The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent).

A sordid spectacle of hard times, a kind of existentialist allegory of life.

The acting is strident and overblown, the narrative technique gimmicky and obvious, and the implication that the competitors' situation is a microcosm of a wider-reaching American malaise rather pretentious.

In They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, agony, pain, endurance are not in the bodies of the actors nor somehow mysteriously evoked by their images. Instead, they remain locked in the camera, mechanical, the product not of human knowledge but of technology.