Kentucky (film)


Kentucky is a 1938 Technicolor film with Loretta Young, Richard Greene, and Walter Brennan. It was directed by David Butler. It is a Romeo and Juliet story of lovers Jack and Sally, set amidst Kentucky horseracing, in which a family feud goes back to the Civil War and is kept alive by Sally's Uncle Peter.

Plot

During the Civil War, Thad Goodwin, Sr., of Elmtree Farm, a local horse breeder resists Capt. John Dillon and a company of Union soldiers confiscating his prize horses. He is killed by Dillon and his youngest son Peter cries at the soldiers riding away with the horses.
75 years later, in 1938, Peter now a crotchety old man, still resides on Elmtree Farm and raises horses with his niece Sally. Dillon's grandson Jack and Sally meet, her not knowing that he was a Dillon. Sally's father Thad Goodwin, Jr., dies when his speculation on cotton drops. The Goodwins are forced to auction off nearly all their horses and Jack offers his services to Sally, as a trainer of their last prize horse, "Bessie's Boy", who is later injured.
Sally eventually loses the farm, and Mr. Dillon makes good on his original bet with Thad Jr. and offers her any two-year-old on his farm. She picks "Blue Grass" instead of the favorite, "Postman", and Jack trains him for the Derby. She eventually learns of Jack's real identity and fires him as trainer. During the race, Blue Grass runs neck and neck with the Dillon's horse Postman, but Blue Grass wins thanks to Jack's advice. Sally embraces Jack, but Peter collapses before the decoration ceremony and dies. At his funeral, Dillon eulogizes him and of the American life of the past, as "The Grand Old Man of the American Turf".

Cast