Friday's Old Fashioned: Chariots of Fire (1981)

In founding the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin drew considerable inspiration from time spent in England, where being a well-rounded individual, nay, gentleman was emphasized, and people, nay, gentlemen competed not to win but for glory of sport. All this can sort of be seen in “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 film recounting the triumph of two British runners at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, the last Games during which de Coubertin served as President of the International Olympic Committee. And I’ve always wondered if that is at least in part why Hugh Hudson’s film almost always turns up on those lists citing the worst Best Picture winners. It’s an anachronistic world presented in “Chariots of Fire,” as white as the British Athletics uniforms, one in which amateurism in the face of professional sports is the noblest ideal, and featuring a character whose greatest crisis is deciding whether to run on the Sabbath. Contextually, this is unlikely to appeal to a modern audience. I get it, as the kidz say. But viewing “Chariots of Fire” strictly through that lens sells Hudson’s artistry short.

The exquisite period detail is juxtaposed with the celebrated score by Vangelis, one utilizing contemporary synthesizers bringing to life the idea of these athletes advancing the species, emblematically moving us into the future, which is what that opening credits sequence, still astonishing 43 years and a hundred million parodies later, depicts. Likewise, Hudson and his screenwriter Colin Welland also juxtapose two British runners, Scottish missionary Eric Liddell (Ian Charles) and Cambridge student Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), opposing sides of the emotional coin. The former is the one who will not run on the Sabbath, because he runs for God, to feel His pleasure, he says, and which Hudson renders in his climactic Olympic race that comes across so much less about traditional drama than a moving merger of athletic and spiritual excellence, a higher plain than winning or losing. Abrahams, on the other hand, is beset with an all-consuming thirst for victory that if you look past all the vintage tweed, appears conspicuously modern. He even hires a professional coach (Ian Holm), running afoul of the stuffy lords of Cambridge.

It is those same stuffy lords of Cambridge that we see toasting from afar not so much to Abrahams’ victory at the 1924 Paris Olympics as to how their institution can ride the coattails of that victory. Hudson then cuts straight to a close-up of Abrahams in the aftermath of his win, staring into space, his expression blank, the end point of what he has worked for and, therefore, the end of everything, in a way. And for a moment there, honestly, you can’t quite tell if he’s happy, or sad.