Published in Japan Forward 1/8/2020
Covid-19 may have deprived us of this year’s Tokyo Olympics, but there are plenty of Olympic-themed films that are well worth watching instead. They range from warm-hearted comedies to tense thrillers and dark human dramas.
Most are based on true stories, with subsequent real-life events adding another layer of interest. Many deal with the conflict between the lofty ideals of the Games – “the harmonious development of humankind,” according to the Olympic Charter – and the messy reality of commercialism, cheating and political agendas.
That contradiction was there from the start. The founder of the modern Olympics was the French aristocrat, Baron de Coubertin, whose statue can be found outside the Japan Sports Association building in Tokyo.
Coubertin statue in Tokyo
Coubertin, born in 1863 to a royalist family, was highly conscious of France’s loss of status in the nineteenth century, symbolized by the Prussian army besieging and taking Paris in 1871. That was shortly followed by the establishment of the Paris Commune, a radical socialist collective that held the city for two months before being bloodily suppressed.
Against such chaos, the Olympic ideal offered the promise of order and hierarchy. From Britain, the leading power at the time, Coubertin took the idea that “organised sport can create moral and social strength.” By rejecting professionalism, Coubertin’s Olympic movement ensured that the Games would exclude the proletariat.
Just as the Olympics has always been political, its relationship with films goes back a long way too. The first official documentary is of the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm, which featured such luminaries as Native American athlete Jim Thorpe – later to be stripped of his medals for playing semi-pro baseball – and the future General George Patton, who competed in the Modern Pentathlon.
The first Hollywood take on the Olympics was Million Dollar Legs (1932, directed by Edward F. Cline), a wacky comedy starring W.C. Fields. The Berlin Olympics of 1936, which an ageing Coubertin had lobbied for, was commemorated by the most notorious official documentary of all, Olympia (1938), Leni Riefenstahl’s visually dazzling work of Nazi propaganda.
The Olympics even won an Oscar, when Chariots of Fire (1981, directed by David Puttnam) collected the award for Best Picture. The film, which can be considered a kind of riposte to Olympia, depicts the respectful rivalry between two runners from very different backgrounds at the 1924 Olympics.
One is a British Jew who is determined to succeed in order to overcome antisemitic prejudice. The other is a China-born Scottish Christian who refuses to run on Sundays out of religious conviction. In later life, the former had a long career as a BBC sports journalist, including covering the Berlin Olympics. The latter died at the age of 45 in China, where he had continued his parents’ missionary work.
So there is a great variety of Olympic-related films to choose from. Here are some of my personal favourites, organized into three categories – Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics and Documentaries.
Chariots of Fire doesn’t make the grade, despite its stirring theme music. I prefer stories about losers and untalented oddballs to those about winners winning.
For some reason, the Winter picks are all comedies, while the Summer films are not funny at all.
SUMMER GAMES CATEGORY
Gold Medal: The Ballad of Richard Jewell (2019, directed by Clint Eastwood)
The 90-year old Eastwood’s latest is nominally the story of a hapless security man wrongly accused of planting a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In reality, it is a searing portrait of today’s left-behind America, devoid of economic opportunity and self-respect, hankering for authority.
Jewell, superbly acted by Paul Walter Hauser, is fatherless, obese, clumsy and naive. His one-in-a-million shot at proving his worth is snatched from him by the forces of the Deep State (a procedure-abusing F.B.I.) and the “fake news” peddling media industry (a ruthless female reporter).
In real life, the reporter died of a prescription drug overdose in 2001, also a feature of today’s America. Jewell himself died from complications of diabetes in 2007 at the age of 44. He may not have survived Covid-19.
Silver Medal: Foxcatcher (2014, directed by Bennett Miller)
“This is an Olympic gold medal. I won this… This is more than some piece of metal. It’s about what the medal represents, the virtues required to attain it…”
So speaks a stone-faced Mark Schultz to a hall of schoolchildren. Schultz and his more charismatic brother, Dave, both won gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in the sport of free-style wrestling. Those Olympic virtues Mark cites are tested to breaking point when he falls under the influence of the cocaine-snorting wrestling obsessive, John E. du Pont, a member of the du Pont industrial dynasty.
Du Pont plans to train up a team of wrestlers for the next Olympics at his enormous private estate, Foxcatcher. In his world of super privilege, anything can be bought. Just as his mother paid a boy to befriend him when he was a child, so he uses his wealth to buy the friendship and loyalty of the Schultz brothers and then attempts to force them apart.
The ancient sport of wrestling – introduced to the Olympics in 708 B.C. – proves no more immune to the corrupting force of money and power than any other.
Bronze Medal: Munich (2008, directed by Steven Spielberg)
Munich 1972 was the most disastrous Olympic Games ever. Terrorists from the Black September radical Palestinian group infiltrated the Olympic village – possibly with the help of East German athletes – and slaughtered eleven members of the Israeli squad. The ugly reality of political violence shattered the pacifist pretensions of the “Olympic Spirit” once and for all. More of that in the Documentary Category.
The film focuses on Israel’s response, the “Wrath of God” assassination campaign directed at those deemed to have been involved in the massacre. Given the background, the treatment was bound to be controversial, but Spielberg’s handling of moral ambiguities and inner conflict leaves plenty of space for the audience to make up its own mind.
WINTER GAMES CATEGORY
Gold Medal: Eddie the Eagle (2016, directed by Dexter Fletcher)
“Winning, losing, all that stuff is for the little people. Men like us, we jump to free our souls.”
So says Matti “the Flying Finn” Nykanen, triple gold medallist at the 1988 Calgary Games, to Eddie the Eagle Edwards as they take the ski-lift together to the top of the runway.
In real life, the exchange never happened, but it should have. Eddie was the ultimate sporting misfit. A working-class, self-taught jumper with only twenty months of experience, the Englishman was there thanks to a loophole in the qualification rules which was swiftly closed afterwards.
At the same time, he was the ultimate Olympian, who never gave up despite a childhood handicap and being mocked and dismissed as a fool every step of the way. He never did less than his best, which was enough to get him into the competition final.
In real life, Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards went bankrupt after his spell in the limelight, but then took his A-levels and earned a law degree. He still works as a builder and plasterer and makes occasional media appearances. He loved the film, which he considers to be an accurate portrayal of his heart and soul, if only 5% accurate.
Fate was not so kind to Nykanen, who died at the age of 55. After retirement, he became an alcoholic, married five times, did jail-time for spousal abuse and stabbing a man in a pizza bar and worked as a male stripper.
He is still considered the greatest ever ski-jumper.
Silver Medal: Cool Runnings (1993, directed by Jon Turteltaub)
The 1988 Winter Olympics must have been a dream come true for plucky underdogs, with the Jamaican bobsleigh team following on from Eddie the Eagle. Eddie was given a fictional mentor in the shape of a drunken former champion, now reduced to ski bum status. The Jamaicans have an equally flawed fictional coach – Irv Blitzer, a bobsleigh gold medalist who was drummed out of the sport for cheating.
Irv: You wanna know why I cheated, right?
Bannock: Yes, I do.
Irv: That’s a fair question. It’s quite simple, really. I had to win. You see, Derice, I’d made winning my whole life. And when you make winning your whole life, you have to keep on winning, no matter what. You understand that?
Bannock: No, I don’t understand. You won two gold medals. You had it all.
Irv: Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without one, you’ll never be enough with one.
Perhaps Matti Nykanen could have done with a mentor like Irv.
Bronze Medal: I Tonya (2017, directed by Craig Gillespie)
We’re back in low-income, rough-and-tumble America. This time the criminal act is depicted in blackly comic terms, with a cast of absurdly incompetent conspirators and conflicting narratives of what happened.
Tonya Harding is a brash, working-class girl who has an extraordinary talent for figure skating and a monstrous mother. The only American to have completed a triple axel jump, she is competing for a place in the U.S. team for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Her great rival is Nancy Kerrigan, middle-class, well-mannered and conventionally cute.
As in Foxcatcher, Olympic glory brings out the worst in human nature. As in Richard Jewell’s story, a sensation-hungry media feasts on the fallen.
In real life, Tonya capitalized on her brief notoriety by selling a sex tape and appearing on trashy TV shows, before trying her luck as a professional boxer. Nancy landed a contract with Disney, then turned professional skater, appearing in Broadway on Ice and other ice shows.
That might as well have been scripted too.
DOCUMENTARY CATEGORY
Gold Medal: Tokyo Olympiad (1965, directed by Kon Ichikawa)
The original plan was for Akira Kurosawa, to film the official record of the 1964 Olympic Games. He even went to Italy for the 1960 games to prepare, but his demands proved too rich for Japan’s Olympic Committee to swallow. Instead, Kon Ichikawa took up the challenge.
His film is a Kurosawa-esque epic, nearly three hours long and requiring 103 cameras and a total staff of 550. On board were avant garde composer Toshiro Mayazumi and Japan’s most famous modern poet, Shuntaro Tanikawa.
From the opening shots of a glaring primeval sun and a wrecking ball demolishing aged pre-war buildings, the film was never going to be a simple record of sporting achievement.
Instead we get close-ups of the duck-like waggling of the speed walkers’ behinds, the bloodied feet of the marathon-runners, the grimaces of the weight-lifters. In Ichikawa’s panorama, the results hardly seem to matter.
Japan’s Minister of Education hated it, as did the Minister for the Olympics who wanted to have another film assembled instead. On release it became Japan’s largest grossing film and is now considered a masterpiece of the genre.
Silver Medal: Olympia (1938, directed by Leni Riefenstahl)
In 1944, Leni Riefenstahl finished filming Tiefland, an opera-based melodrama in which she also starred. She was forty two years old and the only female film director of note in the world. Although she lived until 2003, she was effectively blackballed from the industry and never made another film.
The problem was not just that she had produced Nazi propaganda, but that the she had done it with such brilliance. The Triumph of the Will (1935), which glorified a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, won the gold medal for artistic merit at the World Exhibition in Paris, just three years before Hitler invaded France.
Olympia is the cinematic equivalent of Wagner. The camera dwells on the physical beauty and indomitable will-power of the god-like athletes, including “non-Aryans” like Japanese marathoners and black American quadruple gold medallist, Jesse Owens.
Leni’s innovations were remarkable. She dug a pit under the pole-vault to film the jumpers against the sky. She catapulted a camera along a rail to catch the sprinters in close-up. In the famous diving sequence, she used slow-motion, reverse motion and an accelerating rhythm of cuts to turn the humans into bird-like creatures, arcing through the air with geometrical perfection.
It took her two years to edit the film, working by herself for ten hours a day. Even today, some of the effects are stunning.
Bronze Medal: One Day in September (1999, directed by Kevin Macdonald)
Munich was the birthplace of Nazi-ism. The Olympic Stadium was just six miles from Dachau. In the words of narrator Michael Douglas, “the Germans saw the Games as an opportunity to erase the negative memories of the 1936 Olympics.” But terror group Black September, according to the lone surviving perpetrator, saw the 1972 Olympics – the first to be beamed worldwide by satellite – as an opportunity to “showcase” their cause.
What is also showcased in the film is the stunning incompetence of the German authorities and the callousness of the Olympic Committee who decided that “the Games must go on.” Even after the bullet-ridden naked body of an Israeli hostage is thrown from a window, other athletes continue to sun themselves on loungers and play table-tennis just two hundred yards away. Writer Gerald Seymour, on the spot as a reporter, recalls that there was “something selfish, slightly obscene about the atmosphere in the rest of the village.”
Using the double perspective of commentary by the widow of the fencing coach and the last surviving terrorist, in deep cover somewhere in Africa, the film commemorates this first dreadful instance of terror as global spectacle.
SPECIAL CATEGORY
Pierre de Coubertin Medal for Olympic Spirit: Olympia 52 (1953, directed by Chris Marker)
Chris Marker is said to be France’s most famous unknown film director. A Japanophile, he first visited Japan in 1964 to view the Tokyo Olympics and made a short film, The Mystery of Kumiko (1965), incorporating sequences from the Games.
Later, he made a documentary about Akira Kurosawa – A.K. (1985) – and had a bar in Shinjuku’s Golden Gai named after his own most esteemed film, La Jetée (1962). Japan is a large presence in his other important film, Sunless (1982).
Olympia 52 was Marker’s first film. Unimpressed by his own efforts, he effectively buried it. Some sequences are available in awful quality on Youtube, but it was never issued on DVD and is never shown in cinemas. However, good quality extracts can be found in a film about the film, Regard Neuf Sur Olympia 52 (2013, directed by Julien Faraut).
That’s enough to appreciate the poetic flow of Marker’s Olympic commentary and his idiosyncratic close-ups of the spectators and fascination with odd details.