MadTom

Over a decade ago, I used to share a vacation home in the Poconos in one of the municipalities adjacent to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, so I'm fairly familiar with Jim Thorpe's life story. I've visited his tomb in his namesake town a couple of times, and am sympathetic over his having been stripped of his two Gold Medals for the Decathlon and Pentathlon from the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. That said, I'm giving this supposed "documentary" the lowest rating possible because it was largely a bunch of cheap shots at other prominent Americans, by a bunch of kooks who had their own agenda, spewing their conspiracy theories as fact when they can be disproven with a little simple research. This includes two men who would be among the most iconic US Army generals of World War II in Europe three decades after they were in Jim Thorpe's life.

But first I'll address one of Thorpe's other associates. Avery Brundage was Thorpe's age and was on the 1912 US Decathlon and Pentathlon teams with him in Stockholm, finishing five places behind Thorpe in the Pentathlon and 15 places behind in the Decathlon. He then went on to become president of the American Olympic Committee from1928 to 1948 and then president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. This "documentary" essentially accuses Brundage of everything bad that happened in Thorpe's life from 1912 onward, from stealing his sneakers in Stockholm (which resulted in Thorpe famously performing the entire games with two mismatched shoes he had scavenged from the trash), to revealing to the press Thorpe's having played baseball semi-professionally which triggered the revocation of his medals, to rejecting every appeal of the revocation while president of the American or International Olymic Committees up to the end of Brundage's tenure at the IOC 19 years after Thorpe's death. Several of Brundage's biographies acknowledge that much of his actions could be interpreted as racist, but no evidence exists that he stole Thorpe's sneakers or ratted him out to the press, and his rejection of the appeals appears simply to be consistent with his belief in adhering to the letter of the law disqualifying professional athletes from the Olympics. Unsubstantiated supposition of some decades-long sore loser grudge rooted in racism is ridiculous.

The next target of the conspiracy theorists is future General of the Army and 34th President of the United States Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, who as a second-year cadet at West Point played halfback on the varsity football team against Carlisle Indian Industrial School, of which Thorpe was the star athlete, in the fall following the Stockholm Olympics. The "documentary" states as fact that the West Point team and particularly Eisenhower planned not just to outmaneuver Thorpe but to intentionally injure him severely enough to end his athletic career, just because Thorpe was an American Indian, and saying Ike actually admitted to that fact in his memoirs. Then they state that the plan backfired and Thorpe knocked down Ike and injured his knee enough to end his football career. NO SUCH STATEMENT OR ANYTHING RESEMBLING IT EXISTS in ANY of Ike's writings, and the athletic and medical records at West Point document that Ike's knee injury that took him off the football team took place a week later in a game against Tufts University. Also, Jim Thorpe was at least 30 pounds heavier and at least 3 inches taller than Ike, making Ike highly unlikely to be the ideal candidate to permanently cripple him.

The slam against the second iconic World War II Army general was practically irrelevant to the life of Jim Thorpe and clearly included only to present the future general in the worst possible light. George S. Patton was also a US competitor at the Stockholm Olympics, in the MODERN Pentathlon, not to be confused with the Classic Pentathlon in which Thorpe won the Gold. It was thie first time the event was included and was more military in orientation, consisting of horseback riding, fencing, running, swimming and pistol shooting. Patton had graduated from West Point in 1909 and had been on active duty as a cavalry officer since, and was the top contender for the US team. (He was actually a mentor to Eisenhower between the World Wars, until Ike surpassed him in rank in 1942.) The "documentary" paints Patton as a miserable failure at the Olympics, falling far short of his expectations especially in shooting. Absolutely nothing to do with Jim Thorpe except that he was also on the US Olympic Team at Stockholm and won the Gold for the OTHER Pentathlon. In actuality, Patton was the ONLY American competitor, PLACED FIFTH OUT OF 42 PARTICIPANTS, and was the only non-Swedish competitor in the top 7. Here's the kicker: the shooting portion consisted of five shots each at a series of different bullseye paper targets. The judges ruled that two of his shots missed their paper targets completely, but on both targets the four shots were tight enough to put a hole in the center between them which Patton appealed on the basis that the fifth bullet passed through the gap; the fact that the fifth bullet did not put a hole elsewhere on the paper was prima facie evidence that it was more likely that it went through the hole. But the judges turned down the appeal. Had one of the bullets counted, he would have won the Bronze and if both, the Gold.

At least under Eisenhower's command, Patton won the 1944 TOUR DE FRANCE while setting distance and speed records, then only a few months later won the Gold in the Combined Arms Snow Marathon in the 1944 Winter Olympics at Bastogne, Belgium. Both feats cemented his and Ike's place in world history. As Patton himself said, "Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance!"

I can't think of any athlete before or since with anything close to the success of Jim Thorpe in multiple sports and athletics and at his level of competition. He certainly didn't need to make anyone else look bad to make himself look as great as he was, and he certainly doesn't deserve to have anyone stoop so low as to do that ostensibly on his behalf seven decades after his death.

Hallmark movies run the qualitative spectrum from bombs to masterpieces. One thing they do particularly well is adapting the premises of old literary classics to modern times. (My personal favorites of those are the ones adapted from the works of Jane Austen.)

I agree that the two lead females, Alison Sweeney and Ashley Williams, were a little too long in the tooth for their characters, but I'm not sure any two other actors would've done a better job with the chemistry between themselves and with the other characters. Both are in their 40s; Sweeney's character Erica is supposed to be an American who moved to Barcelona ten years earlier after breaking up with her boyfriend, so is at least in her early 30s and nothing says she can't be a bit older than that. Not a deal-breaker for me. Williams's character Anna is supposed to have just published her second romance novel, which readers and critics say indicate (correctly) that she has neither been to Barcelona nor ever been in love. Not a deal-breaker for me either; speaking of Jane Austen, she was one of the greatest romance novelists of all time and, granted that she lived over two centuries ago under the mores thereof, by all indications she died a 40something virgin; she was a great success remembered to this day while Anna's budding writing career is sinking fast. So age of the characters does not make for implausibility.

The promos for this movie didn't give any hint that there was going to be any kind of adaptation of an old classic. I thought this was going a be a run of the mill Hallmark Rom-Com for the first several minutes of the film. I was pleasantly surprised when the plot twist revealed that adaptation, which I recognized immediately, and was doubly surprised by the fact, since this was a movie set in Spain with two American characters and the remainder of the characters being Spanish, that the old classic was a French literary work about French characters, totally unexpected.

I don't want to have to post a Spoiler Alert, so as an unpublished novelist myself (I've been procrastinating on self-publication of one novel for literally decades) and having read a number books originally written in a foreign language, I've always wondered how accurate the English translations I've been reading were to the original work. Let's just say that the answer to that figures heavily in the plot and leads to the adaptation of the old classic. I can hardly wait for the second half of the story next weekend. Enjoy!

When Hallmark Channel reran this under the title ONCE UPON A WINTER'S DATE on Memorial Day weekend 2025, I read the movie description and immediately realized it was a remake/variation/rehash/ripoff of the 1993 Bill Murray-Andie MacDowell classic GROUNDHOG DAY. AS I've said on a number of other reviews, nothing wrong with that. Even with the mandatory formula for ANY Hallmark movie where you know within the first twenty minutes which two characters are going to be coupled up at the end and that the movie ends with a kiss. This is where the old metaphor kicks in that Life isn't a destination, it's a journey. We already know the destination is the kiss at the end, and we know that the plot of original movie being remade is the parameter of the journey. The trick is to deviate enough in the journey so that it's not totally predictable and stale and a rehash of the previous versions.

I'm always looking for these types of movies on Hallmark to see if there's any new twist that makes it noteworthy. VALENTINE'S AGAIN/ONCE UPON A WINTER'S DATE gets extra kudos in that it actually breaks out of the Hallmark formula of knowing within the first twenty minutes which two characters are going to be paired up as a couple and kiss at the end. Even after the disastrous date on main character Kat's first iteration of Valentine's Day, you still don't know for sure if the guy she had the date with is NOT the guys she ends up paired with and kissing. This movie keeps you guessing almost to the end. That alone makes this movie noteworthy and a standout for Hallmark.