December 14, 1944: “National Velvet” Premieres

December 14, 1944: National Velvet premieres, based on the 1935 novel by Enid Bagnold. It stars a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney. Each of them would end up getting married 8 times – but never to each other.

Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a 12-year-old horse-crazy girl, who lives with her family in Sewels, a village in Sussex, in the South of England. She wins a gelding in a raffle, naming him "The Pie." In the book, the horse is a piebald, and thus is given the name "The Piebald" or "The Pie" for short. In the movie, Pie is a chestnut, and his previous owner had called him "The Pirate," and "The Pie" is short for that.

Velvet dreams of training him for the Grand National, a steeplechase race held annually at Aintree Racecourse in Aintree, outside Liverpool. Founded in 1839, it runs 4 miles and 2½ furlongs,  with horses jumping 30 fences over two laps.

Rooney plays Michael "Mi" Taylor, a disillusioned jockey, helps her train The Pie. Famously only 5-foot-2, Rooney had previously played jockeys, traditionally a sport for short and slight men (and would play another on an episode of The Twilight Zone). But, when fully grown, Taylor was also just 5-foot-2, and it is Velvet who rides The Pie.

This being old Hollywood, of course, Velvet and The Pie win the race. But an exhausted Velvet falls off her mount just after the finish. Thus, they are disqualified, for violating the rule requiring the winning jockey not to dismount before reaching the enclosure.

When the English media finds out that there's a 12-year-old girl as one of the race's jockeys, she becomes a sensation. But she turns down all offers of fame and fortune, because it would require The Pie to go with her, and she thinks he wouldn't understand, and would be traumatized.

The film was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, winning 2, including Best Supporting Actress for Anne Revere as Araminty Brown, Velvet's mother. Angela Lansbury, Arthur Treacher and Reginald Owen were also in the film.

From 1960 to 1962, NBC ran a TV series version of National Velvet, starring Lori Martin. In 1978, there was a sequel, International Velvet. Velvet's brother Donald, played by Jackie Jenkins in the original, had gotten married, and moved to Arizona, where he had a daughter named Sarah Velvet Brown, named for his sister. But Donald and his wife are killed in a car crash, and Sarah, played by Tatum O'Neal, goes to England to live with her aunt Velvet, played here by Nanette Newman.

The sequel fudges the original story: In all previous versions, The Pie was a gelding, unable to father children; but in this version, he is retired to stud, and his last colt is born right after Sarah's arrival. She names him Arizona Pie. She trains him, and rides him in the Olympics, winning a Gold Medal for Great Britain, then marrying an American medalist.

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December 14, 1944 was a Thursday. Russian painted Vassily Kandinsky died on this day. It was also the day that actress Lupe Vélez committed suicide. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game in the NHL: The Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a tie, 2-2 at the Montreal Forum.