unexpected Oscar winner

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2010)

The true story of two athletes in the 1924 Olympic Games is given a gossamer screen treatment and becomes a visually elegant inspiration piece, English to the core, glorifying God and Empire with pomp and circumstance, and no shortage of heartfelt virtue. The subjects are Eric Liddell, a Scottish missionary who ran to experience divine ecstasy, and Harold Abrahams, an English Jew for whom running offered an answer to bigotry. Dramatic momentum demands the two compete, but history is not so obliging, leaving an empty spot at the heart of the film. The big Olympic finale is, as a result, almost anticlimactic, with a token conflict built around the not exactly earth shattering dilemma of Liddell's refusal to race on the Sabbath. Every character is built atop a foundation of noble thought and decent English manners, providing the true source of the film's inspiration – not the competitions or the training scenes, or the absurdly popular theme music by synthesizer wizard Vangelis Papathanasiou, which lacks a certain period flavor, to say the least.