A British Import

Rating: 8/10 (30 October 2004)

Films made in the U.K., or anywhere else, don't necessarily strike a nerve with Americans. Such films -I except the James Bond series- require the willing acceptance of a foreign cultural context to which U.S. viewers often seem stubbornly resistent. "Chariots of Fire" is the happy exception, a trip over the ocean and back into time which millions made in 1981. Even those who'd never heard of Corinthian spirit appreciated its display here.
Tall, thin Ben Cross, who would make a perfect Sherlock Holmes someday, gives a spot-on performance as grouchy old Harold Abrahams, as disagreeable as a postwar sports administrator as he was when competing in the Twenties. The late Scotsman Ian Charleson has a harder task, making something other than a wide-eyed innocent of Eric Liddell, rugby/track star and Presbyterian missionary. The two actors, and their respective characters, chisel out definitions of confidence in completely opposite ways.
Oddly, the producers chose to commission an avant-garde electronic score from Greek-born Brit Vangelis. If everything else was so scrupulously authentic, down to having a veteran track coach teach the actors how to stride in a way long obsolete, why not program music appropriate to the Jazz Age?