England's Turn of the Century, 24 years late

Rating: 7/10 (2 October 2004)

CHARIOTS OF FIRE is a fascinating film on many levels; it shows us an England that no longer exists. It is, at the same time, a nostalgic glance back into the dying Victorian era, and a rude, boisterous emergence into the modern world. It shows the last gasps of the ideals that made England THE imperial power of the 18th & 19th centuries; ideals that were made obsolete by a world where there were no further empires to be won.
Eric Liddel and his Olympic aspirations are a nearly perfect allegory here. Liddel is the product of the last great (and disastrous) crusade of the Victorian era, World War One. The war not only very nearly exterminated an entire generation of British males in the name of extending the notion of British global moral superiority, but it set into motion the social and economic forces that had to inevitably lead to the retrenchment and ultimate withdrawal from an empire that England had won over the previous 200 years.
As part of the elite at the top of the British social structure, he was not directly or personally touched by the carnage, death and sacrifice imposed on the lower classes by Victorian ideals, but from his privileged position he saw, and UNDERSTOOD, the meaning of it all... the Victorian concept that an Englishman must be willing to toss aside as worthless anything that he holds dear as personal values (as tradition had demanded that he construct) in favor of the demands of King and Country, was clearly proved to him to be a false standard for judging ultimate right and wrong. Make no mistake, Liddel was definitely portrayed as a man whose roots were deeply sunk into the soil of the concept of imperial England, but he also clearly saw it's flaws and limitations in the new century. Only this understanding made it reasonable, and POSSIBLE, for him to stage his rebellion that chose his religious convictions over the pressures imposed by the demands of King and Country.
Liddel's was the patriotism made by and for the realities of a new century, paradoxically based on his acceptance of an ancient emotional drives that far predate the existence of the British Empire.
If the turn of the century had been a time for the rest of the world to embrace the concept of self determination, the dying Victorian era was struggling to maintain it's grasp on English social values, trying desperately to cling to the past. The struggle would go on for another 20 years, as was shown in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. The old HAD to eventually make way for the new if England was to survive as a major nation on the world stage.
Harold Abrahamson apparently came from a very different background from Liddel... he was part of the merchant class ascendancy in England, struggling against the snobbery based discrimination of the older, traditional upper classes for social acceptance. A second strike against him was the fact of his Jewish background that inspired the polite, proper, but nonetheless odious antisemitism and racism that is part and parcel of the racial superiority complex of the English social order.
Just the same, Abrahamson, like Liddel, was part of the Brave New World that England was emerging into... as different as their backgrounds were, Abrahamson and Liddel were unlikely brothers in arms in the underground fight for determining England's social future.
Especially powerful is Abrahamson's meeting with the Masters of Trinity and Caius. The meeting is an intense but low keyed, very proper, and "civilized" battle in which the full ugliness of racism and antisemitism is exposed in the old England. Abrahamson shows, as Geilgud had put it earlier, that he is a member of "a stiff necked people", in his insistence as the "socially accepted" Jew being brought to task by his "betters", that he continue to employ a personal (and clearly superior) trainer, Sam Musabini. The full ugliness of racism is exposed when they question Musabini's ethnic background, and shown by Guilgud's sarcastic relief as the Master of Trinity that Musabini is not wholly an "inferior" Italian, but is alloyed with an (also inferior) Arabic heritage. The scene is only one step removed from a Nazi expressing disgust over non Aryan background... a hint at the future that would mark the final demise and decline from dominance of the Victorian mindset in less than 20 years.
In a way... as the social future of England is clearly expressed in the triumphs of Liddel and Abrahamson, those very same triumphs also express a joyous recognition of all that was great and noble in in the old social order. It's a culmination of an era that gives pride and dignity to the accomplishments of the departing age at the same time that it also shows the promise and possibilities of that new age which is just emerging.
It may be trite and trivial to say it, but CHARIOTS OF FIRE is sort of a Coming of Age story for a nation.