Kentucky (1938)

There's a lot I don't understand about this ridiculous movie. In the first place, it's called Kentucky as if it's an old-school western film like In Old Arizona or something. But this isn't an old western - despite it opening with a shot of a weird map of the North American continent that doesn't have the United States carved out – only the state of Kentucky.

Then this movie begins in 1861 – Kentucky secedes from the Union, but a really terrible Union soldier steals a bunch of horses from a racing stable and kills a man. It's war, but it's awfully stupid. They're racehorses, so it's not like they can really help in the Civil War. Either way, the entire point of this sequence is to set up a family feud, but it's done so by making the Confederacy the good guys and the Union the evil, horse-thieving murderers.

Then all of a sudden it's 1938? Weirdly we jump ahead three-quarters of a century and now this movie is about the same two feuding families except of course the young man from one family and the young woman from the other are going to fall in love. This is now a horseracing melodrama set in 1938. And if you didn't believe Rebecca Schneider when she told us in Performing Remains that the Civil War is still happening, this movie is here to tell you that Rebecca Schneider was correct.

This is a bunch of Old South nonsense dressed up as melodrama. Two more gripes: first, there is only one horserace in this entire film – it takes place in the movie's final 15 minutes. Even the apparently very exciting race that takes place before the final Kentucky Derby race is narrated by an announcer as our main characters don't even watch the race. They're in the saloon, betting on their horse, and they listen to the race instead of enjoying it. We listen too. My second gripe is that Walter Brennan just yells through this whole movie. And he won an acting Oscar for all of this yelling. It's absurd. He's terrible in this movie. Kentucky is a melodrama, sure, and he's an old crotchety grandad in it (despite being in his early forties when they filmed it), but he just yells the whole time. It's so obnoxious. (Apparently, Brennan won because extras were allowed to vote back in the 1930s, and he was very popular with that contingent, since he worked as an extra for so many year.) 

Either way, this movie is dumb.