Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen NOT CRICKET QUO VADIS, LADS? Chariots OF FIRE. It's such a pretentious title. What does it mean? As the World Turns. Edge of Tomorrow. It's that kind of title. (At least Upstairs,...
...This isn't the first scene, only the credits, but already we get the message...
...When the Masters of Caius and Trinity (Lindsay Anderson and Sir John Gielgud) call Abrahams in for a friendly chat about the English tradition of amateurism, he angrily tells them to get stuffed, and goes his own way...
...Chariots centers on the rivalry for the laurels between A-brahams and a Scot named Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson...
...At least Upstairs, Downstairs makes literal sense...
...He must set aside his scruples in this matter for the good of England, they say...
...Liddell, who is a Scots fundamentalist, is trying to cling to the constraints of his religion...
...The jaunt along the beach, hair flying, spume and sand splattering over their running whites, isn't so dashing as it seems...
...They're just trying to keep warm...
...Chariots has been made to have the kind of ultimate pointlessness of something seen in weekly installments...
...He goes after what he wants without hiding his ambition or limiting his means...
...For me to improve the scene this way wouldn't be cricket, though, because the movie is bound by the facts...
...Edward's own historic refusal to run seems foreshadowed by Liddell's refusal...
...When the British team arrives in Paris for the games, it happens that the qualifying heat for Liddell's event is to be held on a Sunday...
...Only Abrahams is aware, as we see when he corrects a verger at Caius College who addresses him by a juvenile nickname...
...Passage of time and all that...
...The entire affair really is too shame-making, isn't it...
...In the next scene, we are back in those halcyon postwar days...
...Don't you see...
...The rebuff draws, as soon as Abrahams's back is turned, an anti-Semitic remark...
...It is that all of England is to be represented by these rosy-cheeked lads, and not just in some long-forgotten Olympics...
...He's sorry, he says, but he can't break the Sabbath...
...Truth to tell, one of them is not so rosy...
...Abrahams has a mistress (Alice Krige...
...The first scene therefore delivers it again, from a pulpit...
...Liddell has a sister (Cheryl Campbell...
...The pulpit is in St...
...We know that's where we are because as Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) arrive at Cambridge Station, every baggage porter is wearing a hideous prosthesis or bearing the scars of some appalling wound...
...Do you feel as if you're carrying the whole of the British Isles on your shoulders...
...These runners are the last flowers of Victorian England, blooming too late, though they never realize it, coming into bud after the frost of the First War...
...Actually, they're mere mortals, even less-Englishmen-hardly more than boys, a track and field team in training for the Olympic Games in the 1920s...
...In elevating soap opera to the status of Masterpiece Theater, our own times also seem to have elevated badly constructed stories like this one into unvarnished truths...
...He's quite the swarthy bloke, though that's part of the message, too...
...The fact is that after one event in the Olympic trials in England, the two men never ran against each other again...
...That's the spirit...
...Since being in the war, he states coldly, he isn't addressed thus...
...Perhaps Chariots succeeds better than I think as a national saga, the true epic of modern England...
...In England...
...Despite the little Union Jacks sewn on each runner's togs over his heart, director Hugh Hudson and script-writer Colin Welland fear we haven't got the message yet...
...A repercussion of history with more immediate consequences for us is that sticking to the true story of the Abrahams-Liddell rivalry makes for a whopping anti-climax...
...While Abrahams trains demonically to be a world-class runner, Liddell takes up running reluctantly, switching over from being his country's greatest rugby wing after he wins a track meet hadn't even planned to enter...
...Wanting to be the fastest runner in England, he privately employs the best coach there is (Ian Holm) to train him...
...Abrahams represents a new age...
...The credits still aren't over, but maybe we could skip ahead a scene or two...
...Keep moving, lads...
...One wonder's, listening to the ragging that Liddell gets, what old Cadogan-Lord Curmudgeon-would have to say to Edward a dozen or so years hence...
...Abrahams is doing everything he can to break out of the constraints his religion places upon a man in English society...
...Montague and most of the others take rather scant notice...
...Or is it...
...Or is it...
...In spite of the differences between the two men, Liddell also ends up challenging the old deferences and paternalism...
...Since most of the movie revolves around Abrahams's obsessiveness about beating Liddell next time out, it really is too sick-making for them not to race again, isn't it...
...That's the spirit...
...David Yelland's resemblance to the young Edward is uncanny...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...
...Keep running, lads...
...The film is a welfare state all by itself...
...That takes great stamina in a film with fifty speaking parts, three credited "Location Managers," four "Art Directors," four more "Film School Attendants," and five "Wardrobe Assistants...
...This film opens with all the young chariots wheeling along the beach, singeing the surf with their speed...
...At a reception for the team Lord Birkenhead (Nigel Davenport) tells Liddell that the Prince of Wales (David Yelland) would like to meet him...
...Taken all together, this band of runners stands for the state of the nation at a particular historical moment, a rather prolonged one that separated Matthew Arnold's two worlds, "one dead, the other powerless to be born...
...Heavy pressure is brought to bear...
...They console themselves with another discreet round of anti-Semitism...
...Don't let the climate, meteorological or moral, get you down...
...You may well be, judging by the credits...
...The occasion is the funeral many years later of one of the runners we've just seen in their prime...
...They're at a seaside resort, after all...
...Chariots is a true story, as the presence of the Prince of Wales reminds us...
...Birkenhead, the Prince and an insensed Lord Cadogan (Patrick Magee) get Liddell alone and turn on the heat...
...It's a good thing that the laddies in Chariots are distance men, for while you've been reading this, they've still been trying to get through the credits...
...A number of survivors are present as well, come to recite the Ode to an Athlete Dying Old...
...Mary's in the Strand, a church symbolically occupying the middle of the road, a memorial traffic jam of a church snarling one of London's main thoroughfares, a monument to obstruction in the High Street of history...
...Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies has the final word on this era...
...A Jew and a veteran, he has no time for any of the customary niceties or English hypocrisies...
...But he stands his ground against them all...
...In my impatience with Chariots, I found myself rewriting this scene where Liddell confronts the Olympic Committee...
...They are easy to tell apart...
...I wanted one of Waugh's flighty girls to pop in from the reception and pass a remark...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 22
