National Velvet (M.G.M.), from the novel by Enid Bagnold, combines some of the most attractive elements of The Song of Bernadette and of Lassie Come Home. It is almost a children's classic.
Throughout her childhood, horses so deeply excited Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor) that merely to look at them was ecstasy. She lost her heart to one at twelve, when she first saw a neighbor's fierce new gelding running majestically through a meadow. Without quite realizing it, she also lost her heart to her companion that memorable day, a hard little tramp of 17 (Mickey Rooney). He stayed on in the village to work in her father's butcher shop.
When the unmanageable gelding went up for raffle, Velvet never for an instant doubted that she would win him; and she did. The same unshakable faith gave her mastery over the horse. When his magnificent powers as a jumper made it clear that he was qualified for England's greatest and most hazardous steeplechase, the Grand National, it was reckless faith again—plus Velvet's mother (Anne Revere), who had had her fling at the same sort of glory as a Channel swimmer—which brought her the entrance fee.
When the young ex-tramp took the money to London, it was her faith in him that cured him of dishonesty in spite of drunkenness and shady companions. Later on it even cured him of cowardice. Faith won its climactic triumph when, shorn and silked as a boy on the greatest day of her life, Velvet rode her beloved horse to victory over England's best.
National Velvet is not merely sure to delight children and the child in most adults; it is also an interesting psychological study of hysterical obsession, conversion mania, preadolescent sexuality. Twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, a beautiful little girl who has hitherto had minor roles in Lassie Come Home, Jane Eyre, etc., is probably the only person in Hollywood who could bring to this curious role its unusual combination of earthiness and ecstasy. Mickey Rooney proves once for all that he can be a sincere, capable actor when the role calls for it. Anne Revere, in a role which unconventionally (for the screen) combines homeliness, quietude, wisdom, and a sharp flash of sportiness, turns in perhaps the best mother ever seen in a moving picture. And six-year-old Jackie Jenkins, with his bottleful of bugs and headful of lies, is as charming as he was in The Human Comedy.
Yet pleasant and sometimes poignantly beautiful as it is, National Velvet fails to make the most of its opportunities. The relationship between the girl and the young-old bum, a singularly innocent, subtle and touching love story, is merely sketched and hinted now & again, chiefly through the girl's radiant face and Rooney's accomplished acting. In the presentation of the race itself, the chance for a sharply realistic study of an inexperienced girl in competition with tough and tricky jockeys is forfeited for the sake of a few minutes of conventional spills and mass galumphing. Had its makers devoted more care and imagination to such significant detail, National Velvet would have been one of the best films in years. As it stands, it is merely one of the gift horses of 1944 which will best reward examination.