little horse with ASPER-CEL written on the side and then immediately discards it. Two seconds later, he shouts “A HORSE!” and runs after the drawing. This is truly how the creative process works.
In the morning, Fred returns to Sterling Cooper Dugan Price with his brilliant idea in tow. He has to give his entire pitch at the health club while Dugan smokes a cigar and works out. After what must be several hours in real time, Dugan says he approves, and then Fred gets hit in the side of the head with a squash ball and passes out. OSHA is nowhere to be found, because it won’t exist for two more years. It’s okay though, because Fred gets a massage, and those are known to cure traumatic brain injuries.
It’s settled: Fred will use company money to buy a fancy horse, give it the show name of Aspercel, then have his daughter compete her way up to the Washington International Horse Show, banking on the power of subliminal word association to increase sales among the uppercrust. He somehow gets promoted to VP for this scheme, which feels like something you would read about in a Paul Manafort charging document.
Some unspecified amount of time later, S.J. has come to the Bolton Estate to oversee the delivery of Aspercel, a beautiful dappled gray who she picked out personally for Helen. She’s nicer to Fred this time, who desperately tries to impress her by showing her the tricked-out trailer he bought. Still no word on whether or not that thing in the bar next to the TV is a fax machine or not.
Fred bonds with the horse in the only way he knows how: offering him a variety of mood-altering substances.
Helen asks S.J. if it’s actually okay for her horse to drink beer. “One palmful for medicinal purposes is okay,” S.J. says. Medicinal purposes? I think S.J. went to a for-profit horsemanship college. For the record, my mom has sometimes given her horses a palmful of beer after a show.
Fred leads Aspercel out of the trailer with a halter and no leadrope, which is like taking your dog for a walk by holding onto their collar. Aspercel is a fancy boy who quickly tires of the Boltons’ nonsense, escapes from Helen (who screams, “ASPIE!” not for the last time this movie) and nimbly jumps the fence into his paddock. Everyone is stunned but pleased. No one says, “Whoa, maybe we should make that fence higher.”
We then wipe, Star Wars-style, into Helen’s first show with ASPIE! This is our introduction to Kurt Russell, the king of inappropriate tow vehicles, accompanying his sister to the show.
Helen’s already messing up her dad’s whole grift: her class gets rescheduled, and she’s not at all prepared, although she is fully dressed with her helmet on and wearing a bright red foxhunting jacket for some reason. Fred tries to help her get ready, but really has apparently never watched Helen ride in her life, because he immediately tries to put the saddle on backwards. Then he tries to send her off without a bridle.
Helen runs to go get her number from the secretary stand (some inside baseball for you) and Kurt Russell, who is bending over the probably destroyed engine of his sports car, spots Fred fumbling around and runs over to stop the atrocities he’s committing.
“These things are pretty tricky ’til you catch on,” he kindly says to Fred, though less tricky if you aren’t high out of your mind on antihistamines.
Helen comes running back screaming about how she got assigned unlucky #13, then stops dead when she sees Kurt Russell. I guess that means she thinks he’s cute? But when he offers her a leg up, she looks at him like he’s human termites. He grabs her and flings her up onto the horse anyway, like a true gentleman.
Fred and Martha settle into the audience like they’re at the Kentucky Derby. Fred gets out binoculars with which to see a ring that is about five feet away from his face. Kurt Russell joins them because, despite having a sister who is riding in the same show, he is Team Bolton now and only has eyes for Helen.
Aspercel has a refusal at the very first fence and Helen rides like a confused idiot to every fence after. Fred screams, “BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL! SENSATIONAL!” The only thing in the world that makes this guy happy is his daughter riding, no matter how terribly, which makes me wonder why he’s never seen it before in his life.
“Isn’t she great?” Fred says to Kurt Russell, who drops the most vicious burn of his entire career: “The horse is very good, sir.” Ouch! I’m coming and hell’s coming with me!
Helen gets eliminated. “WHY?” Fred shouts. “Well,” Kurt Russell explains, “she just wasn’t good enough, sir.” This kid is an absolute maniac. He just met this guy fifteen minutes ago, and he’s clearly interested in dating Helen, why doesn’t he just keep his mouth shut? Then he calls her a push-button rider. He keeps adding ‘sir’ like it’s softening the blow or something.
Fred gallops over to confront S.J., who has been doing zero instructing of Helen today, to the point that she didn’t even see her ride. S.J. seems entirely indifferent to the concepts of winning or losing, which is exactly what you want in a professional coach.
He demands to know what a push-button rider is. S.J. just chortles and says her ride wasn’t that bad (how do you know? You didn’t see it!) which leaves the non-horsey viewing audience to assume this is some unspeakable slur that should not even be expounded upon. Fred reminds S.J. that Aspercel cost $5,000, which in 1968 was equivalent to $36,000. That is shocking! This whole scheme makes Paul Manafort’s ostrich coat look like small potatoes. Someone tell Fred he works for an ad agency, not Deutsche Bank.
S.J. tells Fred to give his daughter a few months. He says he doesn’t have a few months, “Not if Helen is going to win three medals and qualify for Washington!” She looks at him like he’s lost his mind, calls him out for it, then delivers the best line in American film history: “Excuse me, I promised Barnaby I’d watch this go-round.” Barnaby! Is that a person or a horse? Can’t tell. Fred stalks her over to the ring and says, “What if you gave Helen a lesson every day?” She replies, “She might start winning.” God, I should hope so!
So S.J. starts teaching Helen daily, which gives Fred the chance to sit on the fence for hours at a time and stare at her. Fred apparently no longer has a day job, he’s just being paid a VP salary to be a talent agent for this horse, to whom he is violently allergic.
During one of the lessons, S.J. comes over to him, and he asks her in a roundabout way why she isn’t married. He wants to know this because he is clearly madly in love with her, a fact we the audience are privy to way before anyone else in the movie is. S.J. starts going on about her ex-fiance, and at random intervals remembers she’s being paid to coach a student and shouts out words like “BALANCE!” before going back to what she was saying.
S.J. admits she wanted a family, and Archer just wanted to ride horses eternally until his legs fell off, so she left him… and went right back to horses. I’m not sure I understand, but Fred seems happy with this humanization of the pirate king. No one explains why S.J. is wearing a headscarf instead of a riding helmet.
The daily lessons work: Helen starts winning and also stops wearing foxhunting jackets to jumper shows. Charlie, whose job title I can’t even begin to fathom, has stopped building evil torsos and is now coordinating press coverage for Aspercel. They get a massive above-the-fold story in the Lakeville News-Press, so I guess absolutely nothing else happened in Connecticut that day.
At the next show, Kurt Russell is back on the scene. He only shows up to provide come-to-Jesus moments for the protagonists, so we had to wait until the point in the story when Helen is fed up with the medal circuit until we could see him again. He tells her she’s “tensing up” and needs to chill out.
“I’m having a wonderful time Ronnie!” Helen barks at him, with her shoulders up around her ears, then offers him a “root beer”. Knowing Fred, I doubt that bar is stocked with anything but real beer.
Kurt kind of bullies her into agreeing to a date on Saturday, then we cut to Fred walking jauntily around with Aspercel and Aspercel’s groom, Hank. Dugan, who has been ominously missing in action for a while, rolls up in the back of a town car.
In an act of blatant class warfare, Fred introduces Dugan to the horse, but not the groom. Dugan demands a private chat, so Fred sends Hank off to go walk the horse elsewhere. “Come on, meatball,” Hank says to Aspercel. (For some reason this line imprinted on me so strongly as a child that when I have to lead a horse I still say to it, “Come on, meatball.”) Dugan stiffens, and Fred says, “Uh, Hank, his name is Aspercel.”
“I know,” Hank says, “How come you picked a stupid name like that? A lousy stomach pill.” Wow, it’s like Fred specifically hired this guy to ruin his life.
Fred hurries Dugan over to the trailer and assures him he’s been working on a “brochure” of their progress. Honestly, if I were Fred’s boss, I would also want to kick his ass. What has he even been doing all day since he pitched this Aspercel thing?
Dugan strafes Fred into oblivion before he’s even fully sat down. He tells him, “I think this whole campaign is something you cooked up just so your daughter could get a horse for nothing,” which should be the tagline of the movie. Because the Boltons’ trailer is more like a poolhouse, Helen is lounging around in the giant dressing room and can hear all of this as it goes down.
Dugan tells Fred that the kind of coverage he wanted was “Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Illustrated London News, TV cameras,” which is his bad for not doing even the slightest bit of research on how much the outside world actually cares about horse sports before he approved this pitch. (For instance, half of my friends who know my mom rides think she is a professional jockey.) He reads one clipping aloud to Fred, in which Aspercel is hilariously misidentified as ‘Aspirin’.
Essentially, Fred is going to have to get Aspercel to Washington if he wants to keep his job. He swears that he’s going to “flood the class media,” and if he doesn’t, Dugan is free to can him. Dugan says he has a lot of confidence, and Fred momentarily agrees, but not a millisecond later says, “No I haven’t.” Come on, Fred, you can’t give it up that easy.
Helen is supposed to get one of her three Washington-qualifier medals at today’s show, and she does, but she could not look less happy about it. Fred looks miserable, too. Dugan gives him a downright malevolent look out the back of his town car as he drives away. S.J., having finally pinned down the difference between winning and losing, shouts to Fred, “We’ve won, we’ve won!” Fred stares Dugan down as he says, “We haven’t won yet, Suzie.” God there’s a grim undercurrent to this lighthearted Disney comedy. How close we all are to ruin! Life’s but a walking shadow!
Fred embarks on his “class media” press tour, which takes him all the way out to Chicago. I can’t imagine a journalist from Chicago hearing any part of the Aspercel story and not coming to the exact same conclusion that Dugan did.
He calls home to find Helen is in dire straits after losing at Rockford, where she should have picked up her third medal of the season. She heartbreakingly assures Fred she’ll get to Washington; Fred, who has no idea the jig is up, stutters, “Look, I just phoned to – to find out how everybody is!” Then he catches an early flight home, but Martha and Helen are out somewhere, and since it’s the 60’s his only option is to wait at home. His choice of hanging-around outfit only confirms to me that he’s secretly a millennial trapped in the past. Aspercel pokes his head in the window, and laugh-a-minute Fred calls him “the loser of the week” and makes this alarming anti-joke:
Fred tells the horse, “Go jump a fence or something,” so because he is a Disney horse, Aspercel turns and runs away from Bolton Manor, jumping every fence he sees. Fred chases after him screaming about beer. I’m surprised he doesn’t offer him an antihistamine.
Somehow Fred manages to keep up with this elite horse for a good distance, despite being a bipedal human man. He chases him for literal miles; someone should talk to Fred about his Olympic prospects. Eventually the horse comes to a stop, and Fred gives him a talking-to, then climbs up onto his back and starts riding him.
Back at the manor, the brain trust that is Helen and Aunt Martha are home and have decided there’s been a horsenapping. This despite the fact that they both watched Aspie leap easily into his paddock the first day they brought him home. Fences work both ways! They call the police anyway.
The police must have absolutely nothing going on that day: they promise to “search every back road in the county ’til we find him,” and almost immediately track Fred down. They roll up on him with sirens like he’s John Dillinger. This spooks Aspercel, of course, and he takes off, which causes one of the officers to unholster his gun and shoot into the air, the most irresponsible behavior depicted in this lovably unserious 1960s Disney movie.
Fred, who has never ridden before in his life, somehow stays on despite being on a galloping horse who is jumping four foot fences. The squad car rides alongside him on the road while the trigger-happy cop screams “STOP” out the window. At one point he shakes his head and says, “Boy, I’d like to see that guy’s license,” which actually makes zero sense.
Aspercel jumps literally everything in his path until he finally dislodges Fred by making a six foot vertical jump and then crashing into a greenhouse. The crash is what throws Fred, not the jump. Again, Fred should be studied by science. He’s never ridden before in his life and he just rode the equivalent of an Advanced-level cross country course with no saddle or bridle, in boxers and slippers.
Cut to Fred in jail. Charlie is there, in his capacity as in-house mad scientist-cum-public information officer for the ad agency, and he refuses to identify Fred as the actual owner as Aspercel, I guess because it’s funnier not to? There is literally no reason to drag this out once they get the photo for the next day’s paper. Fred’s life is constant torment for no real reason.
Fred threatens to fire Charlie, which does not seem like something he has the power to do, then starts choking him.
It’s all very funny, the world’s abuse of Fred. The police don’t believe that he is who he says he is solely because he’s supposed to be in Chicago. Apparently in 1968, catching an earlier flight was absolutely unheard of, and you had no Fourth Amendment rights. Never mind that Fred knows all of his own autobiographical details: he is simply the most studied horse thief of all time.
Ironically, the real criminal here is Charlie, who is lying to the police in order to keep an innocent man in jail for financial gain, and should be brought up on some kind of RICO charge.
Fred shows the cop his plaid shorts and demands, “Would a self-respecting thief go around stealing horses in shorts like this?”
“Why not?” the cop says placidly.
Fred’s face falls. “Because it’s insane!” he shouts. But Fred is alone in finding any of this insane. He is the straight man, our audience surrogate in a heightened fictional world of madness.
Charlie finds the insanity angle funny and suggests that Fred has escaped from a mental hospital, advising the police to look into this. Fred goes into another rage and tries to seize the photographer by his beard, then asks the police to call Aunt Helen one last time. “She’ll tell you who I am, and she’ll also tell you who that creep is!” he says, pointing at Charlie. Charlie makes a quick exit, as if he just realized he could get done on obstruction of justice should Aunt Helen turn state’s evidence.
The other cop — the one who tried to use lethal force against Fred for riding his own horse — comes in all smiles and says he spoke to Aunt Helen, and apparently Aspercel returned himself home to the stable. So the police were so focused on nailing Fred for horse theft that they forgot to round up the horse after Fred had crashed it? What a biting satire of the police!
However, Fred is not free to go. The cop told Aunt Helen they have a man in custody claiming to be her nephew, but she said no, it can’t be Fred, he’s supposed to be in Chicago. Which means Aunt Helen thinks that this was not an opportunistic horse thief, but a highly skilled criminal who cased the joint and researched the makeup of their family unit? After all, how many middle-aged guys live with their aunt and daughter?
Back home, Helen is listening to bluegrass on the radio (interesting choice) and brushing Aspercel while aggressively berating him. “As if I don’t have enough problems without you running away!” she says.
Unfortunately for Helen, this isn’t one of the many Disney movies where a horse speaks or understands English. In the whole Disney canon, this is actually one of the more realistic entries when it comes to depicting the relative cognitive abilities of a horse. But the actor playing Aspercel does pin and swivel his ears in response to spending probably five or ten takes being yelled at for no reason.
The radio interrupts the bluegrass for some news, and they start with the lightest news of the day — the horsenapping. The broadcast begins with, “Aspercel, a well-known jumping horse,” a sentence that only makes sense in this universe. My friends don’t even know who Seabiscuit is, and he was nominated for Best Picture.
We hear that Fred’s legal troubles have been resolved off-screen. “The alleged horse stealer turns out to be the young lady’s father, Mr. Bolton of Westhill Road. Don’t ask us why, folks! We can’t figure it either,” the broadcaster says with a chuckle, and then shifts into a serious tone. “On the international scene, things are not proceeding quite as well,” he says. This is insane behavior. This is why news broadcasts start with the most serious, urgent news and then end on a lighter note, instead of the reverse.
Helen shuts the radio off. Helen has bigger problems than the Cold War or the end of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. She assumes her father the madman kidnapped their horse for publicity. Of course, what other assumption is there to make? Especially since the complete amateurs over at the radio station literally said, “Don’t ask us why, folks! We can’t figure it either!” instead of picking up the phone and doing some journalism.
Aspercel has his hands full with the flehmen response and doesn’t care that his owner is having a nervous breakdown.
Kurt Russell is back! He drives up in his dumb little car that looks like it came in a cereal box but can somehow pull a fully loaded horse trailer. He’s wearing a blazer to indicate they are going out on a date, which is sweet. In this modern era, I have seen men dress less formally as wedding guests than Robby here is dressed for his date with Helen.
Helen sees him pulling up, panics and brushes her hair with a horse brush. “I’ve done that,” my mom often comments when we watch this scene.
This is what Ronnie says as he walks up. You can tell from this line alone that Kurt Russell had the charisma to become a big star, because he doesn’t sound as stupid as he should.
He asks why she isn’t dressed. She says, “Dressed?” He gets the impression she forgot their date and is standing him up. She explains that her horse went missing earlier. This doesn’t mollify him. “And I have to wait for Suzie,” she says. “SUZIE,” he scoffs. “She’s coming over to see if Aspie’s all right,” Helen says. “ASPIE!”
This is Ronnie’s response to Helen’s apology. “MY PLANS?” he exclaims. “MY WHOLE SATURDAY?” I have seen my parents have this argument about 8,000 times. Kurt Russell and horses go way back, so he is bringing some verisimilitude to the role here. You feel his helplessness and disbelief in the face of the way horses seem to dilate the flow of time. Days and hours lose all meaning when a horse is involved.
The realism here is extreme, verging on uncomfortable, like early Steven Soderbergh.
Of course the irony is that Helen is the real prisoner — she’s a victim of her father’s white-collar crime, like the Madoff boys. She confesses all this to Ronnie in a flood of tears, then runs away. Aspercel, who has a gift for both comedic timing and visual metaphor, bolts out of his stall into Ronnie’s path as he tries to go after her.
One has to feel for the animal actor in scenes like these. Over and over again, take after take, the trainer indicated for this horse to come forward, and Kurt Russell ran headlong into his neck and yelled at him to get out of the way. “Well, what the fuck,” you imagine the horse thinking. “Why don’t YOU get out of the way?”
The police take Fred home, riding three abreast in the front seat, and try to apologize to him. “You do, and I’ll never buy another ticket to your annual clambake,” Fred says. One thing about Fred: he is a supremely self-loathing individual. If the police had shot at me and falsely imprisoned me for trying to catch my own loose horse, I would start drowning them in lawsuits the second I left the station, not appease them with the promise of future clambake ticket money. These cops should be on the Brady list.
Robbie is waiting on the porch. The sun has completely gone down, so he’s likely been cooling his heels for the better part of an hour. He angrily confronts Fred and tells him that he admired him until tonight, and you can tell that he’s been rehearsing this speech in his head the whole time he’s been sitting out here. “When I have kids, I will never make them do something they don’t want to do,” vows Ronnie. (This seems like a massive, delusional overcorrection to Fred’s own parenting errors.) “Even if the only reason they were doing it was so I wouldn’t lose my job!”
“LOSE MY JOB?” Fred exclaims, realizing the jig is up. This is exactly like when Tony Soprano found out Meadow knew he was mobbed up.
This is the most guilty reaction imaginable. “Are we talking about Helen?” Uh, what the fuck do you think, Fred? How many of your children is Kurt Russell dating?
Given the context, Fred is being somewhat menacing here. Of course, Ronnie knows he’s in a 1960’s Disney movie, where no harm can come to him. If this was real life, even in Connecticut, Robbie should start having serious concerns about his well-being right about here. This man is in desperate financial straits — he’s at risk of losing his job and house in one fell swoop. In a different movie, one can imagine Fred asking, “Who knows you’re here tonight, Ronnie? Did you tell anyone you were coming over here?”
This is Horse, so Ronnie just explains the situation. Helen is inside, crying and staring at the dog Herbie. When her dad walks in, her reaction is to hide her tears, but she does so by clutching a tissue to her face and turning full-body toward her father while openly weeping. “I seem to be coming down with a cold!” she exclaims. No one in this family should work for the CIA.
“What’s this nonsense about me losing my job?” Fred says.
“It isn’t nonsense, Daddy, I heard what Mr. Dugan said at Lakeville,” says Helen.
Fred assures Helen that “what’s here at home is most important” and that she won’t ride in any more horse shows. Of course, if they lose their house, what’s here at home won’t be at home anymore, yes? “Daddy, I can get us to Washington,” Helen pleads. There’s that competitive zeal! But no, she’s fired as Aspercel’s rider because she had a nervous breakdown.
“If you con me I’m going to take you across me knee like I used to,” he threatens, 1968-style. “You never took me over your knee,” she giggles. “Well, I should have,” he says. 1968! I’m not even sure what “conning me” means in this context — secretly riding in horse shows and winning secret medals? Fred sends Helen off on her date with Kurt Russell, and she asks if they’ll have to sell Aspie before she leaves.
When Helen leaves, Fred asks the dog what the market is for “slightly used vice presidents.” Fred, I think your immediate priority should be securing legal representation.
S.J. comes over and does a vet call in a scarf and sweater set. Fred says he doesn’t know how he’ll feed Aspercel once he’s thrust into poverty, and S.J. chuckles airily and says he’ll figure it out. If I were her, I would be more worried, considering this family is a significant part of her income stream. He says he’s considering joining the circus because he took Aspie over a 7-foot fence.
S.J. is the first person to react to this fact with the appropriate shock. “Aspie went seven feet?” she says in disbelief. Fred also went seven feet, bareback and without reins in his pajamas, but no one cares because this movie isn’t called The Man In The Regular Man Suit.
“What if we took Aspie to Washington?” S.J. says, but Fred says no, Helen is done with shows and his career is over to boot. But S.J. has a different idea. She also tells Fred to shut the hell up about his extremely precarious financial situation.
“Why do you say I’m feeling sorry for myself?” Fred says.
“Because I like you!” S.J. says. This is too close to a romantic confession, so she adds that she likes Helen, Aunt Martha, Aspie, Herbie and “the whole insane setup,” presumably in no particular order considering that she listed Aunt Martha before the horse. This isn’t actually an answer to his question, but it explains why she’s offering to find a way to take Aspercel to Washington in the open jumper championship.
“If he made it to Washington as an open jumper, wow, that’s really big league, a thousand times more publicity than with Helen in a junior class,” S.J. says. I’m still failing to see how this is a publicity feat at all, but it was a different time. Maybe in 1968 people turned to each other said, “I just don’t know what stomach medicine to buy. Honey, can you fetch the newspaper and tell me who won the open jumper championship at the Washington International Horse Show last night?”
“Aspercel, open jumper champion. How would Allied Drug like that for a subliminal commercial?” she says in excitement. “You know, you might be in the wrong business,” Fred says. You can tell he’s in love with her because of how delusional he is. They shake hands, and Aspercel says, “Phhhhh” with his nose. I agree, Aspie, this plan is dubious at best.
S.J. apologizes for telling Fred he was feeling sorry for himself, and he says it’s okay because he was feeling sorry for himself. Well, for good reason! I think Fred should be commended for not turning to antihistamines in this time of great stress. Then he goes mad with lust and keeps passionately coming onto her in a restrained, playful 1960s way until she flees the scene.
We cut to, presumably, the following day. Based on the lighting, it’s around noon — so of course Fred pulls up just having knocked off work, and no one else has any normal-person responsibilities to attend to. The camera cuts to Archer Madison, S.J’s former love interest and a former USET rider who’s now coaching professionally. He’s striding around the ring, wearing a silly little outfit befitting of the name “Archer Madison,” which sounds like an upmarket but affordable mens’ shoe store. For some reason, Helen thinks this man is so handsome that her father will be turned gay by the mere sight of him.
“Isn’t he devastating, Daddy?” Helen says. Fred senses a challenger and realizes that this is S.J.’s ex-fiancé. “How could she had ever cooled it with someone so gorgeous?” Helen says. This is a very regular-looking guy, so I don’t know what Helen’s problem is. I guess this is just a way to tell the audience, “Girls who love horses go crazy over this guy, so watch out, Fred!” As if Fred needed more reasons to feel bad about himself and his prospects in life. He immediately assumes Archer is trying to worm his way back in based on how he’s touching her, and I have to take Fred’s side here.
“Last-minute instructions”? He is cupping her face with his hand. Fred doesn’t even know what the instructions would be for, because as the audience surrogate, he never knows what the hell is going on even when he should. Of course, S.J. is going to be the one riding Aspercel, with no warm-up and only the head protection of a yellow scarf.
Fred is astonished and horrified. “All the top riders were booked for Washington,” Helen explains. So Fred’s idea was that he would pay a rider to put in work on Aspercel until he was ready for the open jumpers? The overhead on this operation is absolutely insane. How much of this stuff do you think Fred is writing off as business expenses? I think he may have indirectly caused the recession of 1973.
Maybe Fred thought he would ride Aspie in the show. They went over that seven foot wall together, after all!
Archer has her ride over like three cavaletti once, then she’s immediately jumping the horse over this four-foot fence. “You got left behind! Try again,” Archer tells her, while inexplicably raising the fence a few inches as he’s talking. We don’t have time to do this thing right, guys — if we don’t get to Washington, we’re all headed for the slammer. Fred objects to Archer raising the fence, because even though this is all his fault, he’s the only sane one here.
S.J. goes around again, and then one of the all-time funniest scenes in a horse movie occurs. “You’re behind the motion, get with the horse,” Archer says, then lunges forward in horror and exclaims: “Watch it!”
S.J. gets over the fence completely fine, then the stunt rider stands up in her stirrups and theatrically leaps sideways off the horse. That classic mistake you always see from even the most experienced riders: losing their mind and leaping off the horse’s back for absolutely no reason. Maybe S.J. was pissed at Archer for saying she got left behind. Who’s getting left behind now, buddy? I left the whole fucking horse behind!
Fred is supposed to be the overprotective, undereducated rube here, the big dummy who’s just in love with Suzie and doesn’t understand the nuances of equestrian sports. But every “expert” involved is actually acting like an idiot, and Archer is one of the more useless horse trainers ever committed to film, so the putative dummy has a point. Archer adjusts his strategy after S.J.’s fall: he sends her over the cavaletti twice before she goes over the big fence again, instead of just once. Then the lesson comes to a swift and abrupt end. Does this guy charge by the minute?
Archer proclaims that S.J. winning the open jumper division is a “300-to-1 shot… but she does have a chance.” Yes, a 300-to-1 chance, you just said. “Let’s cool off this horse!” he exclaims, before striding offscreen. I don’t think the horse even needs to be cooled out after that. I do think S.J. needs a CT scan.
(Fred puts up some puff and bluster.)
On to Washington!
And Kurt Russell got an invitation!
A fascinating and impressive aspect of Horse is that whole the climax takes place at the Washington International Horse Show, and contains wide-shot footage from the actual show of elite horses doing things that would be impossible to recreate on a stunt lot.
Which means that the filmmakers must have reverse-engineered the plot based on one year’s horses and competitors so they could use footage from the show, then cast accordingly. I’d love to learn more and write an oral history for GQ, but this movie came out fifty years ago and I don’t know how to get in touch with Kurt Russell.
Aspercel gets off to a great start and wins a big silver bowl on his first night out, then is feted in the paper as “Unknown Connecticut Horse,” which I’m sure Tom Dugan loved seeing.
S.J. also strikes up a friendship with her biggest competition, Lieutenant Mario Lorendo, an affable gentleman who is mounted on a mare named Rascala and wearing a god damn officer’s cap instead of a helmet. However, S.J.’s helmet lacks a chin strap and merely offers the tempting illusion of protection, which might be worse than no helmet at all.
Fred goes to visit S.J. on the final night of the show, offers her a hot dog, then tells her, “You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who looks beautiful chewing.” I feel bad for his poor ertswhile wife, Helen’s mother: long forgotten, presumed dead, and apparently an ugly chewer. But maybe Fred found Helen in a cabbage patch.
Fred tries to confesses his feelings to S.J., but they’re repeatedly interrupted by the horsey men in her life, Lieutenant Mario Lorendo and Archer Madison. Archer is in a tuxedo to remind us that people used to make an effort for events like the Washington International Horse Show, before Rome fell and we all became filthy t-shirt people.
Fred runs into Charlie, who tells him he wants to get a shot of him and Dugan together. Dean Jones gives a hilarious “oh shit” face and takes a half-step back in response.
Fred tells Dugan he’s glad he could make it and Dugan menacingly tells him he wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I guess all these characters have decided to live and die by the idea that this whole thing is a fraud, a sham and an embarrassment if Aspercel doesn’t win the championship, but if he does, everything is fine.
Fred knows the importance of managing expectations, even though we’ve all agreed that his entire life must, for some reason, hang in the balance of this horse show. Dugan somehow ends up with Fred’s hot dog, and he takes a bite out of it without thinking, then reacts with disgust and his minion behind him offers him his cup of water. This seems out of character for Dugan. He’s a red-blooded American who smokes cigars, not a member of the royal family. I think he can eat a hot dog. Maybe he was understandably worried that Fred was trying to poison him.
The final night sees Aspercel facing off against Rascala.
What follows is genuinely exciting and fun, and I have nothing to poke fun at. It’s a good movie!
Rascala and Aspercel keep tying, forcing the jump-off fence to be raised higher and higher. Suzie and Mario are both very sportsmanlike competitors, and as the competition grows more stiff, they only seem to become more fond of each other and more excited about what they’re doing — it’s a nice and subtle little depiction of sportsmanship. They’re both in it for the love of the game, and winning is secondary.
The final result of the jump-off comes down to tenths of a second, which gets Dugan’s minion sitting behind him so excited that he starts whacking him in delight. Dugan, who is smoking a cigar in this enclosed public space like an animal, is horrified.
Of course, because this is a movie, and more importantly a Disney sports movie from 1968, S.J. and Aspercel narrowly squeak out a victory.
In all the excitement, S.J. and Archer kiss passionately on the lips, which Fred sees and is understandably upset by.
I don’t think you need to kiss your students on the mouth like that after they win. My mom certainly doesn’t kiss her students on the mouth like that.
Fred fades into the background out of despair, because while he may have avoided bankrupcty and made his daughter very happy, his lady love is kissing other men and there’s no solace left for him on this earth. In his absence, there’s some humor with his coworkers as they jostle to pose with the big winner, Aspercel.
Dugan says that he wants a picture of himself with the “little girl who jumped the big wall.” I think if you jump a seven-foot fence you have earned the right to be referred to as a grown woman! Helen and S.J. go to pose for photos, while Fred dejectedly leads Aspercel away. They look in his direction with worried expressions. They know the dark depths Fred’s soul has plumbed.
That’s not oats, Fred, that is beer!
All’s well that ends well, though: S.J. comes to find Fred and explains that her heart is with him, not with Archer, with the implication that she found a stability in Fred which Archer never offered.
And then they get interrupted one last time by Helen, who runs in and makes it as awkward as humanly possible.
And that’s it — the big happy ending. I don’t know where Aunt Martha and Kurt Russell got off to, though. Maybe stocking up the trailer with booze and hot dogs.
