International Velveeta

I was coming up against the day when the movies that I recorded as part of Christopher Plummer's day in Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 were about to expire, so I made the point of watching International Velvet. It's another of those movies that was released when I was a kid so remember hearing about the title but not knowing a whole lot about it; I would have been much too young to know about the original National Velvet from 1944 as well.

This is, as you could probably figure out from the title, a sequel to National Velvet, albeit set quite a few years later. Velvet Brown, all grown up and played by Nanette Newman (wife of the film's director, Bryan Forbes), is living in Devonshire together with her boyfriend but not husband, writer John Seaton (Christopher Plummer). Velvet is walking along the coast, talking about how, eight years earlier, her life changed when her niece Sarah (Tatum O'Neal) came into her life. It seems that Velvet's brother moved his family to America when Sarah was just an infant, and then Mom and Dad up and died in a car crash, leaving poor Sarah alone with no family in the US. So that's why Sarah is coming to live with her aunt and not-officially-an-uncle, although we'll call him uncle because it makes things easier to follow.

In any case, with all that upheaval in Sarah's life, losing her parents and being stripped from her friends, it's easy to see why she spends the first act of the movie being horrendously sullen and trying to run away on multiple occasions. The second time, she rides off on Pie, who was Velvet's horse that she rode to win the Grand National back in the original movie. Sarah's riding Pie as part of an attempted getaway really pisses Sarah off until she realizes that perhaps she can use horsemanship to try to get closer to Sarah. Pie has reached retirement age and gets a special ceremony for it before his last foal is born. (It's been ages since I've seen the original National Velvet but some reviewers say that the original Pie was a gelding. Good luck getting any foals out of a gelding!)

And Sarah wants that foal, dammit, even though she doesn't have the money for it. So she does odd jobs for Uncle John, at least until Velvet decides to buy the foal which is another thing that helps bring aunt and niece closer together. Sarah enjoys riding, and eventually becomes good enough at it to be entered into a local show-jumping competition. She doesn't win, but her performance brings her to the attention of Captain Johnson (Anthony Hopkins), who won an Olympic medal back in 1968 and is one of the selectors for the British equestrian team for the Olympics. He's a very tough taskmaster, but ultimately fair.

Sarah is good too, although there are multiple good riders so that Sarah's first international experience is only as an alternate. It's also a harrowing experience, as one of the horses doesn't take well to international travel. Sarah gets good enough to qualify for the next Olympics, and the final act of the movie deals with the Olympic three-day equestrian competition, which requires horse and rider to engage in three different aspects of riding: dressage, cross-country steeplechase, and show jumping.

Once again it's easy to see why someone somewhere along the way would want to take a property like National Velvet and write a story about what happened to Velvet when she grew up. However, the story we ultimately get is one that's full of plot holes (although to be fair, since the climactic Olympics are the Moscow games set a year and a half after the movie's release, there's no why Bryan Forbes could have known about the boycott). The story is also mawkish and slow at 127 minutes, with Tatum O'Neal giving a particularly poor performance. And it doesn't help that the print TCM ran is in such soft focus that you wonder whether they got a blurry print.

Maybe fans of the equestrian scene might like this one, but as for me I'm glad I checked this one off my list of movies to watch and don't have to revisit it.