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Chariots of Fire made British film unbeatable – then we ran out of breath

Ben Cross in Chariots of Fire - Rex
Ben Cross in Chariots of Fire - Rex

When Chariots of Fire came out in 1981, it was received as the salvation of British cinema. After a decade of gloom, paranoia and ever-ballooning budgets in Hollywood – the neurotic Seventies, in all their dark glory – Hugh Hudson’s dreamy vision of the 1924 Olympics (starring Ben Cross, who died earlier this week) was propaganda for everything British films could be.

As the Eighties began, the cinema industry was mired in executive extravagance and auteurist folly. This reached its peak with Michael Cimino’s epic western Heaven’s Gate (1980) – endless, doomladen, and costing a fortune. It bankrupted United Artists and forfeited the keys to the kingdom.

Britain had had a tawdry and shocking decade all round, in which the dwindling fortunes of Hammer Films and the Carry On series couldn’t fight off competition from the small screen. UK cinema admissions nearly halved between 1970 and 1980. Sex comedies and TV spinoffs lunged desperately to stem the tide, but only the Bond films and Monty Python’s cheeky ventures were keeping business afloat.

In this context, the banner success of Chariots of Fire was a shot in the arm for homegrown production that flooded the industry with fresh optimism. The film was modestly budgeted, at £3m. It also had no major stars (Cross and up-and-coming stage actor Ian Charleson were cast as the two lead sprinters, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell).

The producer, David Puttnam, had stumbled on the story of gold medallist Liddell when he was housebound with the flu, then commissioned actor-turned-scribe Colin Welland for the research-heavy job of writing it. Meanwhile, Hudson hadn’t yet directed a feature – his previous job on a film set was second-unit work on Puttnam’s Midnight Express (1978).

From the unpromising chaff of these collaborations, something magical sprouted. The heavy favourite at that year’s Oscars was Warren Beatty’s Reds – a three-hour-fifteen-minute history lesson about communists, on six times the budget, which felt in every way like a Seventies vanity project crawling late across the finish line. It was meant to win Best Picture.

But voters rebelled, turning their backs on depressing politics and the whole era of the auteur, and basking instead in the plucky craft – and hopefulness – of Hudson’s underdog debut. There was enough grit to it as historical portraiture – with the snobbery and anti-Semitism thrown at Abrahams, for instance – to off-set the lyrical uplift and give it the substance of something Oscar-worthy.

Colin Welland with the Oscar he won for Chariots of Fire, in 1982 - Getty
Colin Welland with the Oscar he won for Chariots of Fire, in 1982 - Getty

Chariots of Fire would go on to make over $60m worldwide. “The British are coming!”, Welland famously declared when he bounded up to collect his trophy for Best Original Screenplay. For a few years, his prediction didn’t seem wide off the mark.

A year later, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi reinforced British cinematic clout with eight Oscars. The rare feat was to convert that heavy-duty historical biopic into a genuinely enormous popular hit, not least in India. Puttnam then curated a small, handmade treasure in Local Hero (1983) and risked a more downbeat story with The Killing Fields (1984), which did pretty respectably.

Successes like these come in cycles, though, and the golden glow that Chariots of Fire cast over the first part of the decade came to seem like a false dawn. Hudson’s Tarzan epic Greystoke (1984) scraped by, but his follow-up, the Al Pacino war epic Revolution (1985), was a career-ending flop of overwhelming magnitude. It was dubbed “Britain’s Heaven’s Gate” – a sure sign that the lessons of Hollywood’s previous decade had not been intelligently absorbed.

The slump that followed made it de rigueur to mock Welland’s Oscars speech retrospectively, as a moment of hubris destined to come back and bite all concerned. But the further we get from Chariots of Fire itself, the more an added layer of nostalgia seems to build up around it, like radiant moss.

Give it a mere 15 years, and we’ll be as far away in time from the film’s production as the 1924 Olympics were on the other side. In the continually overcast history of British cinema, something about this clean, inspirational fable – winning medals for its makers, not just its characters – continues to shine through.