Tanbark and Turf (1955)
** (out of 4)
Peter Roberts narrates this Sportscope short from RKO, which tries to explain how horses are bred so that they can be turned into harness racers. That's pretty much the entire "story" to this documentary and if you've seen any of these shorts from RKO then you know that there are more hits than misses. As is normally the case with the Sportscope series, this one deals with a somewhat interesting story but sadly the movie doesn't do anything with it. I'm never quite sure what these films are trying to do because they often just ramble on about the subject without knowing what they're trying to say. Countless studios released shorts like this one and the best of them (Passing Parade, Pete Smith Specialty) knew what story they wanted to tell and they did it. This one here clearly wants to explain harness racers but the way they go about it is just downright boring, uninteresting and in the end everything they're saying just gets lumped together.