Film

...Most sports films deal with obstacles overcome, describing a successful struggle against long odds that results in social or spiritual transcendence...

...Her search led her to Gdansk and to an encounter with Birkut's son (Maciek), a shipyard worker, who informed her that his father was dead...

...We all tend to admire people of principle, but I suspect there is more than a little conservative calculation in the promotion of such a hero for contemporary audiences...

...Chariots is not an especially well-paced work: There are three beginnings, and much of the film is devoted to exposition...

...This theme can be found in Chariots in both its forms, but the obstacles that confront the protagonists are never given enough substance to persuade us that they are real impediments to their achievements...

...and in the end he sets off to convert the Chinese...

...Nor does his status as a Jew seem to interfere with his selection for the British Olympic team...

...The sequence of events leading up to the 1980 uprisings is revealed through the inquiries of Winkiel (Marian Opania), a radio-journalist and government pawn, who is sent to Gdansk to penetrate the ranks of the strikers and do a hatchet job on Maciek...

...Chariots, we are informed from the outset, is "a trite story"—two stories, actually, brought together by the filmmakers and by historical circumstance...

...What's more, it makes striking use of those talents for which the British are famous— excellent performances by theatrically trained actors and exquisite representation of period detail...

...At the beginning of the film he reprimands—albeit genially—a young boy for playing ball on Sunday...

...But a bit of churlishness is in order...

...It is an attractive, well-acted, upbeat movie—just the sort of film entertainment for which a well-heeled, formally dressed, middlebrow audience can stand up and cheer...

...This bruising, powerful motion picture, with all its rough edges, makes most other current filmmaking appear trivial...

...By exploiting these talents in a movie of broad popular appeal, Chariots has been heralded as a sign that the moribund British film industry may be coming back to life...

...It is not so much a sequel as a completion of Wajda's 1977 Man of Marble (reviewed last March in The Progressive), into which he has been able to incorporate some recent Polish history that he was forced to exclude from the earlier work...

...While remaining conten-tiously Jewish, he seeks to overcome the anti-Semitism of the British establishment and achieve social acceptance by becoming a national hero...

...In the course of his investigations, the "forgotten" events of the past decade of worker struggle are brought to light: the abortive student demonstrations of 1968, the bloody suppression of the workers' uprisings in 1970 (including, at last, an explanation of the death of Birkut), and the genesis of the 1980 strike at the Gdansk shipyards...

...These are merely symptoms of less than masterful direction, though, and much less bothersome than the implicit politics of Chariots of Fire, which mark it as a capital achievement of the Margaret Thatcher school of filmmaking...

...Man of Marble traced the frustrated efforts of Agnieszka, a brash, ambitious film student, to uncover the true story of Mateuz Birkut, who was celebrated as a model worker in the 1950s, apparently fell out of favor, and subsequently disappeared...

...Wajda reportedly intended to do some re-editing after Cannes, but was dissuaded by Polish friends and colleagues who so identified with the film that they couldn't bear to see even a millimeter cut...

...It seems churlish to greet such a film with less than wholehearted admiration...

...But when these old frumps try to call him on the carpet, he simply tells them off and continues to pursue his goals...

...The documentary material gives Man of Iron a rare sense of immediacy, and provides the viewer with a feeling of being an actual witness to historic events...

...Shooting began in January of this year, and editing was completed just in time for exhibition at the Cannes Festival (where it was awarded the Grand Prize...

...In its promotion of essentially Victorian values and its resolute focus on the past, Chariots of Fire strikes me as the most reactionary film I've seen in some time...

...The original ending of the film, hinting that Birkut had been killed in the worker demonstrations of 1970, was suppressed by the Polish authorities...

...Moreover, there are a few real-life figures, including Walesa, who play themselves in the film...

...The filmmakers have compensated for the absence of authentic dramatic conflict by engaging in emotional manipulation of the audience: We are seduced into identification with the film's heroes, fed a goodly dose of national chauvinism, and, at the conclusion, put through the wringer of no less than four climaxes...

...Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) is a student at Cambridge, and the son of wealthy Lithuanian Jews...

...A credit title informs us that "the people in this film are ail imaginary, but the situations are real...

...And the visual image is powerfully reinforced by Vangelis Papthanassiou's soaring musical score...

...The problem is that Charleson portrays the character so appealingly that one can easily fail to see in this fundamentalist preacher-missionary a 1920s precursor of the Moral Majori-tarian...

...The narrative traces the paths of two British sprinters, each with something to prove, on their way to competition in the 1924 Olympic Games...

...In Man of Iron, Wajda has created a work that is part invention, part reproduction, and part documentation...

...In fact, the only anti-Semitism we witness is the wry condescension of a couple of aging dons...

...Moreover, the filming of the races—the only real scenes of action—leaves much to be desired...

...Eric Liddell (Ian Charle-son) is a devout and highly principled Scottish missionary who "runs for God" because "when I run I feel His pleasure," He almosts forfeits his chance for glory by refusing (despite intense pressure from the Prince of Wales) to run in preliminary heats on the Sabbath...

...But this is not quite the case—Wajda has incorporated into his fictional construct a good deal of documentary footage: shots of armored personnel carriers rolling through the streets of Gdansk in 1970 and of worker rallies ten years later, as well as television footage of an Edward Gierek speech, and several shots of Lech Walesa...

...Walesa appears as a witness at the fictional marriage of Maciek and Agnieszka, as well as in documentary records of demonstrations and negotiations with government and Party officials...

...If his religious convictions prevent him from running on Sunday, he has made his choice and can feel righteous about it—but why should everyone else in the world be obliged to observe the Sabbath as he deems proper...

...Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron is a political bombshell, with the force and epic sweep of the Soviet masterpieces of the 1920s...

...It is no secret that Man of Iron was made hastily...

...Maciek (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) have been married for several years (he is now a second-echelon leader of Solidarity, and she has given up earlier ambitions to devote herself to the free union movement...

...In the end, as the historical record attests, both young men win gold medals and are acclaimed as worthy representatives of Britannia...

...In Man of Iron, the essential historical gaps are filled in, and the story is brought up to the present...

...Man of Iron is the most significant work yet from one of the world's most talented directors at the height of his powers...

...What it all seems to add up to is that Abrahams, who already has just about everything one could want in life (he also wins the love of the film's most beautiful woman), just cannot be content until a bunch of silly snobs accepts him...

...It's an ambition for which I can muster little sympathy...

...Harold Abrahams's great wealth ensures him a privileged position in, English society...

...The obstacles Liddell encounters seem to be largely of his own making...

...There is no suggestion that he has had to struggle against prejudice to gain admission to Cambridge, or that he is in any way snubbed by his peers...

...the viewer is deprived of a feeling of speed...

...While each of the films can stand by itself, together they form a single panoramic examination of the political role of the media in contemporary Poland, the suppression of significant parts of the national past, and the history of working-class and student dissidence from the Stalinist 1950s to the emergence of Solidarity and the signing of the Gdansk Charter...

...For the most part they are shot head-on, with a telephoto lens, which tends to flatten out the image and reduce perspective...

...It is morally and emotionally uplifting, a fervent celebration of old-fashioned virtues (character, sportsmanship, gentlemanly amateurism)—"a hymn to the human spirit," as Gilbert Adair wrote in Film Comment...

...The film begins in the midst of the 1980 Gdansk strike...

...It becomes especially difficult not to regard the movie as an exercise in escapist nostalgia if it is viewed in comparison with Britain's other entry in the Film Festival, Ken Loach's Looks and Smiles—a gritty black-and-white fiction film documenting the problems of adolescents in contemporary Sheffield...