I watched the first 20 minutes of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? at Gustave’s house, months ago, but didn’t get around to watching it in its entirety until last week, and it’s worth the revisiting.I like stories in which an activity usually considered a pleasant several-hour diversion is turned into a dystopian contest or battle — The Long Walk, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy — and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? fits right into that genre, following the fates of various entrants of a Depression dance contest in which the last couple standing wins $1,500.

The narrative has a handful of glitches (it’s careful to lay out the contest rules, but then violates them time-wise repeatedly in the last third of the movie; several scenes pay more attention to stylization than to pacing, leaving the actors nowhere to go), but altogether it’s well built, driving forward to conclusions both expected and not.The opening sequence, in which the audience is shown a literal horse getting shot, could have foretold two hours of thudding symbolism, but director Sydney Pollack then inverts the “flashbacks” and puts a twist on them.

And while at first I couldn’t reconcile Jane Fonda’s performance with what becomes of her character, the more I think about it, the better it works for me.Again, it’s a bit more stylized than I usually prefer, but the movie came out at a time when I think both writing and acting had started to move to a more naturalistic, less stagey presentation, and you can sort of see that transition at work here.I’ve said before that I often find Fonda difficult to take, but sometimes she’s just the thing, and here, she’s a pitch-perfect combination of angry and brittle.And her hair is amazing — that curly, just-fluffy-enough marcelled bob, a little rumply from exertion?Want!Can never have; have wrong type of hair!

Gig Young, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as the emcee, is also fantastic; he plays the character’s grinding cynicism and irritability so easily that I didn’t think until afterwards how hard it must have been not to keep it out of caricature territory.The “casting couch” scene is just one example of the guy knowing what he’s become, knowing he should care, and then allowing himself to feel resigned, and the tightly controlled flicker of utter self-loathing Young allows to cross his face from time to time is just great work.It feels like a documentary at those moments.(And based on what I read about Young’s rather baroque decline and fall, it may in fact have been a documentary, if an inadvertent one.Too drunk to record his lines on…Charlie’s Angels?That is drunk, my friends.)

I get the sense that this movie used to rate much higher for people than it does now — that it’s become more minor.That’s too bad; it’s two hours well spent.

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