Putting Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy back together after Pretty in Pink was either a calculated risk or a spectacular misreading of the room, and I still can’t tell which.
By ’88, both of them were looking for a way out from under the Brat Pack umbrella, and in fairness, so was everyone else who’d been named in that New York Magazine piece three years earlier. McCarthy had already done more dramatic fare with Less Than Zero and Kansas, while Ringwald was trying to get out of High School roles, but none of it shook the label loose.
And having them star together again this close to Pretty in Pink probably didn’t help.
It only earned 6.6 million against a fourteen million dollar budget, and Weintraub Entertainment, the production company, went under not long after. If the audience expected Blane and Andie, they probably felt like they got something bland and arty. And Ringwald is genuinely cast against type here.
Jewel is a girl from the Kentucky backwoods, married off young to an abusive husband played by a very early Viggo Mortensen. She may also be underage. We’re a long way from the pink prom dress optimism. This movie goes from grey to greyer.
Ben Stiller had his big-screen breakout here as McCarthy’s best friend Tipton. Stiller would go from this to SNL to MTV to directing Reality Bites, and by the mid-90s he was essentially Hollywood’s go-to Gen X commentator. But here he’s just a twenty-two year old casually telling his buddy that girls are replaceable. He plays that guy.
He implies to McCarthy that he should drop the old nag and get himself a fresh horse, meaning Jewel. Move on. Swap her out. Title of the movie moment.
Every man in Jewel’s story is treating her like exactly that. Mortensen’s character has her on a leash, McCarthy’s character picks her up because she’s interesting and puts her down when it gets complicated, and Stiller’s character tells him to cut his losses. And no one was asking what Jewel wanted, naturally
And maybe not-so ironically, Ringwald herself was living some semblance of this around this time.
She’d been the face of a generation at sixteen, and by twenty, the industry was already looking for the next big thing. A fresh face.
And the Brat Pack label absolutely made it easier to dismiss that group of young actors, they were just a fad, a silly thing that happened.
-Pop
Fresh Horses arrived on Home Video this week in 1989, after a November 18th, 1988 theatrical release.