The book was written by Enid Bagnold in 1935 and filmed in 1944 only nine years later (just proving I can do the maths), MGM billed it as a ‘heart drama’. There are many differences between the book and film as there almost always are and I can tell you some of the reasons but not others.

The book is about 250 pages and if you were to transfer it directly from print to film I believe it works out at roughly one minute per page which makes a four hour movie, a bladder buster in most people’s language. MGM got it down to 123 minutes making it much easier to view, but in order to do that things get lost and other things get rewritten to accommodate the loss. So instead of taking the relationships between the family members and building it up slowly you’ve got to show them much faster in short snippets.

The story is much the same. Velvet Brown is horse mad and just wants to ride, she ends up winning a horse in a raffle and from there rides him in the Grand National horse race.

Some of the changes.

Mi Taylor (played by Mickey Rooney) is not a trusted staff member but comes along at the beginning of the movie. He has a different agenda and wants to get as much out of people as he can, even to the point of planning to steal everything he can from the Browns, this changes as he gets to know them and finds Velvet trusts him implicitly.

In the book everyone knows from very early on that Mi Taylor’s father coached Mrs Brown across the Channel, but in the book this is left as a cliff hanger for Mi and he’s not told until the very last moments and even then we only see the very beginning of the discussion from afar and can’t even hear Velvet tell him.

In the book Mrs Araminty Brown is a solid woman with a good solid body and it’s quite easy to imagine her being able to swim the Channel in her youth. Anne Revere does an excellent job as Mrs Brown and everything about her is right except she’s far too thin, she’s just not solid enough. It’s just like the Poirot movies on TV, David Suchet looks the part but there were a short series of movies made in the 1980s with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot and he has the part down pat, it’s just a pity he looks wrong.

The change I find the most interesting is what they did with Velvet Brown and Mi Taylor. The dynamics were mostly right but in the book Velvet just wanted the horse to run and do his best while Mi had all the ideas and did all the work with getting everyone to the Grand National, finding a Polish jockey who wouldn’t be riding and ‘borrowing’ his papers so Velvet would be able to take his place, while the movie shows it to be mostly Velvet’s ideas with Velvet rejecting the jockey due to his lack of ideals and then persuading Mi to help her by cutting her hair and walking her through all the procedures. Basically they’ve made Velvet be much more forthright and far less wishy washy than the book, she’s far less of a dreamer and much more of a doer.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally enjoyed both book and film. I loved seeing Elizabeth Taylor in her first big role and I always enjoy seeing Mickey Rooney, he’s such a good actor. It was great to get a different picture of a life totally different to mine. Angela Lansbury played Velvet’s older sister and it was lovely seeing her in her youth, she hasn’t changed all that much. I could rave on forever about the different actors but I won’t, I’ll let you go.