Five Movies to Help You Cope with Olympics Withdrawal

With the 2012 London Summer Olympics completed, we thought we’d help you combat the inevitable sense of loss that occurs when the flame goes out and the athletes pack for home. Here are five films to ease you back into an Olympics-less world, starting with a pair of moves where the summer games are the main focus, followed by a couple of movies with the games serve as mere backdrop and ending with musical where a couple of shapely nightclub performers simply happen to share an ocean voyage with a group of Olympians.

Olympia (1938)
Commissioned by the International Olympic Committee to make a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Summer Games, Leni Riefenstahl delivered an artful and, at times, elegant record of athletic prowess and the body beautiful. That’s a surface account of what Olympia is all about. Behind the scenes, it was trick to finance, and Riefenstahl, the controversial director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), first tried to get the esteemed German film studio UFA to supply the necessary cash. They declined, balking at the 500,000-mark budget—approximately three times what a standard film of the era cost. Tobis-Filmkunst ended up funding the project, which included footage of Adolph Hitler presiding at festivities where African-American sprinter Jesse Owens took home four gold medals. Later, when Riefenstahl came to America to find a distributor, she edited out many of the scenes involving the dictator.

Chariots of Fire (1981)
The Best Picture Oscar winner is a character study of two British athletes set against the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) is a devout Christian, running for God and following his conscience; Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) is a Jew subject to profound anti-Semitism on the road to track-and-field victory. The moviemakers studied newsreels of Liddell that revealed little more than his style of running, which producer David Puttnam felt they got right in the film. When Puttnam showed the film to Liddell’s widow, she praised the way the picture captured her husband’s character, but felt they missed capturing the grace of her late husband’s sprinting technique.

Walk Don't Run (1966)
Cary Grant’s final film is a remake of The More the Merrier (1943) with Grant in the Charles Coburn role, Samantha Egger taking the Jean Arthur part, Jim Hutton assuming the Joel McCrea spot and Tokyo’s summer games substituting for Washington D.C.’s war years. The plot is all about a severe housing shortage, which sees Grant, Egger and Olympic race walker Hutton under one roof, with the expected romantic complications.

Munich (2005)
The Olympics are just the starting point for Steven Spielberg’s lean, suspenseful drama depicting the aftermath of the Black September terrorist act that saw 11 Israeli athletes held hostage and eventually killed at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. In the film, scripted by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Prime Minister Golda Meir endorses a secret plan where five men are chosen to avenge the killings. Based on George Jonas’s book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorism Team, the movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
“Dibs on the shot putter,” says Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) to pal Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) in Howard Hawks’s splashy musical, which sees the two showgirls on board a ship that just happens to carry the United States Olympic team en route to the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics. One number in particular— Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson’s “Anyone Here for Love?”—nicely showcases Russell’s physique along with enough beefcake to make Joshua Logan blush.

July 4

Eva Marie Saint is born in Newark, New Jersey, 1924. She was up against Elizabeth Montgomery for the role of Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront (1954), director Elia Kazan’s landmark drama set in the gritty working class neighborhoods of Hoboken, New Jersey. Eventually, Kazan chose Saint, thereby accepting the challenge of making the 30-year-old actress into a teenager over the challenge of making the 21-year-old Montgomery appear less finishing school and more…Hoboken. Prior to her auspicious movie debut in Waterfront—in a part that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress—Saint appeared on stage and in various television productions. After her Oscar win, she acted in That Certain Feeling (1956), A Hatful of Rain (1957) and Raintree Country (1957). What followed was the second biggest role of her career, playing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959). Saint recalled the words of her director: "[Alfred] Hitchcock said, 'I don't want you going back to sink-to-sink movies. You do movies where you wash the dishes looking drab in an apron. The audience wants to see their leading ladies dressed up.' He saw me as others didn't."

June 11

The Pirate opens nationally to mixed reviews and disappointing box office, 1948. Vincente Minnelli directed Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers in the fanciful tale of a young woman betrothed to the mayor of the town while dreaming of romance with bad-boy pirate Macoco. Based on a 1942 non-musical Broadway play starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the film was originally envisioned as a vehicle for Gary Grant and Greer Garson. When that idea fell through, MGM hired Cole Porter to write songs and brought in Kelly and Garland to star. It was not an easy production, with Garland missing 99 of the 135 shooting days due to illness. The picture is memorable primarily for the “Be a Clown” number that concludes the movie as well as Gene Kelly’s enormously muscular thighs.

April 2

Alec Guinness is born in London, 1914. When it came time to adapt Pierre Boulle’s novel The Bridge on the River Kwai for the screen, producer Sam Spiegel envisioned Humphrey Bogart in the role of Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, with Nicholas Ray directing. That was just one of several director/star scenarios before David Lean was selected to helm the picture. With Lean on board, Spiegel turned to Laurence Olivier to play the lead; Olivier was busy preparing to direct and star in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and declined the offer. Guinness was an early choice as well, but turned it down after reading the screenplay. More names entered the fray—Cary Grant, Ronald Colman and James Mason, to name a few—before a rewrite made Guinness change his mind.

“The original script was ridiculous,” the actor contended, “with elephant charges and girls screaming round in the jungle. When David Lean arrived with a new screenwriter, it became a very different thing. I saw Nicholson as an effective part, without ever really believing in the character.” Part of the problem was that Nicholson, as written, was a bit of a bore. Guinness attempted to bring a little humor to the dull figure, against the wishes of Lean, who wanted Guinness to play it straight. "I can't imagine anyone wanting to watch a stiff-upper-lip British colonel for two and a half hours,” the actor remarked.

The film proved to be a hit and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1957. For his portrayal of the delusional officer and POW who oversees the construction of a bridge, Guinness was named Best Actor, his only Oscar.

March 4

Hollywood trade magazines announce a new Warren Beatty movie project called Heaven Can Wait, 1977. The story of a Los Angeles Rams quarterback who graduates to the promised land a little too early and must come back to earth in another man’s body was nixed by then-Warner Bros. studio head David Geffen only to be green lighted by Barry Diller after Geffen’s firing. Some interesting casting choices were bandied about: a boxing Muhammad Ali as the lead character, Cary Grant (who reportedly turned down a million dollar offer from Beatty) as Mr. Jordan and either Kate Jackson or Leslie Caron as Betty Logan. In the end, a football playing Warren Beatty assumed the lead role, James Mason took the part of Mr. Jordan and Julie Christie was eventually cast as Betty Logan.