NATIONAL VELVEL (1944)

As long as young hearts endure, so will NATIONAL VELVET and movies like it. In her starmaking role, Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a wide-eyed adolescent who, assisted by her jockey pal (Mickey Rooney), trains Pie, a horse she won in a raffle, for the Grand National Steeplechase. Of course, no girl can ride in the National, can she? Yet Velvet, posing as a boy, assuredly does. Superbly directed by Clarence Brown, this exciting winner of two Academy Awards (one to Anne Revere as Velvet's mother) co-stars a young Angela Lansbury and veteran Donald Crisp. Plus the film has an off-screen postscript as winning as the onscreen finale: the studio gave Pie to Taylor after filming wrapped.