The allegory/metaphor/microcosm is just a tad overplayed for me, but really compelling watching. And of course this stuff existed during the Depression.
Gig Young [is] the master of ceremonies. “Yowzza! Yowzza!” he chants, and all the while he regards the contestants with the peculiarly disinterested curiosity of an exhausted god.[…]
Horses provides us no cheap release at the end; and the ending, precisely because it is so obvious, is all the more effective. We knew it was coming. Even the title gave it away. And when it comes, it is effective not because it is a surprise but because it is inevitable.
Both the novel and the film—not only through certain "signals" in the dialogue, but by their structure and by the very force of the material itself—invite us to take the marathon and its story as something beyond itself, as an allegory, or a metaphor, standing, if not for life itself, than for certain large aspects of experience. Yet the marathon is a metaphor almost a priori—one of those natural, organic metaphors which seem obvious when you see them but which take a certain brilliance to "discover" (and much greater brilliance to utilize well artistically), and which have enormous potential—because they grow out of the common core of our experience.[…]
One index of Hollywood's increasing sophistication over the years is the changes in its villains-away from the man who commits evil simply because he likes to, or because that's his function, toward more contradictory and human characters. The character of Rocky, the master of ceremonies, totally corrupt yet totally without malice, helps make evil interesting again.
— Paul Warshow (Film Quarterly)
Synopsis: In the midst of the Great Depression, manipulative emcee Rocky enlists contestants for a dance marathon offering a $1,500 cash prize. Among them are a failed actress, a middle-aged sailor, a delusional blonde and a pregnant girl.