On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen RELOON AND RUNNING by robert asahina ood writing, directing and acting combined to make Chariots of Fire the most impressive feature of the New York Film Festival-perhaps of the entire...
...Imagine you're running on hot bricks," his coach, Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), urges him as Cross gracelessly highsteps his way around the track...
...Stung, Abrahams denounces the "armchair values of the prep-school playing field" and, with his sights on the upcoming Olympic trials, continues alone...
...When I run I feel His pleasure...
...Liddell, whose calm self-assurance could not differ more from Abrahams' intense competitiveness, is introduced after the story is well under way...
...Alas, the authors seem to be anxious about what are essentially rather dull matters...
...the first words we hear are a paean to a better time when there was "hope in our hearts and wings on our heels...
...Part of the success in achieving credibility here is due to Welland's script, which clearly shows Liddell to be in the right in his confrontation over Sabbath-breaking with the British officials...
...One is Duvall's intense performance...
...De Niro, sadly, is an inadequate foil...
...Later, we get to watch Des walk through the door of the mansion, climb a flight of stairs, enter his room, take off his jacket, hang it in the closet and sit down on his bed...
...we never actually see Des at work...
...his tight, nervous grin, his beady eyes flickering apprehensively away from whomever he's talking to, and the aggressively protruding dome of his forehead make Duvall's Tom the definitive portrait of the fallen cop grimly determined to redeem himself through good works...
...The British team officials try everything to change the adamant Liddell's mind, invoking patriotism and allegiance to the King...
...Later, almost in passing, we learn that he is also Lord Lindsay, and his climactic concession to Liddell in Paris reveals (through Welland's careful portrait and Havers' casual elegance) the reach of the term "aristocratic...
...They are crude reversals of the kind of characters Pat O'Brien and James Cagney played in such films as Angels with Dirty Faces, but Dunne and Didion have added a twist: Tom's hunt for the murderer of a prostitute leads him closer and closer to Des, and eventually puts an end to his clerical career...
...The son of a Lithuanian Jew who wanted to "make fine Englishmen of his sons," Abrahams is an outsider-by ambition as well as religion...
...This time out we observe the Spellacy brothers-desmond (Robert De Niro), an ambitious priest rising swiftly in the Church, and Tom (Robert Duvall), a cynical cop sinking slowly in a sea of corruption...
...The movie version is so lifeless, it should have been retitled Last Rites...
...I also don't know whether Charleson ever competed in track and field, yet he certainly runs like a natural, with long, graceful strides...
...The impasse is overcome when another team member, Andrew Lindsay (Nigel Havers), after winning a silver medal in the 400-meter hurdles, gallandy yields his place in the400-meter dash to Liddell...
...In the end, Abrahams wins the gold medal in the 100, and Liddell takes first place in the 400...
...There's no dramatic payoff: We never really learn who murdered the hooker or why, or exactly how Des is implicated in the crime...
...Abrahams, the outsider, commands automatic recognition and empathy, after all, in a way that the devout Liddell, does not...
...Colin Welland's finely nuanced script opens with Abrahams' arrival at Cambridge in 1919...
...What do I aim for now...
...Born in China of a Scottish missionary, he espouses a "muscular Christianity" in word and deed...
...But both qualify for the Paris Games, and Abrahams resumes his training with renewed vigor...
...it took true artistry to make it as good as it is...
...For example, they make much of Des' wheeling and dealing in real estate and local politics-all on behalf of the Archdiocese, naturally-although in their typically literary fashion Dunne and Didion have the other characters talk endlessly about his hustling...
...he is not afraid to grate on our nerves or to appear awkward...
...When Charleson sprints, we see the fierce exultation of a man of faith whose joy springs from the unity of head and heart...
...Few things are harder to film believably than an interesting character sincerely motivated by religious convictions-particularly if those convictions are alien to our experience...
...Happily the second plus, Ulu Grosbard's crisp, confident direction, almost succeds in leaving us no time to dwell on De Niro's failings or the weakness of the script...
...In addition, Liddell's sister, Jennie (Cheryl Campbell), is never fleshed out, although her piety powerfully influences him...
...Similarly, the "Catholic Layman of the Year," Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), turns out to be a crooked businessman as well as a pimp and pornographer involved in the prostitute's death...
...In Paris, Liddell confronts a challenge to his religious beliefs...
...And the diva who becomes Abrahams' lover, Sybil Gordon (the lovely Alice Krige), is on screen all too briefly...
...Lindsay's grace and generosity, for example, are revealed in his first meeting with Abrahams, when the upstart sprinter's attempt to best a 700-year-old Cambridge record for the "College Dash," a run around the Caius yard— initially greeted with anti-Semitic derision-is instantly legitimized by Lindsay's presence (and defeat) as the lone competing runner...
...He is torn between preaching and running until he learns to combine them in the local track meets, turning the events into prayer meetings by addressing the crowds gathered around him in the winner's circle...
...Atone point, the Master of Caius (Lindsay Anderson) reprimands him for hiring a personal coach...
...To win is to honor Him...
...I run to win...
...They are also preparing ultimately for the American team, led by the two fastest men in the world, Charles Paddock (Dennis Christopher) and Jackson SchoMBrad Davis...
...I don't run to take a beating," he muses...
...Des is austere and withdrawn to the point of practically fading into the background...
...Then the character gets lost about halfway through, only to be picked up again as narrator during the trip to Paris...
...Chariots of Fire opens and closes with the romantic image of the British team running together on the sands of the Kent seaside...
...Liddell and Abrahams are so vividly drawn and performed, however, that the film nevertheless exerts an amazing emotional pull, sweeping the viewer along on a wave of sentiment that never tumbles into sentimentality...
...Other characters in Chariots of Fire blossom to life in quickly limned scenes...
...True Confessions unfortunately lacks the tight construction of, say, a Dashiell Hammett thriller...
...I run in God's name," he humbly tells them after triumphing effortlessly, "let the world stand back and wonder...
...These moments of weighty silence are Dunne's and Didion's way of letting us know that True Confessions isn't an ordinary detective flick, that it's laced with existential angst and laden with Catholic guilt...
...Wisely, Cross eschews playing to our preconceptions about the vir-tuousness of alienation...
...But while ripping away the tattered veil of Church hypocrisy may seem daring to lapsed Catholics like Dunne and Didion, it is pretty familiar and boring stuff to the rest of us secular moviegoers...
...I'm going to take them on and run them off their feet," he proclaims defiantly, and he does just that throughout his university career...
...That's something John Gregory Dunne and Joan Did-ion should have asked themselves before adapting Dunne's best-selling novel, True Confessions...
...At the beginning, there is a little confusion as to point of view: The story is at first told in voice-over by Aubrey Montague(Nicholas Farrell), a steeplechaser who befriends Abrahams...
...the Master of Trinity (John Gielgud) chimes in to stress the "way of the amateur...
...1 have no idea what the real Liddell looked like, but no one could better embody the Scottish minister's son of Welland's script than Charleson, with his fair skin, ginger hair and a toothy grin that is engaging and serenely self-satisfied...
...It took some courage to conceive of a film suffused with such frank nostalgia and patriotism...
...He learns that the 100-meter preliminary heats are scheduled for a Sunday, and his faith does not permit him to compete on the Sabbath...
...Set in Los Angeles in the '40s, the story is modeled after the era's hard-boiled detective novels and movies...
...True Confessions does have two plus-ses...
...At the other end of the social scale is Mussabini, the immigrant half-Arab professional so disdained by the Cambridge Masters...
...God made me for a purpose," Liddell declares...
...A fine moment comes when Mussabini, secluded in his hotel room near the Olympic stadium, rises to the sound of the national anthem, which he knows is signaling Abrahams' victory in the 100 meters...
...loyalty, mutual responsibility, comradeship," and hint that Abrahams is, by contrast, "playing the tradesman...
...Charleson's extraordinary portrayal deserves even greater credit...
...Of course, to intellectuals like Dunne and Didion such vulgar concerns as plot are not the point...
...Initially, she seems to be his fiancee...
...You can tell that from the way their meandering script allows Tom plenty of time to brood when he returns to the scene of the crime in search of evidence that isn't there...
...To begin with, the actor looks the part...
...The rivals compete against each other for the first time at the Olympic trials, where the Scot soundly defeats Abrahams in the 100-meter dash...
...or from the length at which Des meditates while he strolls the grounds of the Cardinal's mansion...
...That he needs to be taught how to stride, unlike Liddell, tells us a lot about Abrahams...
...Far more impressive than the athletics, though, is the handling of Liddell's moral code...
...Even in his moments of triumph, however, he encounters genteel anti-Semitism...
...Apparently we're supposed to be shocked at the worldliness of the Catholic Church...
...This conclusion is a rousing, thoroughly satisfying mixture of individual heroism and patriotism (and, incidentally, anti-Americanism): A fluid combination of rapid cutting and slow motion stirs us in the same way that the finalesof Rocky or Breaking Away did...
...The pain evident on Abrahams' face as he runs testifies to Cross' almost equally effective acting in what must be recognized as a less difficult role...
...The screenplay does have some problems...
...On Screen RELOON AND RUNNING by robert asahina ood writing, directing and acting combined to make Chariots of Fire the most impressive feature of the New York Film Festival-perhaps of the entire year...
...Why bother eavesdropping on a confessional if you don't overhear anything worth the effort...
...Its success is all the more striking given the old-fashioned story, based on fact, and the oddly-matched heroes: Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), the two gold medal-winning sprinters on the 1924 British Olympic team...
...He runs to prove himsel f, and t o best his detractors...
...Beating him next time...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 19
