THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? Milestones

Famously holding the record for the most number of Academy Award nominations (nine) that didn’t include Best Picture, Sydney Pollack’s 1969 adaptation of a Depression-era Horace McCoy novel packs a timely punch today in the midst of the financial industry crisis. Jane Fonda plays Gloria, a bitter Dust Bowl evacuee and aspiring actress who enrolls in a Los Angeles dance marathon hoping for fame and fortune. Dance marathons began in the Roaring Twenties but by the time of the Depression attracted masses of unemployed workers and greedy promoters who capitalized on their contestants’ mental and physical exhaustion; marathons could last weeks or months, offering a kind of “reality entertainment” with strict rules that narrowed the survivors. Marathons were symbols of desperate times and a system that treated people like animals. “There can only be one winner, folks,” says one promoter “But isn’t that the American way?” In films like TOOTSIE ( 1982) and OUT O F AFRICA ( 1985), Pollack established a reputation for romanticism, but this earlier effort offers a hard-edged allegory. He claustrophobically traps the viewer within the dance hall, achieving a heightened sense of terror with long tracking shots and handheld cameras.