What 1944 film starring Elizabeth Taylor is about a girl who wins a horse?

What 1944 film starring Elizabeth Taylor is about a girl who wins a horse? The answer is National Velvet.

National Velvet is a 1944 MGM Technicolor sports film directed by Clarence Brown. Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a horse-obsessed 12-year-old English girl who wins a gelding in a raffle and dreams of entering him in the Grand National steeplechase.

Velvet names the horse Pie and persuades Mi Taylor, a former jockey played by Mickey Rooney, to train him. Her mother contributes prize money from her past English Channel swim, helping fund the ambitious plan. Velvet eventually rides Pie in the race disguised as a boy.

Although Velvet and Pie cross the finish line first, she falls from the horse immediately afterward and they are disqualified under the race rules. That detail is often missed: the film is not simply a story about an official victory, but about courage, partnership and Pie’s chance to prove himself. The movie was adapted from Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel and entered the National Film Registry in 2003.