The Games (1970)

Director:

Michael Winner

Writers:

Hugh Atkinson (novel)
Erich Segal (screenplay)

Genre:

Drama | Sport

Tagline:

The spectacle behind the spectacle.

Plot:

Four marathon runners (one from England, one from the U.S., a Czech and an Australian Aborigine) prepare to run in the Olympic games. The film follows each one and shows what their motivations are for running in the games.

Plot Keywords:

Olympics | Game | Beefcake | Greek | Man Wearing Towel

Cast

Michael Crawford	...	Harry Hayes
Ryan O'Neal	...	Scott Reynolds
Charles Aznavour	...	Pavel Vendek
Jeremy Kemp	...	Jim Harcourt
Elaine Taylor	...	Christine
Stanley Baker	...	Bill Oliver
Athol Compton	...	Sunny Pintubi
Rafer Johnson	...	Commentator
Kent Smith	...	Kaverley
Sam Elliott	...	Richie Robinson
Mona Washbourne	...	Mrs. Hayes
Reg Lye	...	Gilmour
June Jago	...	Mae Harcourt
Don Newsome	...	Cal Wood
Hugh McDermott

Runtime:

USA:100 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

USA:G | UK:U (original rating) | UK:PG (video rating)

Filming Locations:

Austria

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Productions

Trivia:

The role of Christine was intended for Judy Geeson, but illness prevented her from accepting it.

Much as I hate to say anything good about a Michael Winner film...

...this one is actually pretty good. It's biggest advantage is that for once it never actually looks like a Michael Winner film. Working for a major studio and shooting in Scope seems to have held the loathsome braggart's worst (and mostly labour-saving and cost-cutting) excesses in check - few crash zooms, few of the usual continuity errors. Indeed, some of the staging comes perilously close to being imaginative.

This is very much an example of that long-abandoned genre, the doorstop bestseller turned into a large-scale, globetrotting episodic saga, where the locations - Australia, Tokyo, Czechoslovakia, Rome, London - are as much the star as the ensemble cast. Not that the cast give in without a fight. Hidden behind Arthur Pewty moustache and glasses and the worst haircut this side of 'Presumed Innocent,' Stanley Baker gets to be as comprehensively nasty as only he could as Crawford's obsessed coach (hinting at repressed homosexuality at points), Aznavour makes more of his limited screen time than is on the page (and serves as 'The Games' equivalent of the Yves Montand character in 'Grand Prix'), while Jeremy Kemp has a field day as an unscrupulous Aussie bookie exploiting Athol Compton's naive Aborigine runner and trying to fix the Olympic marathon event into the bargain. Crawford fares less well - there's too much of Frank Spencer in his unconvincing early scenes, though he improves greatly as the film goes along - while O'Neal fares better with Erich Segal's words here than he did in 'Love Story.' You even get the chance to see a clean-shaven, youthful Sam Elliott: a sobering sight.

There are inevitable problems: there's little sense of what drives people to push their bodies beyond the limits of endurance, little sense in the camera of what it feels like to run or to need to run. Some of the subplots (most notably the horrendously hip early scenes with O'Neal) are less successful than others, but if you don't like one, another will be along in a few minutes. There's an unusually imaginative use of locations from this most visually pedestrian of directors, particularly in the Rome sequences, and the Games themselves are staged on a suitably epic scale. There's even room for some digs at the political infighting between national teams and the corruption of the Olympic Committee as they put athletes' lives at risk to avoid losing their prime US TV spot - and the accompanying TV payments.

It's not a great film, but it is a very enjoyable one and it would be nice to see a Scope DVD some day.