Stories about athletes produced with the appropriate focus on accomplishment and effort can remind us of the body and its many glories. To the extent sports movies inspire us while delivering the necessary goods in spectacles of exertion we leave theaters happy, reminded of how wonderful it is to be strong. To the extent such sports movies fail in this endeavor we suffer through the boredom of training montages and unconvincing competition at the expense of dramatic threads worthy of interest.

What Chariots of Fire managed to accomplish in its two hour running time is the telling of an interesting human story stitched over various sports spectacles and the backdrop of the world's single largest athletic contest. By telling the true story of two English runners, one who's devoutly Christian and the other who's self-consciously Jewish, the movie focuses on these two men as aspirants to greatness in a difficult period of national upheaval. But it also interrelates their struggles into a competition narrative leading up through the 8th Olympiad of 1924. In the end each man pays for his accomplishments with considerable personal sacrifice and deepening moral fortitude.

Of course none of this goes very far in telling is what we already know about the film long ago made famous in the opening sequence of runners striding down a sandy beach. Namely we know Chariots of Fire on the basis of Vangelis and his electronic score that has been so gloriously associated with the spiritual side of sports. What we tend to forget, though, when we consider the film at all, is its absorbing story of two men battling for greatness with all the courtesy, dedication and conviction of gentleman that is so sorely lacking in the professional athletes of today.

Opening in 1919 with the new class of Cambridge students being assigned to their colleges, Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) is introduced with a chip on his shoulder. He's a gaunt-faced, arrogant, quick thinking man ambitiously directed to prove his Jewishness as a blessing and not a curse in largely Protestant England. He falls in with an aristocratic group of young athletes, each of whom is primed for their education and various adventures on the track.

Lord Andrew Lindsay (Nigel Havers) is the affable hurdler. Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) is the steeplechase runner through whose perspective the story is told. Among them Abrahams is outstanding but together they begin mounting the necessary steps to qualify for the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Far away from Cambridge lives Eric Liddell (Ian Charleston), the so-called fastest man in Scotland and a Christian missionary who values the Lord's work above his personal accomplishments. Disagreeing with his sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) Liddell resolves to glory in his missionary work but only after bringing attention to his church as a Christian runner winning races in the name of his God. He therefore engages in a training ritual that puts him on a collision course with Abrahams who also happens to be a sprinter.

Along the way Abrahams engages Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), an Arab-Italian, to train him for future glories. Much to the dismay of his Cambridge Masters (John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson) he seeks excellence for himself first and foremost and then for his school and country. Opposite him Liddell seeks greatness in the pursuit of God and thus secondarily exalts in feeling himself speed ever faster down tracks filled with fleet footed men.

With the Olympiad fast approaching Liddell learns his qualifying heats will be on the Sabbath. Refusing to run he causes uproar within the Olympic committee but is finally persuaded to run Lord Andrew's quarter mile race, thus opening up the 100-meter dash to Abrahams in his bid for immortality.

With slow motion effects and the volume turned up on Vangelis's soundtrack, Montague finishes out of the top three slots in the steeplechase and Lord Andrew finishes second in the hurdles. Abrahams beats the much-feared Americans in the dash and Liddell pulls out the quarter mile to a triumphal lap that leads the British team home. Over the ending crawl we learn that Liddell went on to missionary work in China where he died at the end of World War II while Abrahams became a lawmaker and broadcaster and died in 1978.

Though not a particularly layered drama in the sense of suggesting allegory, metaphor or other such literary models to enliven the work, Chariots of Fire is a tightly written film that develops its group of young unknown actors with surprising facility. Colin Welland's script is filled with interested historical details like the use of World War I veterans and the somehow implicit, though viewable class structure of England. It also sets up certain early 20th century conflicts within the British Empire made of England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the protectorates and makes ethnic and religious convictions worthwhile points of consideration rather than being merely obvious traits for enlivening two-dimensional characters.

Abrahams and Liddell are well-rounded young men with talents and insight and not the shallow men they might have appeared to be were it not for their screen direction or Cross and Charleson's performances. While Chariots of Fire is an ensemble piece filled out with the likes of Gielgud and Holm, it is carried on the shoulders of its leads that fulfill the responsibility with a sense of purpose.

Taken on the whole the historic struggles of Abrahams and Liddell is now somehow dismissible from a modern vantage point. Neither man was an eccentric or psychotic in keeping with the current standards of our nearly criminal football, soccer and basketball players. Nor was either man was famous for exploits off the athletic field like modern athletes who often times live beyond the ethical bounds of their celebrity. Yet their accomplishments have also been eclipsed so many times over subsequent years as to render them amateurish, all the more so in light of how early Olympiads almost exclusively featured white European athletes.

The lasting value of Chariots of Fire, then, is that it dares to equate athletic pursuits with religious conviction and does so without appearing laughable. It is also focuses on athletes who are worthy of our respect for genuinely pursuing individual excellence as much for the glory of achievement but also because sports fulfill them. In this message about hard work leading to personal satisfaction the film upholds the movie tradition of films like Rocky that lie in its wake.

While athletes are a special class of human endowed with unique physical abilities, they are not above the normal wax and wane of daily inconvenience. They are also subject to the same kinds of doubt, vanity, illness and social influence we find ourselves continually charged with balancing in our daily lives. Chariots of Fire doesn't focus on these nuances of its runners' lives but it does manage to suggest how their experiences aren't conducted in a social vacuum.

Anti-Semitism is present though not predominant. British classicism is a theme but is not oppressive. American chauvinism, the usual thematic by-product of Hollywood movies, is wholly absent. Historical dress and technology is put in evidence with three-piece suits, watch chains, leather running shoes, silent movies and antique cars. Moreover the Olympics become the setting for personal struggles in a public venue that is often made quite personal through memorialization and four-year gaps between games.

The Academy Awards race of 1981 took place in the second year of a new decade that was largely focused on melodramas. After Ordinary People's win for Best Picture in 1980 moviegoers were treated to a few big screen epics and a number of genre reinventions. Among the former was Warren Beatty's Oscar-nominated labor of love, Reds, and among the latter were Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated Raiders of the Lost Ark and the non-competitive noir update Body Heat and anti-musical Pennies from Heaven. The other Best Picture nominees were Louis Malle's Atlantic City, Mark Rydell's On Golden Pond and the eventual winner, debut director Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire.

Giving new voice to an old American warning of, "the British are coming, the British are coming", itself redolent with xenophobic ethnocentrism, many critics of Hudson's movie complained about how it was a foreign film. In this line of thought the Hollywood Foreign Press awarded the picture a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, thereby shutting it out of competition for any of its other awards.

In this way Chariots of Fire is the child of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai and Carol Reed's Oliver!, among others, just as much as it's David Puttnam's production of a Hugh Hudson film. It is an English speaking, non-American, Academy Award winning movie of the year that defied the tradition born from Louis B. Mayer's edict to legitimize Hollywood and is, therefore, an outsider vehicle to be regarded with a measure of moderation.

It remains to us a fine picture and is more enjoyable than certain other Best Pictures like Gandhi and The Last Emperor that don't warrant repeat viewing. Plus it's got that pulsing score by Vangelis to inspire would-be coach potatoes to rise and go to the nearest track for a turn at the quarter mile. Still, it's not a film for the ages even if it fits the bill for a sleepy Sunday afternoon.

Watch it again if you've already seen it because it holds up for what it is as a little drama with bursts of sports spectacle. If you haven't already seen it try and clear some space in your calendar some time in the future. You will undoubtedly feel something aside from indifference and that's worth your time spent being entertained.