Chariots of Fire (1981)
Directed by Hugh Hudson

Film Review

When it was first released in 1981, Chariots of Fire met with almost universal critical acclaim.  An international box office hit, it recouped its modest five million dollar budget ten times over, whilst being showered from all directions with awards.  Re-released in the UK in July 2012, ahead of the London Olympics, the film looks somewhat worse for wear and but it still manages to be an inspiring piece of cinema, one of the very few sports-related films that has universal appeal.  As charming as the film is, it is hard to account for its phenomenal success back in the 80s, and even harder to comprehend why it took the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay in 1982 (it did however deserve its two other Oscar wins, for its costume design and famous score by Vangelis).  Chariots of Fire is one of the most over-hyped and overrated films ever to come out of a British film studio, but to admit as much seems to be about as socially acceptable as shouting rude names at the Queen or bungee jumping off Big Ben in a Winnie the Pooh costume.  One just doesn't do such things.  What the Hell...

Made at a time when stiff-shirted period dramas were all the rage in Britain (on television as well as at the cinema), Chariots of Fire hoovers up all the well-worn clichés and spits them out as if it had invented them.  Whilst the film's production values are hard to fault, there is a notable lack of flair and originality in both the direction and screenwriting, so that the end-result is only superficially pleasing.  The most obvious shortcoming is Colin Welland's script, which struggles to find anything interesting to say about its two main characters (Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams) and so reduces these to blunt caricatures.  One is a principled Christian whose only point of interest is whether he can bring himself to run on a Sunday or not (cue some strained irony involving the future King Edward VIII); the other is a self-promoting Jew with an almost terrifying love of comic opera (hence the endless references to Gilbert and Sullivan, which soon acquires the aural appeal of someone scraping his fingernails across a blackboard).  The secondary characters are even less convincingly fleshed out and the only character who seems to ring true is Ian Holm's wonderfully down-to-Earth trainer.   It doesn't help that most of the time the characters sound like members of a third rate debating society; rather than waste time with naturalistic dialogue, they prefer to throw pompous epigrams and trite moral objections at one another, as if training for a career in politics.

With next to nothing in the way of plot and characterisation, it is incredible that the film manages to hold our attention as well as it does.  Hugh Hudson's direction may not be inspired but it keeps us interested, and the engaging performances from a likable cast of largely unfamiliar actors (including a young Nigel Havers) make up for the shortcomings on the script front.  Ironically, the thing that dates the film most is Vangelis's electronic score - this was a great innovation for a period drama at the time, but now it just anchors the film where it definitely does not want to be, in the cultural abyss that was the early 1980s.  The sequence at the top and tail of the film, depicting the athletes running together on a stretch of beach accompanied by Vangelis's music, was once considered iconic but it has since been parodied so much that it is almost impossible to watch with a straight face.  Whilst it may be flawed (and appears increasingly so over time), Chariots of Fire is a film that is extremely difficult to dislike, but that doesn't automatically qualify it to be a classic. Compared with the other prominent British biopic of this era - Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) - and subsequent period pieces from the Merchant-Ivory team (Howards End (1992)), it is pretty shallow.

Film Synopsis

Harold Abrahams, the son of a successful Jewish financier, encounters anti-Semitic prejudice when he arrives at Cambridge University in 1919 but he soon impresses his peers and the college staff with his athletic prowess.  Eric Liddell is the son of Scottish missionaries and divides his time between a successful career in rugby union and his religious duties.  Both men qualify to run in the 1924 Paris Olympics, and both are determined to win.  After he loses a race against Liddell, Abrahams hires a professional trainer, Sam Mussabini, to coach him.  When he learns that the heat for his race is to be held on a Sunday, Liddell decides to put his religious principles before his personal ambitions and withdraws from the contest.  It is left to the Prince of Wales to remind him of the duty he owes his country...