Top of the Queue: Let the Games begin on your DVD player

Jane Burns  —  8/22/2008 12:18 pm

Theme song alert: There is no way that the song from "Chariots of Fire" will not enter your head at some point of this story. It just comes with the territory in writing anything involved with a Triumph of the Human Spirit.

Triumphs aplenty will begin this week when the Olympics kick off this week in Beijing. (Cue that trumpet music, too.) Although, it's kind of hard to get all excited about the opening ceremonies after learning that the torch relay was invented by the Nazis.

That's the kind of choice information found in "The Real Olympics," a fascinating documentary mostly focused on the original Greek games. The two-hour program was done for PBS in preparation for the last Summer Games in Athens. The ancient games were a little different than the games we know, as The History Channel's collection on the topic makes clear just by its title: "The First Olympics: Blood, Honor and Glory."

Nearly 800 years before Jesus was born, the otherwise enlightened Greeks wrestled to the death, disemboweled each other in the boxing ring, sprinted around the track stark naked and threatened death to any woman who tried to watch.

And we think steroids are so bad.

For something more genteel, a new release this week tells the story of the first modern Olympics, the reborn games of 1896.

"The First Olympics: Athens 1896" was a five-hour NBC miniseries in 1984, starring Louis Jourdan, David Ogden Stiers and a newcomer named David Caruso. It tells the story of "a ragtag team of amateur American athletes whose Olympic triumphs stunned the sports world."

Hmm, didn't know there was a sports world to shock in 1896.

The miniseries was likely a jingoistic effort to pump up the U.S. for that summer's Los Angeles games and probably tried to ride the coattails of another immensely successful, Oscar-winning Olympic film effort that had debuted three years earlier.

Yes, cue the theme music. The gold-medal standard for Olympic movies, at least the Summer Games variety, remains 1981's "Chariots of Fire." It's hard to say it's the gold standard for everything, as revisiting it now shows some melodramatic and cliche moments better suited to a TV miniseries. Yet, the utter snobbery that surrounded sports (or "sport," it was called) in that era comes through loud and clear in the movie, and is backed up by much of what the later documentaries say.

"Chariots of Fire" certainly achieved at a gold-medal level and not just with Vangelis' theme music. The story of the mostly aristocratic British athletics team (that would be "track" to us Yanks) and what drove them to succeed in the 1924 Olympics won the Best Picture Oscar and remains one of the top-grossing sports pictures of all time.

Strangely, the Winter Olympics seem to spark more sports films. Maybe there's just more things to laugh about in the Winter Games, as films such as "Blades of Glory" or "Cool Runnings" can attest. Or sports such as skating can create more melodrama like "Ice Castles" (for some readers of a certain age, apologies for putting that theme song in your head, too).

Track gives us most of our Summer Olympics films; clearly, no one has managed to figure out a way to make modern pentathlon leap off the screen.

The late Steve Prefontaine's legend is still so strong that two feature films were made out of his life (and at least two documentaries). Take your pick between Jared Leto (in 1997's "Prefontaine") or Billy Crudup (in 1998's "Without Limits") as the Oregon distance runner whose all-out style on the track still inspires today, 33 years after his death in a car crash.

Many critics preferred "Without Limits," penned by Robert Towne and Kenny Moore, a former Sports Illustrated writer who was also a teammate of Prefontaine's on the 1972 Olympic squad. It focuses more on his relationship with his coach, played by a kindly Donald Sutherland.

Towne had been down that road before with "Personal Best" (1982). The lesbian relationship in the film raised many eyebrows at the time, but at its heart, the film is about how athletes (played by Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly) have to prioritize competition, relationships and life.

What these films also give us is lots of slow motion. And to thank for that, we can also go back to the Nazis -- specifically, the 1936 Games in Berlin.

Leni Riefenstahl led a controversial life as an apologist and propagandist for Hitler, but also managed some spectacular filmmaking. Most glorious is "Olympia"(1938), her documentary of the 1936 Games that deified the human form in ways that would make the Greeks proud. Divers soar, high jumpers float and runners glisten in what seems to be a visual blueprint for every sports drama that followed decades later.

The only thing missing seems to be a catchy theme song. One clever YouTube user has created one, though, combining a sequence from Riefenstahl's film with some music composed for Oliver Stone's "Alexander" in 2004.

It was written by Vangelis, of course.

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MORE OLYMPIC FILMS

The Olympics, summer and winter, have provided a wealth of comedy and drama for moviemakers. Here's a sampling of some of the Olympic films, all available on DVD, that have tried to capture the glory of the Summer Games in the past several decades:

"Olympia" (1938):

Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary set the precedent for much of how sports stories are told and filmed today. Yes, it was the "Nazi Olympics" of Berlin 1936, but Riefenstahl's camera loves Jesse Owens as much as it loves any Aryan god.

"Jim Thorpe: All American" (1951):

This is a story that's screaming for a modern update, but for now we have to go with the classic starring Burt Lancaster. Thorpe's tale is a sad one, the American Indian star whose pentathlon and decathlon medals from the 1912 Stockholm Games were taken away when it was found out he had made some money playing minor league baseball.

"Tokyo Olympiad" (1965):

Kon Ichikawa's cinematic version of the 1964 Tokyo Games still stands as a beautiful work of art. Much less controversial than Riefenstahl's film, but a little harder to find.

"Walk Don't Run" (1966):

Cary Grant's final screen role was in this romantic comedy set in Tokyo during the 1964 Games. He can't find a place to stay, so he bunks with a young woman offering a room. Before that starts to sound too icky, he plays matchmaker to her and an Olympian played by Jim Hutton.

"Wilma" (1977):

Bud Greenspan, better known for his Olympic documentaries, directed this TV biopic about Wilma Rudolph. Rudolph was the sprint star of the 1960 Olympics with a dramatic story all her own, but this film was also the screen debut of Denzel Washington.

"International Velvet" (1978):

Tatum O'Neal gives equestrian its props in this sequel to the classic "National Velvet." Velvet is now a childless, middle-aged divorcee (oh, the horror!) but helps mentor her orphaned niece (O'Neal) all the way into the Olympics.

"Personal Best" (1982):

Two female track stars (Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly) juggle their personal relationship and their competitive natures while under the tutelage of a wise but cranky coach (Scott Glenn).

"Running Brave" (1983):

Robby Benson starred in the biopic about Billy Mills, an American Indian who won the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Benson makes up for the 1978 schlock about skating, "Ice Castles."

"American Anthem" (1986):

Gymnast Mitch Gaylord stretched his acting chops to play a gymnast in a film that rode the coattails of the huge success by the men's team in Los Angeles two years earlier. Janet Jones starred as his love interest, before she became the love interest (and wife) of hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky.

"Breaking the Surface" (1997):

Diver Greg Louganis' life certainly is the stuff of TV drama, and Mario Lopez did a nice job capturing the gold medalist in this version of his autobiography. It uses actual footage from the 1976, 1984 and 1988 Games.

"Prefontaine" (1997):

Jared Leto played distance star Steve Prefontaine, done in a docudrama fashion. That's not too much of a surprise as it was written and directed by Steve James ("Hoop Dreams").

"Without Limits" (1998):

Billy Crudup stars in this version of Pre's story, which is more about how he locked horns with his coach (Donald Sutherland). This one had more of a pedigree, written and directed by Robert Towne ("Chinatown") and co-written by Pre's friend, Kenny Moore.

"One Day in September" (1999):

A deserving Oscar winner for Best Documentary, "One Day" plays out as a drama, from the desperation of so many involved to the incredible bungling of West German police after Israeli athletes were taken hostage at the Munich Games of 1972. It stands as a solid line in the sand about what the Olympics, and our world, had been and what they are now.

OLYMPIC MOVIES WE'D LIKE TO SEE

"Pocket Hercules":

Tom Cruise takes on the role of Naim Suleymanoglu, the most successful weightlifter in Olympic history despite being only 4-foot-11. Cruise is a little old for the early years, but makes up for it with earnestness and intensity as the athlete who could lift three times his body weight and defects from Bulgaria to Hungary.

"The Blow-Hards":

While exchanging the Olympic torch on its way to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, Ben Stiller and Jack Black accidentally blow it out while arguing if Bruce Jenner could have beaten Batman in the decathlon. Many wacky misadventures ensue as they scheme to hide the darkened torch and get it relit.

"On Target":

Robin Williams plays a high school guidance counselor who just happens to notice that a problem kid (Shia LaBeouf) at his inner-city school has what it takes to be a modern pentathlete. The counselor knows this because he was a member of the U.S. modern pentathlon team in 1980 but didn't get to go to Moscow because of the boycott.

"Heading Downhill":

Matthew McConaughey stars as renegade U.S. skier Bode Miller, who was vilified for supposedly not taking the Salt Lake Games seriously enough but saying he enjoyed the party. The casting will be even more perfect if Miller ever takes a newborn downhill skiing.

"Fight to the Death":

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson stars as Arrichion, champion of the ancient sport of pankration. The martial art combines wrestling and boxing and was a sport in the ancient games where (spoiler alert!) Arrichion of Phigaleia broke his opponent's ankle at the same time the opponent's choke hold strangled Arrichion. The opponent surrendered in pain, not knowing Arrichion was actually dead, and Arrichion was posthumously awarded the 564 B.C. Olympic gold. Lots of blood and gore, "300" style.

Jane Burns  —  8/22/2008 12:18 pm