More American than Knute Rockne?

The next movie on my DVR that's coming up soon on TCM is the sports biopic Jim Thorpe -- All American. That next airing comes tomorrow, January 25, at 4:15 PM.

The movie opens up at a banquet in Jim Thorpe's (Burt Lancaster) honor later in his life, where he's getting a portrait in Oklahoma's equivalent of Statuary Hall or something similar. Speaking on behalf of Thorpe is a former coach of his, Glenn "Pop" Warner (Charles Bickford, and yes, it's that Pop Warner of youth football fame). This, as you can guess, is a plot device to fade into the inevitable flashback which gives the movie version of the story of Thorpe's life.

Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox tribe of Native Americans, living on a reservation in the Oklahoma territory. His father wants him to get a good education so he can make something of his life rather than just making tchotchkes for white tourists to buy. Young Jim doesn't seem to care much about education, consistently running away from school but showing himself to be a pretty good distance runner, or at least one with stamina. Eventually, Dad deals with his problem child by sending the kid to a boarding school the federal government set up back east with a student body of mixed tribal heritage, the Carlisle School

Jim is still a good runner, but knows nothing about football, failing when one of the upperclassmen tries to get him to break a tackle. But he eventually tries again and, showing himself to be a good runner, comes to the attention of the aforementioned Pop Warner. Jim also proves to be good at pretty much every sport he tries, dominating the track team and doing fairly well at baseball however. Meanwhile, in his personal life, he falls in love with nursing student Margaret Miller (Phyllis Thaxter).

But Jim's personal life requires him to work in the summers to have enough money to pay the bills on campus. One summer on the farm, he's invited to play some semi-pro baseball, which is going to have severe consequences later on in life. He doesn't think anything of it and goes back to Carlisle, where he decides that after college he'd like to go into coaching. The only thing is, he's not white, and constantly feels like that white society isn't giving him an equal chance which is why he can't get that coaching job.

And then the chance for glory comes with the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Jim decides that he's going to compete in both the athletics pentathlon (different from today's "Modern Pentathlon" in that it was five track and field events), and the decathlon, an absurdly grueling physical challenge. And yet, Thorpe wins gold in both! However, it's later discovered how he had spent that one summer playing semi-pro baseball. Professionalism was profoundly discouraged in the Olympic movement in those days, so Thorpe is stripped of his gold medals.

This begins a downward spiral; even though Thorpe is playing sports professionally, he's also turning to drink, destroying his marriage and his sporting career. In the movie version of Thorpe's life, however, Pop Warner gives Thorpe the chance to redeem himself.

I'm not certain exactly how much of the story is slightly less than true but for the required dramatic effect; Thorpe as I understand it had multiple failed marriages but it's not really necessary to show marriage after marriage to get the point across. On the other hand, some of the "dramatization" is fairly egregious. Thorpe did not have the happy ending that the movie seems to give him. Burt Lancaster is the one Hollywood actor of the era who had both the star power and the athletic prowess to play Thorpe, and does as well as a white person can playing the character. (I don't think there was anyone even of mixed race at that time who could have been cast.)

Jim Thorpe -- All American is another good example of the Hollywood biopic of the studio era: a movie that's never not entertaining, but also never fully accurate.