Friday 20th January

As well as being a pop-song, (which was quite unlike a pop song – and a one hit wonder for some band I forget the name of – they were that memorable), this was also a film.  A wonderful film too, from that Golden Age of Cinema 1969.  It was made by Sydney Pollack and starred Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin.  It was a story of a killing, but more a mercy killing than one in any sort of anger. The two characters were drifters in 1930’s America who happened to enter a Marathon dance competition.  This was a particular sort of evil, thrown up by the desperation of the depression.  People would go to dance halls to watch couples dance and dance until there was only one couple standing.  A sort of exhaustive Britains got Talent of yesteryear.  Every so often a new twist would be added, such as having the exhausted couples race around the dance hall and the last couple getting eliminated.  These desperate kids and actually some older couples too, were so hard-up they would spend weeks getting nothing but their food and drink just to try to win a few bucks.

Our hero and heroine were not together at first but found themselves each without a partner and out of desperation became a new couple and were allowed to continue.

And Jane Fonda was magnificent in this, her self-loathing and misery on display for all to see. Michael as the bewildered and disillusioned kid is brilliant too.

I cannot quite remember how it ends, except that he shoots her – I think she asks him to too.  They lose the prize and both realise they have absolutely no future.  When he is apprehended and asked why he did it he replies “They shoot horses, don’t they?”

It made a big impression on me when I saw it in the late seventies on BBC2.  It is the kind of film they should show again and again so that the kids of today can learn from it, but like so many classics of only 40 years ago, they aren’t shown at all nowadays.  Thank heavens for DVDs.