Spectacular ... Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. Photo: Ronald Grant Archive
Not since Leni Riefenstahl has a film-maker made as big an impact on the Olympics as Zhang Yimou with his extraordinary Beijing curtain-raiser. Hopefully, an enterprising distributor will release this majestic pageant on DVD. In the meantime, several other summer Olympic pictures are worth seeking out.
The motto, "Swifter, Higher, Stronger", has never been better exemplified than in Riefenstahl's contentious masterpiece, Olympia (1938). Indeed, the finest Olympic features have tended to be documentaries, as they more successfully capture the unpredictability of competition and the visceral atmosphere of spectatorship than any dramatised reconstruction.
H Bruce Humberstone's Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), Gérard Oury's Ace of Aces (1982), Gordian Maugg's Der Olympische Sommer (1993) and István Szabó's Sunshine (1999) all made effective use of the Berlin games. But there's infinitely more drama in the pain and poetry captured by Kon Ichikawa in Tokyo Olympiad (1965) and by the octet including Ichikawa, Milos Forman, Mai Zetterling and John Schlesinger responsible for Visions of Eight (1973).
Sadly, Munich 1972 will always be remembered for the horrors depicted in Kevin Macdonald's One Day in September (1999). But most fictional features have striven to keep sport and politics separate, despite Bruce Malmuth and Albert Pyun exploiting the Seoul and Atlanta Olympiads to indulge in some post-cold war sabre rattling in Pentathlon (1994) and Blast (1997).
Krisztina Goda's Children of Glory (2006) was scarcely more subtle in recreating the brutal events that intensified the Soviet-Hungarian water polo rivalry at Melbourne in 1956. But such melodramatics are very much in keeping with cinema's take on the Olympics. With the final result rarely in doubt, film-makers have had to pack the preceding action with sufficient incident to distract audiences from the clumsy choreography of the actual athletic endeavour. Consequently, the sacrifices and domestic strife involved in preparing for the games have proved fertile ground.
Bill Travers and Mariel Hemingway put their love lives on the line in Frank Launder's Geordie (1955) and Robert Towne's Personal Best (1982), while Tatum O'Neal and Susan Anton risked alienating close relatives in Bryan Forbes's International Velvet (1978) and Joseph Sargent's Goldengirl (1979). Ex-Olympic shot-putter Herman Brix went one better in Lynn Shores' potboiler, A Million to One (1937), by managing to upset both father Monte Blue and sweetheart Joan Fontaine. But the pick of these soap operatic sagas is Michael Winner's The Games (1970), which focuses on the conflicts jeopardising the Rome ambitions of weak-hearted Yank Ryan O'Neal, trainer-bullied Brit Michael Crawford, state-exploited Czech Charles Aznavour and racially abused Aborigine Athol Compton.
Winner hired middle distance stalwart Gordon Pirie to ensure the authenticity of his marathon footage. But it was the stylisation of the running sequences that set Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981) apart, with the slo-mo dashes to the accompaniment of Vangelis's Oscar-winning score reinforcing the Boy's Own sense of history that underpinned Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams' triumphs over adversity at the Paris games of 1924.
Indeed, the majority of Olympic biopics would test positive for theatricality. There are honourable exceptions, like Francis D Lyon's The Bob Mathias Story (1954), which saw the first dual winner of the decathlon title playing himself, and Ken Hannam's Dawn! (1979), in which Bronwyn Mackay-Payne excels as rebellious Aussie swimmer Dawn Fraser. But injustice and tragedy abound in Michael Curtiz's Jim Thorpe - All American (1951) and DS Everett's Running Brave (1983) - which respectively examine the problems facing Native Americans Jim Thorpe (Burt Lancaster) and Billy Mills (Robby Benson) at Stockholm 1912 and Tokyo 1964 - and Steve James's Prefontaine (1997) and Robert Towne's Without Limits (1998), in which Jared Leto and Billy Crudup essay superstar runner Steve Prefontaine, who died in a car crash two years after inexplicably failing to beat the world at Munich.
It's not all hard-luck stories, however, even though Asterix (Clovis Cornillac) and Obelix (Gérard Depardieu) are forbidden from using their magic potion on Mount Olympus in Frédéric Forestier and Thomas Langmann's Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008). Jayne Mansfield and Cary Grant also amusingly enter into the Olympic spirit in Andrew Marton's It Happened in Athens (1962) and Charles Walters' Walk, Don't Run (1966).
But the runaway comedy champion is Eddie Cline's Million Dollar Legs (1932). With script contributions by Joseph L Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, this slapstick political satire centres on arm-wrestling president WC Fields' attempt to rescue the Ruritanian state of Klopstokia from fiscal disaster by taking a team to the Los Angeles games. There is no better cure for those medal table blues.
So my podium pictures are: Chariots of Fire (gold) Million Dollar Legs (silver) Charlie Chan at the Olympics (bronze)
What are yours?
