Review: Chariots of Fire

A film concerning the performance of the British track team at the 1924 Olympic Games. The two primary characters are religious Scotsman Eric Liddell, and Jewish Cambridge student Harold Abrahams, who has to overcome prejudice from colleagues and educators (hello Sir John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson). Sir Ian Holm plays Abrahams’ athletic coach Sam Mussabini, Cheryl Campbell and Alice Krige (who looks anaemic) are the two athletes’ respective spouses, Brad Davis and Dennis Christopher play a couple of American runners, Nigel Davenport turns up as a Lord, and Patrick Magee is a seriously cranky Lord.

 

There’s potential for great drama and interest in the story of Olympic runners, but this 1981 Best Picture Oscar winner from director Hugh Hudson (the subsequent “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan”) and Oscar-winning screenwriter Colin Welland (who also scripted “A Dry White Season”) chooses the wrong real-life story, in my view. I just couldn’t get into the story of a bunch of snooty, toffee-nosed Cambridge students/athletes, or their stuffy elitist masters. Not even the fact that Sir John Gielgud and director Lindsay Anderson were playing the racist university heads could rouse much enthusiasm within me. For the most part it bored the pants off of me, and if one runner’s crisis of conscience about running on the Sabbath was meant to be a genuine source of drama, it failed to engage me one bit, true story or not. It seemed like such a piddly issue to me, and it gets resolved in a polite, diplomatic, champagne-sipping fashion (Even Gielgud’s racism is so very wordy and polite that you almost don’t even realise what he’s really saying). It’s a very, very polite film, old chap and boring as fuck. With all this snooty aristocratic foppery, all I could think of was Monty Python’s ‘Anyone for Tennis?’ sketch. Oh, how I wish this film turned out like that. At other times, I was reminded of the portion of  Python’s “Meaning of Life” set at a boys’ school. You really don’t want to be reminded of comedy sketches during a supposedly dramatic work.

 

The only living, breathing things in the whole damn film are the strong supporting turn by Sir Ian Holm, the excellent cinematography by David Watkin (“Robin and Marian”, “The Three Musketeers”, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan”), and the clearly anachronistic but unforgettably iconic, Oscar-winning music score by Vangelis (“Blade Runner”). I don’t normally like anachronistic scores (though, when you think about it, classical scores for historical epics are all anachronistic too), but this is the one time where it works. The opening images in particular, are truly iconic and the score is certainly a wonderful accompaniment to them, even if it clearly comes from the 80s, not the 20s period depicted in the film. At least the score gives the film some much-needed vitality. In fact, the running scenes in the film are excellent in every way. It’s just that I didn’t really care who won. Actually, I do have to say that the director and his editor massively botch the climactic race by getting all “Don’t Look Now” on us and alternating between the race and post-race celebration. What the hell is that? You’re spoiling the result as the race is being run you idiot!

 

Of the actors here, Sir Ian Holm definitely fares best, even if he doesn’t look remotely like a biracial man. As in the case in “Greystoke”, there’s little subtlety to his performance, but he’s good, and clearly enjoying himself. In a smaller turn, Nigel Davenport steals his every scene wonderfully well as always, and despite everything, both Sir John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson are certainly more interesting than the younger set here. Patrick Magee can often be a wonderfully demented and intense presence in a film, but here he looks like his head is about explode, and the performance seems to belong to a different film. Probably a more entertaining one. Of the runners, the only one who stands out is maybe Ben Cross, who is just OK. What sets him apart is that his Jewishness sets his character apart from the rest, he’s never quite fully integrated into the hoity-toity British academia snobbery.

 

Look, it’s kind of the same issue I had with “A Passage to India”: Set in the 1920s, made in the 80s, mostly in the style of the films of the 60s. But it’s also just not my kind of thing. This is a very stuffy, stiff upper lipped film. I just don’t understand why you would take a wonderful concept like an Olympic athletics triumph, and give it the Merchant-Ivory treatment. Surely there are more exciting Olympics stories out there to tell. This one comes from a remote, pompous, and in my view, pretty un-relatable POV. I wanted to be pulled into this triumphant Olympics story, but I was kept at arm’s length. I didn’t care about these tea-swilling, champagne-sipping, hoity-toity twats, and all their foppity fop frippery drove me around the bend. I didn’t really get this one, and I think the fact that it’s one of the least talked about Best Picture Oscar winners today really says something. 

 

Music and cinematography are triumphant, and there are sounds and images here that you’ll never forget. But as drama? It’s pretty unengaging and enervated, with the basic heroic Olympics concept completely at odds with all the Merchant-Ivory-esque foppety fop. Just remember, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was released the same year as this, folks. By far one of the worst Best Picture winners of all-time.

 

Rating: C