And it’s a lot easier to swap out a couple of chestnut horses that have different abilities than it would be to swap out a couple piebalds.
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“Not historically accurate” as some would say. 
I love it when fans tear into canon and lore. And the deviations from such. 
Thanks posters for the clarifications of what TC was won by The Black, and how The Pie was able to enter the Grand National.
I could never figure out how a found pinto (from my pov) was able to get into a race like the Grand National. Now I know! 
(Somehow I always pictured The Pie as an actual parti-colored piebald such as is seen at the local rodeo arena on Saturday nights.)
So … do I remember rightly that The Black and The Pie (both named after their color) never had even one prep race before their great triumph race that stunned the world? For both, that was their first start in an actual race? I love fiction !!! 
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Books and movies are two different things, one can do what the other cannot. You can enjoy each in their different, separate ways.
I read the book National Velvet as a child, and liked it, but I saw the movie National Velvet also as a child, and loved it.
As an adult I continue to love it. I was that little girl, cantering to school, and jumping peoples’ hedges on the way, collecting horse statues and playing with them, rather than dolls, and running out to pet the milkman’s horse and give him piece of carrot or apple. And sniffing the warm smell of horse on my hand for the rest of the day, and wanting nothing more in my life than a horse.
Is it real? Could it have happened? Same with the Black Stallion, could that ever have happened? A kid with no training, on a horse with, uncertain breeding, no training, winning a race like the Grand National, when neither had ever competed?
The phrase always is Willing Suspension of Disbelief, As in reading and watching Shakespeare.
It just doesn’t matter. The point of both the book and the film, IMO, is LOVE, love for something other than oneself, courage, determination and family… and very much about the strength and and power of girls and women, in a world that always relegated us to the back seat. Velvet’s mum, swimming the English Channel , and Velvet herself.
It was in my opinion, a perfect movie, perfectly cast.
The 12 yr old Elizabeth Taylor, whose steely determination belied her fragile beauty, Donald Crisp, Micky Rooney…Anne Revere… Angela Landsbury!! Made in 1944, it was a wartime movie, and was wartime propaganda, (not in a negative way) the pristine English villlage, peopled by kind and loving folks… a world threatened at that moment by devastation, and brave people standing up and fighting back… keeping on… against improbable, impossible odds, keeping going, staying strong… That’s the message.
That scene, when Velvet’s father wants to send Pie to America to make money… and Velvet refuses, not wanting him to be something for people to stare at, saying when I asked him he burst his heart for me, and when I asked him again, he burst his heart for me again… I’d sooner have that horse happy than go to heaven"… 
never fails to make me a tearful mess.
And yes, Donald kept a bottle of his spit around his neck, and it seems he wet the bed at night “I was sick…”.
I love that movie, and the tears start from the opening scene…
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Interesting to think that National Velvet came out during World War II, when the Grand National race was not actually run in England due to the war.
There were also some interesting bits of trivia about the movie on IMDb.
Mickey Rooney had to film his entire part in a month so that he could report to basic training to serve in the war.
And the actress who played the mother beat her movie daughter Angela Lansbury for the Oscar since Lansbury was nominated for her role in The Picture of Dorian Gray that same year.
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this is beautifully written, and SO TRUE!! I thought Donald kept the tooth he ‘lost’ in the suet, and the look on the face of the reporters…
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YES!
I was that same little girl, whose bicycle was The Pie, who tried to create her own stable of paper horses & to this day have that same feeling for my horses.
Both those that are gone & those I have now.
& Now I need to find my tattered paperback copy of National Velvet & read it again.
& Find the film online to watch once again. 
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I love the movie but really find the book to (understandably) be so much more enthralling. The writing is beautiful; the descriptions of the countryside are gorgeous, the people are all distinctly individual with depth and character.
I reread it every once in a while and am always just a little surprised at how good it
Kim Walnes and The Grey Goose were the stunt doubles in Sylvester.
And does she ever have some hair raising stories about it!
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