The stirring life story of the American Indian who overcame personal and professional struggles to become one of the nation’s greatest athletes. Burt Lancaster stars. Year: 1951 Director: Michael Curtiz Starring: Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, Steve CochranThis reverential, well-crafted 1951 biopic starring the hulky Burt Lancaster as Native American Olympian Thorpe is hardly the definitive word on one of our greatest track stars, but it does remind us how unfair and demeaning it once was for athletes of color. Concentrating on Thorpe’s track and football victories (he also excelled at boxing, swimming, and golf), director Michael Curtiz and screenwriters Douglas Morrow and Everett Freeman (working from Thorpe’s autobiography) chart their hero’s rise from reservation poverty to Carlisle College track star to 1912 Olympic decathlon/pentathlon winner. Thorpe was stripped of his medals when it was learned that he had taken a few bucks as a football player. Lancaster is even better at playing Thorpe in the depths of drunkenness and despair than in his jock heyday. Charles Bickford is Pop Warner, the legendary coach who encouraged Thorpe to go for the gold, and Phyllis Thaxter appears as the athlete’s supportive wife. Thorpe, who served as technical adviser, died two years after this film was released. Thirty years later, the International Olympic Committee overturned the earlier ruling and returned Thorpe’s medals to his family. “What does it mean now?” a bitter Lancaster was quoted as saying at the time. –Glenn Lovell
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August 9, 2010
#1
Review by
Rating:
Not to long ago an athlete was picked as the best(athlete)in our century…Mohammid Ali. He was a great fighter…but what else? How did this man become the greatest athlete of the century? “Whats wrong with this picture”? Jim Thorpe should have been named as the best as is appearent by his accomplishments in several sports. Did Ali win the decathalon or the Pentathalon…25 total events. Was Ali a champion football and baseball player? How can anyone who excels at only one sport be called the greatest of the century…whats wrong with this picture? The wrongs done Jim Thorpe have not been corrected with this kind of judgement. We have the sports writers to thank for this injustice.
August 10, 2010
#2
Review by Martin Asiner
Rating:
JIM THORPE, ALL AMERICAN is based on the autobiography of the same name, and in the hands of director Michael Curtiz, Thorpe, as played by the athletic Burt Lancaster, comes across as a man beset by a multitude of demons. The film begins with Thorpe as a boy living on an Indian reservation. He runs constantly, almost as if he were trying to outrun the bitter dregs of an anti-Indian racism that he saw as dogging his heels for his entire life. He grows to maturity and attends the Carlisle Indian School on a track scholarship. Much of the film focuses on Thorpe’s obvious athletic skills and as long as it does so, Lancaster manages to imbue his character with the pathos of a tragedy that would not disappear. One of the most memorable scenes in a film filled with them (not all of them pleasant) is the one in which he has just arrived as a freshman at Carlisle. He is dressed in his best clothes and shoes, and then suddenly,he is filled with the need to run. He does run, right over and through Carlisle’s track team. The track coach looks at his assistant and tells him, “Find out who that is and bring him here.” His first years at Carlisle show a relaxed Thorpe. He meets his future wife played by Phyllis Thaxter and excells at every sport of the school. Paradoxically,however, the more success that Thorpe achieves, the more is in unable to handle it. His reaction to fame is colored by his previous reaction to racism. He grows bitter and anti-social. He fails to understand that amateur athletics does not involve money nor does he see that his wife loves him and would continue to do so until his increasing world hate drowns out all else. Thorpe’s anger at having his Olympic medals taken away simply justifies his own self-destruction. As the film moves toward the end, it becomes painful to watch a proud and skilled student-athlete inch closer to a self-imposed ostracism from those who truly want to understand and to help. Lancaster is superb as a man who forgets that a world of athleticism cannot compensate for a world of bitterness that no gold medals can heal.
August 10, 2010
#3
Review by Curtis Allan
Rating:
This film certainly has limits: none of the performances are overwhelmingly good, there are too many white people playing natives, and the story sometimes borders on the formulaic. But with that said, do yourself a favor and see it.
Jim Thorpe – All American is a fascinating look at a period of American history (the early 20th century) that doesn’t get enough coverage. Thorpe was born just before the death of the Old West (1887 or 88), was an All American college football player at the Carlisle Indian School, won gold medals in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, played Major League Baseball before WWI, was a founding presence as an all-star halfback in the early National Football League (and its first commissioner), and went on to a long career as a bit player in such Hollywood films as King Kong and White Heat. On the darker side, over half of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, he was an orphan before 18, his first son (Jim Junior) died at age 2 from pneumonia, he had poor financial habits, wasn’t much of a team player, moved around incessantly, had problems with alcohol and tobacco, two wives left him, and he died in poverty.
Director Michael (Casablanca) Curtiz does a wonderful job of keeping the campy 50s to a minimum while moving Thorpe’s whirlwind life forward on screen. The real strengths of the film (beyond the historical subject matter) are the wonderful nascent images of early sporting events: the college lettermen’s sweaters, old track shoes, baseball uniforms, leather football helmets, etc. Lancaster was quite fit and looks the part of a young athlete very well. He is perhaps best when portraying Thorpe’s dark decline; these scenes foreshadow De Niro in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. And finally, the scenes from the opening ceremonies of the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles look so real I am sure that Curtiz must have cut actual footage into the film, including an aerial flyover and a speech by then vice-president Charles Curtis (these would have been the first Olympics after the widespread proliferation of sound video recording, in the vibrant young city which created it).
All in all Jim Thorpe – All American is a fine cinematic achievement; this is what movie-making is all about.
August 10, 2010
#4
Review by commandante_teresa@yahoo.com
Rating:
_Jim Thorpe_ is nominally a story about a great athlete; it is more a complex, bittersweet portrayal of a man whose frustrated ambition threatens to tear him and his family apart. This movie underlines in bold strokes the damaging effects of racism, both external and internalized, and the fact that material success is no compensation for dignity and self-respect.
August 10, 2010
#5
Review by Robert E. Nylund
Rating:
The title “All-American” was rarely applied to one who truly was an American and was one of the greatest athletes of all time. Jim Thorpe was a Native American, often called an Indian because of Columbus’ original mistake that the natives he encountered in the New World were residents of India, not an entirely new and unknown land. This remarkable 1951 film was one of the rare looks at a Native American who not only earned the title “All-American” but built a reputation as an outstanding athlete. The film makes it clear, too, that he was successful in every sport he tried, often amazing those who thought they knew him.
Early in the film we see a young Jim running away from school because he doesn’t want to go the white man’s school. The fact that he runs many miles to go back home, after his father had taken him to school in a horse-drawn wagon. His father then explains why school is important, particularly if Jim is ever to rise above a very lowly and disadvantaged life on the reservation in Oklahoma. Jim’s father hopes that Jim will do more than he accomplished. Not only does Jim return to school, he eventually goes on to the famed Carlisle Indian School, a virtual college which achieved a very fine reputation both in academics and athletics. The famed “Pop” Warner, portrayed in the film by Charles Bickford, is shown producing some very fine teams and challenging the more reputable, established colleges and universities of his time.
“Pop” Warner becomes Jim’s lifelong mentor. The film actually begins with the coach’s tribute to Jim at a latter day banquet in honor of the amazing athlete. Director Michael Curtiz intercuts actual footage of the banquet, much as he later uses footage of the real Jim Thorpe (seen from a distance) at the 1912 Olympics and in various games. Eventually we see footage of the opening of the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, including the speech by the Vice President of the United States, whom Coach Warner acknowledges is, like Jim, a Native American, except he uses the word “Indian.” Curtiz combines the hisoric footage with shots of Burt Lancaster and Charles Bickford sitting in the Coliseum, which was later used in the 1984 Olympics.
The film is a virtual “rise and fall.” Jim achieved so much in sports, eventually winning both the Pentathlon and the Decathlon at the 1912 Olympics. Then it was discovered he had played on a professional team one summer to earn a little money. For many years professional athletes were banned from competing in the Olympics; the International Olympic Committee was as vigilant in barring professional athletes as it has become in detecting performance-enhancing drugs, such as steroids. Jim had natural ability, of course, and he had great endurance. Yet he was stripped of his medals and it was many, many years before his medals were finally returned to his family, long after Jim’s death, prompting Burt Lancaster’s bitter complaints (cited above). Jim struggled for years, as we see in the film, and, although he apparently never was financially successful, he at least lived long enough to receive some recognition for his athletic achievemtns.
The film was shot in black and white at a time when more and more films were being filmed in color; presumably, the use of monochrome film was because of the inclusion of the vintage, historic footage. Yet it remains an engrossing story and is enhanced by Michael Curtiz’s expertise (as he neared the end of his long tenure at Warner Brothers) and a very fine musical score by another veteran, Austrian-born composer Max Steiner (best known for the music for “King Kong,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Casablanca”).
Hopefully, Warner Brothers will soon release the film to DVD. It has already been shown on Turner Classic Movies and is clearly yet another top-notch production from the Burbank studio.