Hugh Hudson (1981)

Chariots of Fire tells the story of the athletes Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, Olympic gold medallists in, respectively, the 100m and 400m in Paris in 1924.  The aggressively competitive Abrahams (Ben Cross) has to overcome both the mistrust of his ‘professional’ approach to athletics and the anti-Semitism prevailing in the Cambridge University establishment.  Liddell (Ian Charleson), one of a family of missionaries and a practising member of the Church of Scotland, has to balance his religious commitments and his sporting ambitions.  The film’s point of view is fundamentally confused.  Abrahams and Liddell are set up as (very different) rebels against suffocating, anti-individualist authority.  The director, Hugh Hudson, and the screenwriter, Colin Welland, applaud the athletes’ right to make their own decisions about when and how they run their races.  Yet Chariots of Fire, which isn’t lacking in commercial calculation, is a piece of nostalgia too.  It equally approves the amateur sporting attitudes of the day in the person of the smilingly sensitive, champagne-swilling aristocrat Lord Andrew Lindsay (Nigel Havers).  Based on Lord David Burghley, who competed unsuccessfully in Paris in 1924 but went on to win gold in the 400m hurdles at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Lindsay is a relaxed product of the Oxbridge sporting system which so dominated British amateur sport at the time.   (The film arguably doesn’t make that dominance clear enough.)   David Watkin’s images are infatuated with the vast lawns of Lindsay’s ancestral home and the architectural glories of Cambridge colleges. Each carefully lighted composition makes a fine still but robs the visual scheme of any sense of movement (unfortunate, in a film about track and field) and smothers everything in a golden-age, soft-focus glow.  (The look of The Go-Between (1971) wasn’t dissimilar although Joseph Losey beautified the landscapes and the objects in them for ironic effect.)  There’s a brief mention of the fact that Abrahams and Liddell were part of a generation of athletes who narrowly escaped representing their country in the Great War rather than the Olympic Games.  On the whole, though, Hugh Hudson tends to be interested only in the surfaces of the story’s time and place.

Chariots of Fire went into production before the controversy surrounding the Moscow Olympics so it may be unfair to make comparisons between the British Olympic teams of 1924 (as presented in the film) and 1980.  The determination of Abrahams and Liddell has an echo in the position taken by the athletes who defied the British government’s wishes and went to Moscow last year.  The 1924 powers-that-be in the Cambridge colleges and the British Olympic Committee claim allegiance to ‘amateur’ sporting values, esprit de corps, competing for king and country.  Times have changed in respect of the British Olympic Association (as it now is), in that it supported the athletes throughout the Moscow boycott argument.  The view of the college authorities, however, isn’t so different from the position taken by the British government in 1980.  The Cambridge dons regard the college – as an institution – as more important than any or all of the students in it; the Thatcher government tried to use the GB Olympic team as a component of foreign policy.  Both attitudes detract from the athletes as individuals – or even as parts of a team.

The film begins and ends (creakily) at a thanksgiving service for the life of Harold Abrahams in London in 1978.   In these sequences, the elderly Lord Lindsay (awkwardly impersonated by Nigel Havers:  he’s all right as the younger man) notes sadly, and to the accompaniment of whooshing music, that, of the leading lights of the British athletics team from Paris in 1924, there’s ‘only dear old Aubrey Montague and I left now’.  The effect of this is to suggest the disappearance not only of a generation of athletes but of an attitude towards sport.  Lord Burghley fiercely supported the right of our athletes to compete in Moscow but his screen alter ego’s words will make many people in the audience think how different Lindsay is from the present generation of British Olympic champions.  (The latter were predictably not honoured for their gold medals in Moscow and were ludicrously uninvited to the Royal Film premiere of Chariots of Fire).  There is no irony in the film-makers’ sentimental appreciation of an era of jolly good chaps; yet it’s because Harold Abrahams (who worked in British athletics administration until the end of his life) and Eric Liddell weren’t simply jolly good chaps that they’re worth making a dramatic picture about.

Chariots of Fire is redeemed by the performances of Ben Cross and Ian Charleson – and by the Olympics.  Cross, with his haughty high cheekbones and intimidating mien, suggests a man so competitive that even conviviality is, to him, a form of achievement.  He gives Abrahams a belligerent nobility and a complete inability to appear relaxed.  Colin Welland has supplied Cross with a number of impossibly ‘crucial’ monologues, in which Abrahams explains his feelings about himself and his running in a hushed, resonant voice that seems – even allowing for the character’s humourless self-absorption – overdone.  Some of this exposition is shoddy:  Abrahams tells Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell), his college room-mate, months after they’ve met, ‘This is a photograph of my brother – he’s a doctor’.  The brother is introduced to make a point about Abrahams’ Jewishness – Welland’s script exaggerates the importance of this as a conscious motivation for Abrahams’ self-assertion.  Ben Cross has a great scene after Liddell has beaten Abrahams in the AAA Championships:  the spiralling anger and frustration he feels at having lost and at being a bad loser come through in his fierce articulacy, and when he closes his eyes to shut out the anguish but replays the race over and over in his mind.  As Abrahams prepares in the changing room and on the track for the Olympic final, the visuals are unusually expressive – the sequence is shot in dark tones and the image of the narrow corridor of his lane that Abrahams looks down suggests the claustrophobic aspect of the strong competitor’s tunnel vision.  You look at this strip of track ahead of Abrahams and wonder, with something close to horror, what would have happened if he hadn’t won, if his monomaniac obsession hadn’t been satisfied.

At this point, the film takes off and it does so because of what the Olympic Games mean.   For me, as for many people, winning Olympic gold is a definition of championship unequalled in any other field involving the pursuit of excellence and self-expression.  This is due less to the Games’ ‘noble’ associations in antiquity than to the vastness of the Olympics that one remembers from childhood:  the huge stadiums, all those sports, all those countries, gold-silver-and-bronze hierarchy.  When an athlete wins an Olympic gold medal, the achievement seems to remove them from their present national sporting (and political) context and bind them to all past Olympic champions.  The cliché that single-mindedness is a prerequisite for OIympic success is dramatically embodied in Harold Abrahams.  When the dark strength of his ambition and the feelings one got seeing Allan Wells win the 100m gold medal in Moscow collide in one’s head (as they did in mine), the emotional effect is very powerful.  You don’t lose the sense of what the consequences of losing would have been for Abrahams personally.  You realise why it was worth all the trouble:  he’s won an Olympic gold.  (I don’t know how many people watching Chariots are likely to feel this; it’s almost taken as read that Olympic gold has become a devalued currency as a result of the increasing politicisation of the Games.  I get even more excited by today’s Olympic champions if – as is the case with the six British men who won in Moscow in 1980 – their approach subdues the bickering atmosphere of a modern Olympics as much as their talent subdues their rivals.)

The 100m final sequence is also exciting because what’s gone before has been pretty weak.  Until Abrahams runs his final, the quaintness of the Paris Olympics – the primitive running-track, the small-scale bombast of the opening ceremony – rather undercuts the seriousness of the two heroes’ aspirations.  (The opening ceremony looks no less nationalistic than today – it’s just more amateurishly nationalistic!)  Slow-motion athletics has so dominated the official Olympic films of the last twenty years that the gently rippling muscles and gradually grimacing faces have become inexpressive:  Hugh Hudson’s mostly disastrous decision to show almost all the running in slow motion is revised just in time to let the viewer appreciate something of what it means to be a sprint champion.  It’s fair enough to use slow motion if the race is seen from the athlete’s point of view but that works only if you know what his feelings are.   The replays of the AAA race in the mind of the self-lacerating Abrahams make sense but Andrew Lindsay’s silver medal run in the 400m hurdles, a predictable illustration of agony-and-ecstasy, is merely a cliché:  the viewer doesn’t know enough about Lindsay’s attitude to the race beforehand and there’s no indication of what he felt after it either.  The head-on shots that Hudson also favours often make it difficult to tell who’s in front anyway – and this is irritating rather than suspenseful.  And because Hudson thinks every race has to be a thriller, Liddell wins his Scottish contests, against men wearing kilts and often carrying a lot of surplus body weight, by surprisingly narrow margins.

The vivification of Chariots of Fire carries through to Eric Liddell’s Olympic 400m final, however.   Liddell, who refuses to run the 100m because the heats take place on the Sabbath, has already won the bronze medal in the 200m and the programme of events in the track and field, as presented in the film, is hard to follow.  The heats of the 100m take place on ‘the Sunday after the opening ceremony’ and the 100m final, like the 400m final, is held after the 200m final.  Although Abrahams, who finished sixth and last in the 200m, mentions the longer sprint final, it isn’t shown and we don’t get Liddell’s reaction to winning the bronze.  Ian Charleson’s acting provides as effective a counterpoint to Ben Cross’s as Liddell’s personality does to Abrahams’.  Charleson speaks his lines carefully and the modulations of his voice and facial expression are delicate; he convinces you that there’s a lot going on inside Liddell’s head that’s inaccessible to the outside world.  The early scenes, establishing Liddell as a local sporting celebrity in Scotland, have some nice details – it’s amusing to see the autograph-hunting children wanting the sprinter (and rugby-playing) preacher to sign their sporting programmes and their hymn books.

Liddell is saddled, though, with a baffling family.  His father (John Young) speaks almost continuously in religious aphorisms but delivers them in an oddly casual way.   His sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) is implacably opposed to Eric’s athletics career – until she turns up to watch the 400m final in Paris.  Although it’s a good move to give Liddell – occasionally – a sardonically competitive sense of humour, it’s never clear whether he regards his running as a prelude to missionary work or as a proper cultivation of a God-given talent (or as both).  Even so, the transcendent quality of an Olympic victory blends, in Liddell’s case as in Abrahams’, with the character’s sense of mission – and is no less affecting, in spite of the fact that, because we know that Liddell hasn’t staked his life on athletics success, it hasn’t the same urgency.  The two athletes, temperamentally polar opposites off the track, are very different on it too:  Liddell may have a killer instinct in his running but his flailing style – head back, arms windmilling – is almost humorous.  He’s the sporting embodiment of a holy fool.

There are some disappointments in the supporting cast.  Part of the trouble stems from Colin Welland’s erratic dialogue.  He isn’t at ease writing for the sporty youth of Cambridge – tin-eared lines like ‘Come on, Abrahams, you swank’ (as Harold is about to attempt the ‘college dash’, a lap of the Trinity quad completed between the first and last strokes of the chapel bell at midday) are laboured – and delivered so emphatically they’re painful.   When Abrahams says, of Liddell’s running, ‘I’ve never seen such drive, such commitment – he’s like a wild animal’, he sounds like a Daily Express hack de nos jours (and Liddell isn’t at all like a wild animal anyway).  Ben Cross’s fragments of almost tragic-hero monologue contrast jarringly with the crude, satirical lines supplied to John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as the Masters of, respectively, Trinity and Caius (Abrahams’ college).  This pair, with no company but each other’s, are like the two old men grumbling in their theatre box about The Muppet Show and feature much too often, given how narrowly the roles have been written.  Each line makes its point and it’s always the same point:  they’re self-serving guardians of the establishment, and indolently anti-Semitic. (Welland hasn’t differentiated their two voices at all.)  The duo may be distinguished academics but their knowledge of the Jewish people doesn’t seem to extend beyond the usual:  Jews are over-achievers and good businessmen.

The audience I saw the film with laughed at John Gielgud’s response to Abrahams’ gold medal:  not unreasonably – by this stage, his and Anderson’s performances have become a pantomime routine.  When Gielgud says, ‘I never doubted [Abrahams] would win’, the audience reacted as if amused that he’d been proved wrong and was now telling a whopper to pretend otherwise.  But the Master of Trinity didn’t doubt Abrahams’ ability – he disliked him because he was a Jewish go-getter and probably hated him all the more once he’d won.  (They may no longer be anti-Semitic but today there are plenty of successors to the Gielgud character’s point of view, regretting how ‘professional’ the attitudes of Ovett, Coe et al have become.)   Casting Gielgud has the effect of making the character he’s playing less alarming:  the audience is too aware that this is a distinguished actor pretending to be a nasty piece of work.  Lindsay Anderson, although he speaks his lines self-consciously, holds the camera more strongly.  Resembling an anaesthetised bird of prey, his hooded lids front dead eyes; a mask covers a mask.  Anderson gives the impression of being not so much a pillar of the establishment as a creature immured in its stony fabric.

Neither of the young women in the story fares well.  Hugh Hudson hasn’t controlled the performance of Alice Krige, as Sybil Gordon, the musical comedy actress Abrahams falls for.  Her throaty voice is tiresome, the soft-focus camera overemphasises her blurry beauty and the editor has too often left Krige looking down into Sybil’s soul.  Cheryl Campbell’s talents are familiar from television, especially the BBC dramatisation of Testament of Youth, but, as Jennie Liddell, the script never allows her to articulate her opposition to her brother’s athletics and Campbell’s ability to play combative, not wholly likeable women is wasted.   The professional coach, Sam Mussabini, who puts the seal on the Cambridge bigwigs’ disapproval of Abrahams, was a Londoner of Arab, French, Italian and Turkish extraction and Ian Holm has concocted a highly involved accent for the role.  Holm’s physical presence naturally implies dogmatic yet dependent loyalty and supplies some substance to a film notable for thinly-textured images.  In one of the more imaginative scenes, Mussabini sits in a hotel room away from the Stade Colombes and realises Abrahams has won the gold medal when he sees the Union Jack rising up a distant flagpole.  His explosion of private joy – he punches the top clean out of his hat – will resonate with anyone who has learned remotely that the outcome of a sporting event really is the one that they’ve dreamed of.   The morning after Abrahams’ victory, he and Mussabini sit in a terrasse cafe.   Colin Welland supplies Ian Holm with such clichés as ‘I’ve been waiting thirty years for this’ (in 1924 the modern Olympics hadn’t even been going thirty years) but Holm rises above them:  he manages to suggest that clichés are the best you can manage when you’re lost for words.

In minor roles, David Yelland, with a tight, pretty smile and nervous condescension, is good as the Prince of Wales (as usual, you wish Yelland had been given more to do) and Richard Griffiths, although he appears in only one, obvious scene, has an amusingly imperturbable crassness as a piggy college porter.  There are some familiar faces doing familiar routines.  Nigel Davenport, as Lord Birkenhead, a member of the British Olympic Committee, is rough and ready, and that’s it.    Patrick Magee is bewilderingly miscast as Lord Cadogan, the Committee chairman, but the part’s not the thing with Magee, who adds another manically splenetic grotesque to the list of those he’s already played.   I can’t think of another actor so invariably unaware of his fellow actors in a scene, so unwilling to blend into ensemble playing.  Brad Davis (from Midnight Express) and Dennis Christopher (from Breaking Away) play the leading American sprinters, Jackson Scholz and Charley Paddock respectively.  The other American athletes in evidence are cheery, competitive stereotypes but Davis is as morosely inexpressive winning Olympics medals as he was being sodomised by Turkish prison guards.  Christopher makes Paddock enjoyably eccentric; it’s to be hoped he’ll get better roles than this in future.

The tension that Ben Cross gives off holds the film together.  This isn’t to say that he’s better than Ian Charleson (who’s obviously the more skilful actor) but Liddell is essentially a foil to Abrahams in the dramatic scheme of Chariots of Fire.  It may be an advantage that Cross isn’t familiar from television; he dares to be dislikeable without having the assurance that the viewer knows and likes him from other roles.  Abrahams’ dependence on and trust in Sam Mussabini is offset by a patronising streak and he needs to assert his superiority even when he’s singing in a Gilbert and Sullivan society.  Although Ben Cross looks slightly like Sebastian Coe, he’s playing, in effect, the Steve Ovett role – it’s even the case that Abrahams won’t talk to the press.  The G&S bit is the only saving musical grace of the film.  As well as an abominably crude, anachronistically electronic score by Vangelis, the soundtrack features music that’s clearly been chosen to underline the exportable Britishness of the material.   When the action finally returns to the ‘present’, ‘Jerusalem’ is used as a bridge between church services of 1924 and 1978.    After the emotional excitement of the Olympic finals, many in the audience will be ready to shed more tears at this stage (I was).  One resents, though, the use of ‘Jerusalem’ to force the tears; it is affecting but Hugh Hudson is trying to piggyback on the associations the music already has.  (Those associations now include Monty Python so the attempt is doubly counterproductive.)  ‘Jerusalem’ isn’t appropriate, except to justify the film’s title:  Abrahams’ and Liddell’s victories were intensely personal ones.

It’s difficult to judge how successful Chariots of Fire might be in America.  The priority of the individual Olympic athlete’s conscience will have a bitter resonance for the members of the US team forbidden from competing in Moscow.  What may seem entertainingly exotic to American audiences is the film’s description of the esoteric rituals and language of Cambridge past (and Americans may not notice how lacking in nuance the language is).     But most of the film will surely be too dreary and under-directed to bring it international commercial success.  According to one of the rave reviews in the national press, this is ‘the best British film … in a long time’.  In fact, it’s a typical British film in more negative ways – with its unvarying pace, its plodding storytelling (which fails even to sustain the use of Aubrey Montague’s diary as a simple narrative device), its meticulous recreation of period sets (which always look like sets), its square cinematography, its literal-minded script and its excruciating impartiality (used as an excuse for superficiality).  It’s worth seeing, though.  Chariots of Fire is, in many respects, a bad film.  In the crucial matter of presenting the characters of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, an absorbing success.

[1981]