PUMPING IRON
Directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore
A movie about bodybuilding? You've got to be kidding. All those grotesques walking around in bikini briefs, narcisstically flexing those grossly overdeveloped muscles. Disgusting? Besides, they're all gay, aren't they? If the general public thinks about bodybuilding at all, it is likely to be in such derisive terms. So besides indifference to the documentary form, Pumping Iron must also overcome smug prejudice about its subject manner as well.
Hidden World. One hopes the picture makes it past these barriers, for it is a very good film, beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and — to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term —charming. Yes, charming. For its makers have resisted the most common of the temptations visited upon journalists when they attempt to penetrate the small, half-hidden worlds of the strangely obsessed: they do not patronize and they do not satirize. Rather, for 85 minutes they report objectively, yet sympathetically, on a small group of dedicated people who have found happiness in the camaraderie of the gyms where they devote themselves to sculpting their lats and pects and stuff to preposterous perfection. When they are not tugging and hauling with an infinite variety of weights and pulleys, they are perfecting their posing routines for the contests with which they mark off their years, trying to psych themselves up and —gently, slyly —psych their opponents out for them.
The film's first part explores several amateurs' preparations for the annual Mr. Universe contest. It features a particularly appealing loser named Mike Katz, sometime pro footballer, currently a phys.-ed teacher and devoted family man. Katz is one of those nice guys who finish fourth in all sorts of competitions. Here he is done in by a psych artist named Ken Waller, a not-too-merry prankster who steals bits of his opponents' costumes in order to upset their concentration before they go on-stage to face the judges. Katz's musculature may, on one level, set him irrevocably apart from the rest of us, but his sweet sporting spirit as he sits trying to absorb his defeat while graciously applauding a trickster's win is something with which any weekend athlete who has been one-upped by an allegedly friendly opponent can identify.