‘The Longshot’ a Unique Offering for Movie Fans

You might know that comedic actor Tim Conway is a horse racing fan and owner. What you might not know is that he’s also the writer and star of one of the strangest and funniest horse racing movies ever made, the 1986 comedy “The Longshot”.
The first caveat I should give here is that chances are you will not think “The Longshot” is funny nor will you like it. I recently watched it for the first time and I loved it, but I’m pretty sure that what I loved about it was less its qualities as a film and more what a bizarre train wreck the whole thing was. Just as I love nothing more than watching an uncomfortable best man speech or a comedian bomb on stage, I loved “The Longshot”.
The movie had a number of heavy hitters behind it. It was executive produced by Mike Nichols of “The Graduate” fame. Nichols is a horse enthusiast himself, having been a top breeder of Arabian horses for many years.
The cast included Jack Weston, Jonathan Winters and Ted Wass (aka, the dad from Blossom). The cinematographer, Robby Muller, went on to make waves working with auteurs like Jim Jarmusch. None of these folks would add any sophistication to this movie. It’s mostly slapstick and broad humor. Lots of scenes of people falling down, getting thrown around, getting hit in the balls, making out with animals, and talking and worrying about toilets and everything associated with them.

The film follows a group of friends who are terrible, luckless gamblers as they discover a plot to fix a horse race (“Let it Ride,” anyone?) and decide to raise the funds to get in on the action.
Their efforts to raise the money take them on a series of misadventures until they finally settle on borrowing the cash from the mob. When the horse doesn’t win, they are stuck to the mob for the money and have to find a way out.
I wanted to give up on the movie early into it. It’s a very dated film. It feels like it could have been made in 1976, not 1986. It’s cheap and cheesy. A lot of the extras’ dialogue is dubbed over and the B-roll of scenes at the track are monotonous and repetitive. And, as I mentioned, the jokes are awful.
But a couple of scenes are so weird they border on wonderful.
There’s a great scene where the guys are having dinner with some mobsters and one of them keeps futzing with the table legs to get it to balance. It makes no sense and almost feels like something out of “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job”.
Another scene has the guys grilling food on an open grill while inside their car. It’s a completely stupid and absurd choice that seemed like it could have been a Monty Python sketch.
Those two weird scenes weren’t enough on their own to save the movie, though. What really put “The Longshot” in the cannon of classic horse racing movies for me was the incredible theme song. The opening credits are set to a rap about horse racing that is a duet between Tim Conway affecting a strange southern accent and none other than the one and only Ice T. That’s right; the man behind Dorf raps alongside of the man behind “O.G. Original Gangsta” and “Cop Killer” lyrics like “I tell you this horse is gonna win by five / I tell you that’s a lot of jive!”
The song is surreal and weird and wonderful and luckily is available on YouTube so you don’t have to actually watch the movie to hear it.
UNFORGETTABLE OPENING SONG

Tim Conway says he wrote the script for “The Longshot” in a single day. He shared the script with Mike Nichols on a lark, and Nichols agreed to come on board to produce. He had just finished directing the Oscar-nominated “Silkwood” and would work on “The Longshot” dailies while he was on location directing Meryl Streep in the movie “Heartburn”.
“I was drawn to the human part of the story more than the equine part,” Nichols told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s very, very funny, and it’s also very serious. It’s about little guys who rarely have a chance at anything. … There are very few pictures now about real working guys, and Tim somehow plugged into that thing we all loved so much about ‘The Honeymooners’. "
Tim Conway dismissed any notion that he was making a serious film.
“I guess you can read as much into this as you want. I was just writing a funny story.”
The critics chose not to read too deeply into the film. It was pretty universally panned.
If you’re a fan of horseracing you may still enjoy “The Longshot” for its scenes shot on location at the now-defunct Hollywood Park, or for some racing dialogue that was written by a real horseplayer. If you’re a fan of sophisticated comedy you may want to stay away. If, like me, you’re a fan of people getting racked between the legs, pratfalls, and bad 1980s rapping, you’ll love “The Longshot”.