It seemed like this one was hard to find for a while - in fact, at one point back in the Filmstruck days I was going to blitz thru 30 movies more or less to get to it before the channel shut down - that would have left us at a very different spot today. I'd probably be up to 300 by now.
But what we have here is a great film - a triumph of sports, and really a study on the the spirit of athleticism. I guess this isn't what Japan wanted. In fact there's alternate edits and Japanese takes on the Olympics precisely because they didn't like Kon's vision here. In the special features I learned some of his negative was taken and re-cut for an alternate film commissioned by Japan. The restoration team ended up restoring both films, stating it wasn't their place to make the political or artistic choices. I guess we do lose the stereo soundtrack in this cut, but all the stereo prints were destroyed at one time or another.
What is left is a vision. and what is that vision? It seems to be an exploration of the athletes more than the events. Quite often we see zoomed in faces before the events, as he is analyzing the strain and stresses on these athletes before they launch the shot putt, or do the 100m dash. He wants to show their agony before and after the competition, and of course, the triumph of victory.
I often found myself watching an event, getting the final time, and then going to Google to see what the world record was. Some were set during these Olympics but they would be broken in later years. Still it's a crazy thing to see in some like the 100m dash, we're taking 4/10th's of a second is all. Here's some side trivia - the winner, Bob Hayes of USA, would go on to play pro football, and is the only Athlete to have both a gold medal and a Super Bowl Ring. There was also manual and automatic timing going on and so his actual time is between 10.06 and 9.99 seconds depending on manual, automatic, or whatever you use. In any case he was thought to be the fastest sprinter in the world before Usain Bolt.
I ended up liking this a lot more than I thought I would and I'm pretty sure it's got to do with the way Kon chose what he edited to see it in a different light than the typical competition films. I always joked that if I kept doing this for 20 years I'd eventually hit the Olympic box set and then I'd call it quits but hey....maybe I'll keep going after that
RB
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