KENTUCKY PRIDE

KENTUCKY PRIDE (US 1925)
(Galoppo di gloria)
John Ford

A prominent writer whose career spanned both the silent and sound eras, Dorothy Yost (1899‒1967) worked on more than 94 films. She is best known for her collaborations with husband Dwight Cummings at RKO – the comedy Alice Adams (1935) and the Astaire-Rogers  musicals The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), and Swing Time (1936). Her silent-era career, however, which began when she was just a teenager, remains largely unknown.
Like many young women pioneers Yost first worked as a secretary, and in 1917 landed a job as an assistant to the scenario editor at the Triangle Film Corporation. She quickly rose to become head of the reading department, responsible for reviewing and revitalizing scripts. Born into a family of successful writers – her father was a newspaper editor in Santa Barbara, and her brother was a Los Angeles reporter who became Publicity Director for Fox West Coast Studios (1920) and later head of its scenario department (1930) – Yost benefited early on from the family’s West Coast connections.
She first gained attention as an author in her own right on Fox’s
Kentucky Pride (1925), a successful racehorse drama directed by John Ford, based on her original story. Like Anna Sewell’s 1877  novel Black Beauty, the film’s story is told from the point of view of a horse. The equine protagonist Virginia’s Future not only relates the story (a monologue via intertitles) to other horses, and Kentuckians (humans and horses), but ultimately to the film’s audience.
Right from the start Virginia’s Future tells us, “With Us Kentuckians pride of race is everything!” This message of common “pride,” a trait shared by humans and animals, prevails throughout the narrative. Dignity, both human and animal, is continually put to the test, and expressed almost exclusively in the image of the horse’s physicality and through its monologue of memories.
The story is a drama about a yearling who fails to fulfill the promise of her prize-winning bloodline. At her first race, she is not the favorite, but comes from behind the pack to take the lead, then accidentally falls at the finish line and breaks her leg. The loss means the ruin of her master Mr. Beaumont and her own potential demise. Beaumont, played sheepishly by Henry B. Walthall, loses his fortune and abandons his daughter Virginia, the namesake whose future the horse was to guarantee. His second wife (Gertrude Astor) is given the estate, which she shares with their neighbor Greve Carter, her lover. The tragedy and burden of failure which Virginia’s Future and Mr. Beaumont share joins as well as separates them. We literally see this throughout the film, in close shots of Walthall’s nonplussed facial expressions juxtaposed with similar shots of the horse returning his look, making the storyline’s link between humans and animals immediately apparent. Mrs. Beaumont orders the horse to be put “out of her misery.” Beaumont, however, simply disappears in disgrace. Fortunately for the animal, Irish horse trainer Mike Donovan (J. Farrell MacDonald) disobeys the order; this act of resistance will ultimately save Beaumont as well.
Yost liked female characters who sacrificed their personal desires to be faithful and devoted companions or wives to selfish men, a melodramatic schema also seen in the 1927 film
Mother, which Yost adapted to the screen from the novel by Kathleen Norris. Kentucky Pride’s themes of cross-species (in)difference, and its moralizing messages of love, honor, duty, and self-sacrifice, are also similar to those in a 1937 novel by Yost, Prodigal Lover. While Yost is credited with the story of Kentucky Pride, its intertitles were written by Elizabeth Pickett, a director and screenwriter who was also the film’s supervising editor.
When interviewed the following year by the
Los Angeles Times (24.10.1926), Yost advocated for original stories over screen adaptations, claiming that in the future they would be “the most logical and – highly important – most lucrative” for producers. Writing about the film in a special John Ford section of the online FIPRESCI journal Undercurrent in May 2009, the Japanese scholar and critic Shigehiko Hasumi maintains the script was predetermined by the studio, and that Ford’s affection for the horse guided the story. Whatever the significance of Ford’s love of horses (watch for appearances by a trio of famous racehorses in the film: the legendary Man o’War, his sire Fair Play, and The Finn), or that of Ford’s later comment about lack of creative control at Fox (he told Peter Bogdanovich in the 1960s, “You didn’t choose these things – they were thrown at you and you did the best you could with them”), the film’s message is problematic.
Modern viewers may see what Jan Cronin calls “Fordian ambivalence” as nothing less than a political statement about humanity in general, whereas the emphasis on familial love may be a mark of Yost’s pen. In an unpublished paper ca. 1958 (“Contributions of the Yost Family to American Literature”), her niece Sally Pritchard described Yost as someone who “always thought of the screen as a means of exerting a good influence on the public.” Yost and Ford surely had a “definite motive” behind their respective creative contributions. In a December 1926 article in the
Los Angeles Times (“Script Writer Holds Motive Success Basis”), Yost claimed that without it, no screen story could ultimately claim success.
Kentucky Pride can be uncomfortable to watch at times. For today’s viewers the omnipresent references to the Confederacy and the legacy of slavery (most visible in scenes of the horse bearing heavy loads, and unnamed characters like butlers, junk dealers, and stable hands played by African Americans and East European immigrants) are disturbing. These visual reminders, and intertitles referencing vernacular expressions and expressing the virtues of family, breed, and superior lineage, serve as very unsubtle reminders of Hollywood’s controversial historical relationship with white supremacy. – Kim Tomadjoglou

KENTUCKY PRIDE (US 1925)
(Galoppo di gloria)
 

regia/dir: John Ford.
sogg./story: Dorothy Yost.
did./titles, mont./supvr. ed: Elizabeth Pickett.
photog: George Schneiderman, Edmund Reek.
asst. dir: Edward O’Fearna.
cast: “Us Horses”: Virginia’s Future (Myself) [narrator], Negofol (My Father), Morvich (My Husband), Confederacy (My Daughter), Man O’War, Fair Play, The Finn (My Friends); “Those Creatures Called Humans”: Henry B. Walthall (Roger Beaumont), Gertrude Astor (His Wife), Peaches Jackson (His Daughter [Virginia]), J. Farrell MacDonald (Mike Donovan), Belle Stoddard (His Wife [Maggie]), Winston Miller (His Son [Mike, Jr.]), Malcolm Waite (Greve Carter), George [H.] Reed (Butler).
prod, dist: Fox Film Corp.
copyright 02.07.1925.
première: 06.08.1925 (Charleston, West Virginia).
copia/copy: DCP, 71′ (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., orig. l: 6597 ft., 22 fps, b&w e/and imbibito/tinted); did./titles: ENG.
fonte/source: The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Restauro digitale/Digital restoration: Cineric; con fondi della/funded by Twentieth-Century Fox. Un speciale ringraziamento a/Special thanks to Dave Kehr, MoMA.

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