The Grand Olympics

THE GRAND OLYMPICS   ***

Romolo Marcellini

1961

IDEA: An account of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy.

BLURB:  Scenic, ebullient, and often surprising in its formal choices, The Grand Olympics anticipates the greater innovations of Kon Ichikawa’s magisterial Tokyo Olympiad, while adding its own unique colors to the Olympic film palette. A relatively more linear account than Ichikawa’s, the film nevertheless is invigorated by sprightly pacing, a lively soundtrack, and shrewd edits, from the rhythmic montage of the gymnastics competitions to the superb action match cut that turns a diver’s aerial flip into the flight of a pole vaulter. Meanwhile, the frequently snarky, editorializing narration injects a certain jocularity into the proceedings, despite its occasional lapses into sexist and racist colonial commentary. More appreciated is the brief expository information that fills in the backgrounds of the athletes, providing us with details of vocations and relationships. The Grand Olympics overall does a good job of relating to the athletes as humans, and not just bodies; gesturing toward heteroglossia, it even includes some of their diaristic first-person accounts, particularly of German 100-meter champion Armin Hary, who for an extended portion of the film becomes its winsome star. Marcellini concludes the documentary with the marathon, in which Abebe Bikila’s legendary victory is rendered as a mythic twilight feat under the watchful gazes of Roman statues. It’s an expected although entirely fitting ending to a celebration of outsize athletic achievement in the Eternal City.