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The first pairing of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland finds the pair playing second fiddle to a waifish British male youth. No, not Freddie Bartholomew, who seems tailor-made for the lead role and was mysteriously dropped, but Ronald Sinclair, a carbon-copy of Bartholomew. Sinclair’s lacking in charisma and on-camera naturalism, too mannered and too artificial without the personality to pull it off, and he’s overrun by Rooney, Garland, Sophie Tucker, and C. Aubrey Smith.
Yet I still found myself engaged with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. It’s a minor film, but one filled with heart and charm in direct proportion to its narrative thinness. Sinclair is a proper English boy who travels to America with his grandfather (Smith) and racehorse searching for a jockey (Rooney, all cocky swagger and heart of gold), meet a boarding house owner (Tucker) and her young niece (Garland, precocious and engaging), and encounter several obstacles before the big climatic race. Will Sinclair’s thoroughbred win the derby? Of course, but it’s more fun to watch this earliest glimpse of the peculiar chemistry between Mickey and Judy in embryonic form.
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry gives Rooney a plum early role as the jockey that finds his ambitions in direct conflict with his abusive, absent father’s machinations. I don’t know what it is exactly about Rooney as a jockey, but it’s an archetype that Rooney always exceled at in films as varied as National Velvet and The Black Stallion. His verbal sparring with Garland is a delight as their kids-next-door looks and vulnerabilities immediately mesh well together. Their give-and-take would blossom in their further films, but they’re already demonstrating an innate comfort and language with each other here that’s primed for further exploration. If there’s any reason to invest the time in watching this sweet little movie, it’s in the beginning of the Mickey and Judy on-screen pairing. That’s reason enough.
