The character:	Rocky Gravo
The actor:	Gig Young
The movie:	They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

I’m not an expert on shooting things, nor on euthanasia, so I went to the Internet to find out why we shoot horses when they break a leg. First off, we don’t shoot horses anymore, but we use one of those lethal chemical cocktails instead. Second, the answer I had in mind ahead of time was basically correct: the injury is so painful and so difficult to recover from that it is more merciful to take the animal out of its suffering. The details share more of the troubles. “Difficult to recover from” is an understatement. It’s almost impossible. The horse is evolved to have four working legs. Take a leg away, and the other three deform and fatal infections set in. The horse cannot stand up without the fourth leg, but the horse will not lie down either. She wants to stand, and she will attempt to stand even on the broken leg, which, of course, is terrible. The chances are so slim that the horse will recover, given these obstacles, to say nothing of the intricacy of the horse’s leg itself, that trying to treat the horse just means that she will be in tremendous pain for months before, almost inevitably, dying.

With animals, perhaps most often with the pets we love, we decide that a life lived with terrible pain is no life at all. Having to euthanize a pet, hold an animal in your arms while she is injected with death itself is one of the risks that every hooman takes on before they adopt. If we cannot expect that the illness can be cured, or if the animal is already nearing the end of its life, most of us choose to give the animal release. It’s just people we expect to live with incurable pain. No one is allowed to shoot them, or inject them with that cocktail.

When Robert offs Gloria at the end of the movie, as we know that he will from the get-go, he seems to think that she has reached the breaking point just as an animal might. Or, more accurately, he understands that she has become an animal after months of being treated that way. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? has much the same plot as Black Beauty, except this horse movie doesn’t end with us saying, “Well, all’s well that ends well.”

Gig Young, whose final day involved some pretty horrific shooting in its own right, looks real old in TSHDT. “Weathered” is the right word, and so I guess “craggy” is too, but neither one of those really do him justice. Young, whether this was the way he looked when he got up in the morning or the way he looked when he was playing Rocky, has the face of a guy who has seen things. Over the course of the film, he sees people in awful physical pain, doubled over, bent, bleeding. He watches people hold each other up as they faint dead away from exhaustion. He watches a guy have a heart attack and die in front of a crowd and God and everyone. These are harsh images that a man must see, and they would be harsh even for an audience member who has wandered into the dance marathon to get a glimpse of this tremendous endurance contest executed by small, desperate people who would never have thought themselves capable of a tremendous anything.

Given that Rocky is the big boss of the dance marathon, the one who drives these small people into a ring in order to make them spectacles only fit for shooting after they’ve been exploited for so long, there’s no need to pity him any more than there’s a need to pity any other sadistic opportunist. The cruelty of the dance marathon is what engages an audience. It’s not even like a football game, where you can distract yourself from the permanent physical toll these men take on by saying things to yourself like, “What a beautifully sequenced set of playcalls” or “Look at the way that guy fits the run.” There’s no real craft or art to this, no magnificent athleticism or freakish grace. It’s just pain, and tolerance for pain, and the serf’s sense of necessity to live on until there’s just no point to it any longer.

The thing that really gets me about this movie, and what I think takes Rocky from a merely cruel man to one without any capacity for human feeling, is that the prize money the winners are supposed to carry away with them is bupkis. It may be some significant sum for the Depression-era milieu, but everything that’s kept these people literally alive is subtracted from the total: food, lodging, etc. He’s a slaver, and it must be one more thing that he sees that makes him look that beaten and act that uncaringly.