Saturday, April 15 at 2:00 PM — Music Box Theatre — 3733 N. Southport Ave
Tickets: $12 at the door, or purchase in advance
KENTUCKY PRIDE
With live musical accompaniment by Jay Warren
Directed by John Ford • 1925
You think you’ve seen everything, and then you see a silent film narrated by a horse. Following his ostentatious historical epic The Iron Horse (not narrated by a horse, title aside), up-and-coming director John Ford shifted hoofs and made this small-scale, interspecies family saga laid in the pastures of the Bluegrass State. Kentucky Pride follows the life and times of Virginia’s Future, a thoroughbred filly named for the daughter of her first owner, a Southern gentleman (Henry B. Walthall) whose gambling habit continually threatens said future. Following a racetrack accident, Virginia’s Future gets shuffled between a succession of owners: a kindly Irish trainer (Ford regular J. Farrell MacDonald), a farmer, and a cadre of urban junkmen. Offhandedly inventing a sturdy four-legged narrative structure later adopted by Au hasard Balthazar and EO, Kentucky Pride is a sentimental movie with a radically empathetic heart, one that makes a straightforwardly convincing case for equine consciousness and equality. (In the opening credits, “Us Horses” are billed first, including a cameo from real-life champion Man O’ War.) Take it from the horse’s mouth: Ford’s biographer Joseph McBride has championed this film, observing that the “deftness of his craftsmanship in Kentucky Pride — the kind of art that conceals art — keeps this unknown gem fresh and exuberant today.” Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. (KW)
78 min • Fox Film Corp • 35mm from the Museum of Modern Art
NEXT UP: Working Girls on Wednesday, April 19 at NEIU