Wednesday September 21, 2022; 10:05 PM EDT
- In a 1944 review of National Velvet, a film that helped make Elizabeth Taylor's career, James Agee talks about the good film's great missed opportunity. For a young person like the one Taylor played to have a chance in a big national horse race, she'd have to undergo substantial training--being a kind of natural rider wouldn't be enough, Agee hints. Then he sketches a progression that might be the model for the best kind of explosive learning for a young person, sadly not what everyone experiences, though. (Full text after a free registration.)#
- He writes:#
- The sequence during which the horse is trained for his race gives you little more than generalized pretty-pictures instead of a précis of the pure technical detail which must have deeply excited, instructed, and intensified the girl, and should have done the same for the audience.#
- Those three words are on target, aren't they? The training of horse and young rider would have caught the girl's imagination, would have excited her as she began to see over a new horizon in her life as a rider. She would have been instructed, would have accepted instruction and come to treasure it as its value became clearer and clearer. And the power of knowledge and skill would grow in her and in the two of them, horse and rider, and her own love for the horse and passion for their daring endeavor would have grown.#
- Excitement over a real challenge, a real thing to know and love; instruction that deepens the world for the young person; and in deepening the world that instruction intensifies the character of the young person. It's a little theory of learning, of growing up, of becoming a person of substance.#