Amazon.com Essentials:
The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best
picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold
exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination
and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who
ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant
Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes
him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a
highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the
institutional hurdles of class prejudice and anti-Semitism. There's
delicious support from Ian Holm (as Abrahams's coach) and John Gielgud
and Lindsay Anderson as a couple of Cambridge fogies. Vangelis's
soaring synthesized score, which seemed to be everywhere in the early
1980s, also won an Oscar. Chariots of Fire was the debut film
of British television commercial director Hugh Hudson (Greystoke) and
was produced by David Puttnam. --Jim Emerson
