Film · 1969 · Films · 1960s
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Scored from 104 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
In the Depression, couples enter a dance marathon in a ballroom on the Santa Monica pier: keep moving for weeks, ten minutes' rest every two hours, and the last pair standing takes fifteen hundred dollars. Gloria Beatty, broke and caustic, is thrown together with Robert Syverton, a drifter who wandered in off the pier, and they compete alongside an aging sailor, a pregnant farm wife and an actress hoping a producer will notice her. The emcee Rocky works the paying crowd and the exhausted contestants alike, staging elimination derbies to keep the seats full. Sydney Pollack's American drama, adapted from Horace McCoy's 1935 novel, is intercut with brief flash-forwards away from the hall.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a 1969 drama film. It runs 2h 9m and carries a PG certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 104 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 113 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where They Shoot Horses, Don't They? lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 104.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
