My Brother Talks to Horses *** (1947, Jackie ‘Butch’ Jenkins, Peter Lawford, Beverly Tyler) – Classic Movie Review 11,263

MGM’s 1946 junior-league Damon Runyon-style fantasy comedy My Brother Talks to Horses about a psychic boy called Lewie Penrose (buck-toothed Jackie ‘Butch’ Jenkins, aged nine), who provides dead certs for racehorse gamblers, would have been best taken at a gallop.

As it is, director Fred Zinnemann’s gentle trot through Morton Thomson’s novel Joe the Wounded Tennis Player is an outsider, but it is amusing enough.

Peter Lawford and Beverly Tyler are at a loss as the kid’s older brother and his girlfriend, but Charles Ruggles as gambler Richard Pennington Roeder, Edward Arnold as horse owner Mr Bledsoe, O Z Whitehead as inventor Mr Puddy and especially Spring Byington as the boy’s mother keep it going.

The appealing freckle-faced Jenkins retired aged 11 when he developed a nervous stutter that never left him. What also never left him were his childhood earnings, which were well invested for him by his family, leaving him independently wealthy. He supervised the East Texas Water System and ran a car wash chain. He died in his sleep on 14 August 2001, aged 63. He recalled in 1970: ‘I have never regretted leaving the picture business and am very grateful to my mother for taking me away from it.’

It is Zinnemann’s fifth solo feature and second film with Jenkins, immediately after Little Mister Jim (1946).

Also in the cast are Irving Bacon, Paul Langton, Ernest Whitman, Lillian Yarbo, Howard Freeman and Harry Hayden.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,263

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