JIM THORPE -- ALL-AMERICAN (1951)

Funny that the main reason to watch this factually-challenged Hollywood bio-pic of Jim Thorpe, the great Native American sportsman, the sheer tactile pleasure in seeing Burt Lancaster at 37 believably inhabit the graceful athleticism of a college-age phenom, would make the film a non-starter nowadays.*  A full-blooded Irish-American New Yorker as tragic Native American track & field/gridiron legend?  As for the rest, moderately effective boilerplate in an ossifying Warners bio-pic tradition that came in two flavors: Either birth to breakthru to crisis to academic acceptance, various LIFE OF So-and-so prestige pics, mostly  by director William Dieterle.  Or: Cradle to maturity via extended flashback with a mid-life fall before late re-recognition, often directed by Michael Curtiz, as here, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY/’42*, THE STORY OF WILL ROGERS/’52.  But neither Curtiz’s still potent visual flair nor Lancaster’s joyous physicality can overcome a pretty dark story.  Certainly not with the lazy construction that uses former coach Charles Bickford to lay out Thorpe’s history as a very long intro speech at some testimonial dinner.  Thorpe’s decline & fall after his Olympic Medals are rescinded when he’s ‘outed’ as (technically) a professional, is the dramatic fulcrum of his life, but needs a fuller development and a more sophisticated story structure.*  And the film has the devil of a time coming to terms with a defeated man and still finding a bit of uplift.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *After Lancaster, Max Steiner’s ‘Indian Tom-Tom’ music cues would be next to go (but rightly so).

DOUBLE-BILL:  *You can see how the template works in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, James Cagney’s George M. Cohan narrating his own flashback (to FDR no less!), one wife gone  missing (Thorpe loses two!) and WWII patriotism for that little bit of uplift at the end.  Even more parallels in that both men only in their mid-60s, died soon after the films came out.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Most histories of the modern Olympics note that the emphasis on amateur status, which sounds fair & noble, was really an attempt to keep things ‘clubby,’ heavily skewed to favor upper crust Etonians and the like, with working-class tradesmen and laborers unable to afford to compete.  An attitude that in Thorpe’s case, meant his 1912 medals weren’t reinstated until 1983.