Cue the pounding kettle drums of John Williams’ universally recognized Olympic Fanfare! It is that time when the world comes together to celebrate the Summer Olympic games that have been held every four years (except 1916, 1940 and 1944) since 1896, now with round-the-clock television coverage on five American channels.
The film industry has also taken on the Olympics in documentaries and plot-driven movies over the past 80 years. If your taste runs to documentaries, you have to begin with German director Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking “Olympia” (1938), based on the 1936 Berlin games in Nazi Germany. It provides a blueprint for modern sports documentaries with slow motion action, athlete back stories and crowd reaction shots. It’s also a foreboding look at the technical and artistic innovations of a notorious propagandist for a horrific totalitarian regime.
We also strongly recommend director Kon Ichikawa’s “Tokyo Olympiad” (1965) chronicling the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the first to be held in Asia. And finally, a remarkable contemporary snapshot, “I Am Bolt” (2016), recounting the exploits of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who, as of today, remains the world’s fastest man.
Below are a few of our favorite plot-driven movies with an Olympic theme.
Take One
Today’s Olympics are being held in Paris, and no film is more appropriate for this city than Director Hugh Hudson’s 1981 Oscar-winning Best Picture “Chariots of Fire,” which revolves around the last Olympic games held in Paris in 1924. The story focuses on two sprinters, one a devout Scottish christian, Eric Liddell, and the other, Harold Abraham, a British Jew. One runs to glorify God while the other runs to overcome prejudice. Liddell became an overnight front page story when he refused to run during qualifications on the sabbath. Hudson selected unknown actors to play the leads: Ben Cross as Abrahams, Ian Charleston as Liddell and Ian Holms as the outcast professional trainer Sam Mussabini who coached both. Nominated for seven Academy Awards and winning four, including one for the spectacular new age electronic score by Vangelis. The opening credits depicting British athletes running on a Scottish beach remains iconic today.
“Jim Thorpe – All American” (1951) is an old fashion biographical film exploring the life of the greatest athlete in the first half of the 20th century. Thorpe, a member of the Sac & Fox Nation, remains today the only athlete to win the decathlon (10 track-and-field events in two days) and the pentathlon (five events in one day) in the same Olympics. His two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics made him an international sensation, only to have both medals stripped for accepting meal money playing semi-pro baseball while still a student at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Both medals were restored to Thorpe by the IOC in 2022.
Thorpe was also a college football star, and later played professional football in the precursor to the NFL and played major league baseball for eight years. Burt Lancaster portrays Thorpe in redface, a common Hollywood trope at the time, but he undeniably captures the character’s indomitable spirit in later life, touched by racism and alcoholism, with compassion. The film is directed by the ever-versatile Michael Curtiz. (“Casablanca” & “Yankee Doodle Dandy”).
Take Two
Most people would argue that the pinnacle of American cool in the 1960s belonged to Steve McQueen or Paul Newman: strong, sharp, and unruffled. But there’s an equal case to be made for Robert Redford, who seemed so light on his feet that he breezed in and out of three movies in 1969, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” But “Downhill Racer” is a singular curio of that year, pitting Redford, playing an American athlete and newcomer to international skiing, against a ruthless Gene Hackman as the U.S. Ski team’s stop-at-nothing coach, and a stunning Camilla Sparv as Redford’s Scandinavian love interest. The film has thrilling racing sequences, but ventures far from the usual sports movie formula when outside the slopes, becoming a strangely philosophical drama about human nature and competitive masculinity. All of this is intensified by the film’s eye-popping locations in the Swiss and French Alps.
“Sanka… ya dead?” “Yah, mon.” Director Jon Turtletaub’s sweet and breezy biopic “Cool Runnings”(1993) about the Jamaican national bobsled team and their remarkable debut in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics was universally adored by all children of the 1990s. Retrospectively, it’s easy to see why—it features endlessly quotable zingers, a career-best John Candy in one of his final film roles, and a game supporting cast headed by Leon as Derice Bannock, and Doug E. Doug as the iconic “Sanka’’ Coffie. The film runs the course of their disastrous early attempts at racing (in case it isn’t obvious… Jamaica has no snow!), all the way to their climatic and triumphant appearance on the world stage. Plenty of liberties are taken (okay, by the end, there are few liberties left to take), but the result is still one of the most enjoyable and idiosyncratic Disney movies from the decade. Listen for Jimmy Cliff’s toe tapping cover of “I Can See Clearly Now” in the soundtrack, which re-introduced him to an international audience after his excellent debut 20 years earlier in “The Harder They Come.”
All films are available on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
(This column is written jointly by a baby boomer, Denny Parish, and a millennial, Carson Parish, who also happen to be father and son.)
