Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson 30 years ago and featuring Colin Welland's landmark screenplay, is still top of my podium when it comes to sport on the big screen
Radio 5 Live has been excelling itself with some reflective features far from the madding crowd of its usual breathless hurly-burly. Acclaim for Steve Bunce's revealing monograph of the recent Amir Khan contest was followed last week by The Glasgow School, a fascinating study of Glasgow football managers' extraordinary domination of England's Premier League, and a telling homage to the boxing film Raging Bull, in which both leading protagonists, actor Robert de Niro and director Martin Scorsese, persuasively relived their input.
The producers and crucial backroom gang at Radio 5 too often modestly decline to give themselves a credit; the latter two features were both presented by the excellent Mark Chapman, an appealingly lucid enthusiast, who let George Graham and Owen Coyle lead the remarkable Glasgow cast-list of half a dozen.
It was a scoop a couple of days before for Chapman to have Scorsese and De Niro chewing the fat ? or rather, mumbling as if in audition for Godfather IV ? and re-evaluating their flagrantly ketchup-soaked biopic of Jake LaMotta these 30 years on. My serious gripe, however, was Chapman's far too reverent prostration with almost his every link to the dogmatic assumption that Raging Bull was universally and unquestionably considered the finest film about sport ever made. Codswallop. It's not even the best boxing film, not even on the top-three podium. Certainly the close-up fight scenes were shot and edited with pioneering and striking elan, and the decision to film in "old newsreel" monochrome was, you might say, vividly illuminating. But Raging Bull was less about boxing than about a psycho-misfit wife-beater's rages and jealousies ? and wasn't a patch on, I'd say, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Robert Wise's 1956 life of LaMotta contemporary Rocky Graziano, or even Sylvester Stallone's various "American dream" reincarnations of Rocky.
Down the four-score years and more since boxer-turned-actor Jimmy Clabby first bobbed and weaved across Hollywood's first flickering screen, boxing has easily been the most popular sport for film makers: Kirk Douglas was a noble cleft-jawed champ; so was Spencer Tracy; Jack Palance was a swell contender, so was Ryan O'Neal and James Earl Jones, Denzel Washington and Daniel Day-Lewis, Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, and Hilary Swank, too, was a memorable Million Dollar Baby ?
By far the cinema's best and most lasting boxing bequest, however, was the brace of alpha-plus knockout performances which veteran director John Huston inspired from washed-up has-been Stacy Keach and wide-eyed beginner Jeff Bridges as the unsurpassable Fat City (1972) demonstrated the bleak realities as well as the touching humours of life around the ring.
Mind you, in doling out Oscars you have strictly to categorise a "sporting" film. There are films about sport and sports people, films with passing snatches of sporting reference in them, and out-and-out sports documentaries. With Fat City glowing on the step for the bronze medal for films about sport, the silver I happily award to the resplendently glorious all-singing all-dancing delight which Bollywood gave us in 2001 ? Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, a knowing, smiling metaphor for the colonial British Raj to learn a lesson. Everything turned on the result of a superbly choreographed cricket match which lasts for an unforgettable hour of screen time. Also the genuinely authenic article was Colin Welland's landmark screenplay for Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson 30 years ago. Can it be that long? Unassailably still top of my podium. By nice coincidence, did you know the Paris Olympics of 1924 opened 87 years ago this very day, 4 May, to begin a bitty, elongated string of events to last until the end of July? The two gold medal races, won respectively by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell and central to the film, were run on 7 and 11 July.
Raging Bull was already the talk of the town that midsummer of 1980 and we were packing to go to Moscow for the Olympic Games as Mrs Thatcher was still vainly pleading with the British team to give them a miss ? something about a dastardly foreign attack of peacekeeping in Afghanistan, wasn't it? ? when my friend Welland asked if I'd like to spend an afternoon with him in a Soho editing suite as he helped cut his forthcoming film about the 1924 Olympics and the British class system. It remains one of my most memorable afternoons. So even nine months before 1981's Royal Command Performance in Leicester Square I was already pretty certain Chariots of Fire was going to be the best ever sports film.
It remains so. Or I am too much of a sucker for happy endings?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/may/04/ragin-bull-chariots-of-fire-films
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