Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s a saga of determination and achievement, Chariots of Fire:
and next week’s film, The Glory and Misery of Human Life:
Reviews of Chariots of Fire:
Reel Musings Reviews says:
Visually breathtaking, with each frame mimicking a grand painting, and technically crafted with serene precision and care as we are transported back in time to the years spanning between 1919 and 1924, Chariots of Fire is absolutely sublime and a masterful work of artistic historical cinema. Combining qualities of sports genre films with biographical cinematic conventions, the 1924 Paris Olympics serve as the backdrop and primary basis of Chariots of Fire as two British athletic runners grapple with internal conflict arising from their respective religious identities and social class status. Delicately and intricately directed by documentarian Hugh Hudson in his first feature narrative film, each aesthetic of the filmmaking process is expertly utilized by Hudson and his crew in meticulously recreating the aristocratic England of a bygone era, the lush and vibrant green landscapes of Scotland, and the Parisian Olympics, which of course were of a much smaller scale than the modern games.
Meat Hook Cinema says:
I can also report back from the dark side known as ‘respectable cinema’ that Chariots rocked my world. No, I won’t be abandoning my weird tastes in movies just yet and swapping my slasher movies for copies of fare such as Gandhi and Citizen Kane, but it’s hard to deny the awe, majesty and emotions that Chariots evokes.
Variety says:
What with two social “outsiders” hogging the glory for dear old Albion, the snobby establishment doesn’t come off to raves. Yet at the same time, “Chariots” is also a warm salute to the best of British tradition and values, as well as vivid testament to individual integrity and supreme determination. Welland’s sympathetic screenplay generally succeeds at emotional honesty, time and again inducing a tug or choke but without confusing schmaltz for decent sentiment.
Hudson’s direction gets it all together with admirable assurance and narrative style. No arty tricks, no self-conscious posturing. His use of slow motion and freeze frames for the various racing sequences turns out to be a valid device for sharpening emotional intensity and competitive agony, not the cliched gimmick it might have been.
My take:
A well-made and epic film but one that ultimately left me disinterested. I’m totally unathletic for one thing so sports is always a hard sell, but I can appreciate the struggles of the runners. The thing that really turned me off was the depiction of the world of privilege that these men inhabited.
I don’t have a sophisticated class analysis of the film. I understand one of the characters is an underdog. It’s more of a gut reaction. The white suits, the serious University dons talking of matters of appearance, the well-heeled crowd at the games. It left me a bit cold. I’m glad I watched it, but I won’t again: ⭐.
Director: Hugh Hudson
Writer: Colin Welland
Plot (Spoilers!):
A working-class Jewish man breaks through a ceiling in 1920’s British society and enters Cambridge. He is proud, ambitious, and focused. He encounters bigotry but also earns a place in the hearts of his fellow students. He is a runner and is intent on making it to the Olympics.
A Scottish man, born to missionary parents, has delayed his plans for a missionary life in order to run competitively at Cambridge. His pious sister is heartbroken, but he tells her he runs to please God. It is, after all, God that made him fast.
The two men train and compete fiercely, each following their separate paths. Their hard work pays off. They are invited to represent Britain in the 1924 Olympics, where they each earn a gold medal.
***
Bonus: The Real Chariots of Fire
‘The Real Chariots of Fire’, from Silver River and post produced at Prime Focus, uncovers the true story behind the Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fire which traced the story of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, who both won gold medals at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The hour-long documentary aired on ITV1 on Monday, 2nd July.
But did you like the music ? I think the music is the best part of the film I’ve never seen again.
It’s the only thing about the movie that I remember. But the Olympic underdog/class conflict theme is evergreen with a film by George Clooney about rowing being a recent example.
Guess I need to watch it again after all these years.
Yes, Carolinian, I immediately thought of “The Boys in the Boat.”
The film, and the book, were big in Seattle, both because of the University of Washington there, and the strong rowing culture that still exists. You can tell its spring when the boats are out on Green Lake at dawn!
The music was written by Vangelis who scored a lot of films-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vangelis
Still got a coupla of his CDs kicking around.
I guess you could say my man Zimmer is the spawn of all that synth that immediately says “eighties.”
But Zimmer has a core crew of actual musicians and uses real instruments where appropriate (that’s a real church organ sounding in Interstellar). Many composers now are “spawn of Zimmer.”
Film Tracks reviews are not kind to Zimmer, e.g.:
https://www.filmtracks.com/titles/inception.html
He phones it in sometimes and Inception is not one of my faves. Interstellar may be his best Nolan score and there’s an Interstellar extended version album to be found on Rumble that is superb. His long ago Thin Red Line score is also superb.
And of course always as Kael said, “taste is the great divider.”
The music doesn’t appeal to me to be honest. It’s sappy to my ears. I remember hearing it as a kid and thinking it was boring.
Thank you for this Hugh Hudson entry (who died 3 years ago).
Apart from CHARIOTS –
The film that probably ruined his career if you could say so was the extraordinary “REVOLUTION” shot 4 years after “CHARIOTS OF FIRE” which I would as well recommend. As far as I remember the studio and the critics hated REVOLUTION and thus the audience got no real chance to watch it. And it got buried since. Americans and English alike did not forgive Hudson that a Brit dared make a film about 1776.
Pauline Kael:
“(…)This is a certifiably loony picture; it’s so bad it puts you in a state of shock.”(…)”
It´s a period piece about the American Revolution, with an unlikely main protagonist played by Al Pacino.
CHARIOTS´ success (7 Oscar nomin., 4 wins, huge box-office) had granted Hudson a certain freedom.
He used it to make the successful GREYSTOKE (which I can´t find on YT) with Christopher Lambert at that time not well known – a modern take on the Tarzan novel. Followed by REVOLUTION.
Wiki on CHARIOT revenue:
“(…)Its gross of almost $59 million in the United States and Canada made it the highest-grossing film import into the US (i.e. a film without any US input) at the time, surpassing Meatballs’ $43 million.(…)”.
GREYSTOKE made $46M with a budget of $28M.
Wiki on REVOLUTION:
“(…)Revolution cost $28 million to make, and was a box-office bomb, grossing $346,761 in the United States.
Goldcrest Films invested £15,603,000 in the film and received £5,987,000, losing £9,616,000. This poor performance played a key role in the collapse of Goldcrest Films.(…)”
Wiki on the casting of GREYSTOKE:
“(…)Hudson tested four people as Tarzan: a Danish ballet dancer, Julian Sands, Viggo Mortensen and Christopher Lambert. Hudson said it came down to Lambert and Mortensen. “I just felt that Christopher was the right person. He had this strange quality – somehow, because he was myopic, when he took his glasses off, he couldn’t really see properly so he would seem to look through you into the distance.”
Andie MacDowell made her film debut as Jane. “The camera loves her, and I just felt she was the right person”, said Hudson. “Of course it’s a risk, but then the whole project is a risk. If I’m a good director I’ll get the performance I want out of her.”(…)”.
A similar risk was to cast the Italo-American Al Pacino in a historic epic such as REVOLUTION which would have been associated with a different kind of actor at that time.
REVOLUTION, mediocre quality on YT:
117 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLz7N6Jr60s
Wiki has a a separate article on the soundtrack of CHARIOTS OF FIRE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_Fire_(album)
Film score reviewer Christian Clemmensen has a critical take on that score:
https://www.filmtracks.com/titles/chariots_fire.html
Re South Carolina gal Andie McDowell (from Gaffney 15 miles away)–her dialog in Greystoke was dubbed by Glenn Close due to Andie’s Southern accent.
The Andie dynasty continues with her daughter Margaret Qualley who is currently a thing.
And while I’m free associating Gaffney was chosen as the home of Kevin Spacey in the Netflix House of Cards. The town’s water tower–shaped like a peach or a tush from certain angles–may have played a role.
Yes, the Peachoid is a highlight of the drive along that stretch of I-85.
I saw this film when it first came out and thought it was, well, just dull. (I’m totally unathletic, too, and so, for me also, films about sports are a hard sell.)
As for the Vangelis music, it’s really difficult for me to think of a theme I like less. I suppose it’s supposed to sound “sweeping” and “triumphant” or something but, to me, like the film, it’s just dull—there’s a part that repeats three times and resolves, another part that repeats three times and resolves, and, well, that’s it. Maybe most music is like that but, in this case, it’s just hard to listen to, well, for me, anyway. Of course, that’s a matter of taste—some might love the theme.
I found the opening very funny. People all running along the St. Andrews beach, a town that had exactly one Jewish family (mine).
That is a really funny comment! Thanks!
Slightly OT: It’s always fun when you know the actual filming locations in a movie.
I recall, in one case, characters in some crime drama set in San Francisco are supposed to be coming out of a local Muni (metro) station underground but the film crew used a staircase to an underground parking garage (which happened to be nearby the purported location) instead. And in the “original” Hannibal Lecter film, Manhunter (1986), which no one remembers, there’s the exterior of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art doubling as Lecter’s high-security psychiatric institution. (It makes for a pretty swank mental institution, if you ask me.)
LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Museum_of_Art
Some of us were less than taken by the Richard Meier opus–since expanded apparently.
Speaking of humor.
MAD magazine had a “letter to the editor” when “Chariots of fire” was launched.
As I recall it read:
“We want to protest the movie Chariots of Fire.”
“We had the idea first.”
(Signed) Ford Motor Company – Pinto Division
I much prefer the soundtrack to Blade Runner from him:
https://youtu.be/EsmHr45H204?si=nphx1j-Ddyssjl7r
Chariots of Fire is one of the few films that has intruded into my life from the silver screen.
First, I remember watching it when jt was released as a small boy and being gripped – and that music! As evocative of the 1970’s as the Jaws theme and the Star Wars march. There was a great fever around its oscars. It was also part of a wave of nostalgic period pieces like the Merchant Ivory productions, as Britain walllowed in nostalgia and Royal Weddings and Mrs Thatcher destroyed the country to make it safe for capital….
The social tension, the desire and emulation and rejection driving the film, is very legible if you are British. I wanted from early on to go to Cambridge. I wonder if CoF was a part of the formation of this desire – even if ironically Trinity Cambridge refused filming in Great Court and the scene of them running around the court to beat the chimes of 12 o’clock is actually filmed at Eton College school. I could never visit Trinity without thinking of the race scene: I suspect every student of my age had that feeling.
It made its producer David Puttnam a household name in Britain and twenty-odd years after I saw the film and ten since I first stepped into Great Court, I found myself working for him in one of his subsequent endeavours. He was chairman of what included a venture fund and I had some meetings with him where his entrepreneurial instincts were good even if he didn’t know the first thing about venture capital and he always had some good stories to tell about trying to keep the show on the road as a producer. One of our meetings was to see an inventor if amphibious buses who had built a beautiful next generation craft but spent all the money for the customer’s fleet of six on the prototype!
David Puttnam went on to produce some other films on topics of interest to NC, such as The Killing Fields (Pol Pot in Cambodia) and Local Hero (grassroots environmental resistance to corporate despoilers).
“.. Mrs Thatcher destroyed the country to make it safe for capital….”
“We had to destroy the country to save on business expenses.”
It’s a beautiful period piece, and I remember not long after it came out Ralph Lauren was all about that style and my friends and I were crazy about Laura Ashley. Anglophiles all. What most impressed me was the actor Ian Charleson, who made a religious missionary character feel deeply honest, real and not offensive. He wrote some of his own lines.
Ian Charleson was a great actor. He was also the first British star to have died of AIDS, which makes him the analog of Rock Hudson in Great Britain. He famously played Hamlet in the final stages of his disease. He was 40 years old when he died much too young.
A miserable, reactionary film, made like all Puttnam’s films for the American market. And what a shame to see Lindsay Anderson, once a great and inspirational director, acting in it.