Chariots of Fire was hugely successful, though. It ended up making nearly $60 million at the US box office alone. It also won four Academy Awards, one for its original score.

I remember enjoying the movie, and as a fan of the early music of Vangelis (who also scored Blade Runner), I was curious to see if and how 25 years later the film would hold up.

Minimal Appeal

I put Chariots Of Fire on my watch list, but didn’t get around to buying the BluRay until its 30^th anniversary. It took another five years before I actually watched it.

Do you have that, too? Some films you really want to see, yet you never end up being in the right mood. Perhaps because of all the reasons Michael Hauge gave when he labeled the movie a fluke.

This so-called logline in IMDb doesn’t help, either: “Two British track athletes, one a determined Jew and the other a devout Christian, compete in the 1924 Olympics.”

Whoever wrote it, must have missed an act or two. The first half of the story takes place in Cambridge from 1919, and shows Jewish student Harold Abrahams’ determination to counter the prevailing anti-Semitism, by proving he is the university’s best runner:

“I’m gonna take them on, all of them, one by one, and run them off their feet.”

Director Without A Clue?

The movie still works, mostly because of the sheer obsession of its main players. And running is in a way very cinematic. (Tom Cruise has known this all along) But what is it about?

Tom Stemple wrote an amusing piece about two video interviews, one with writer Colin Welland, and the other with director Hugh Hudson. After he listened to Welland, he concluded: “Religion is the main theme of the film. Then I turned over the tape and listened to Hudson. He talked at great length about the mechanics of shooting the film. It became clear from how he talked that he did not have a clue what the movie was about.”

Really? It’s not that hard to see what this is about. As the act one curtain falls, in a textbook declaration of the hero’s objective – the ‘Outer Journey’ if you wish – Abrahams vows to “run them off their feet.” It is a fairly open goal, but in good tradition, the mid point will specify it further as ‘winning at the Olympics’.

The theme is clarified in the movie moment that I will show you below. While adversary Liddell runs because he finds his inspiration within, in his faith (“when I run, I feel His pleasure”), for Abrahams the motivation lies external.  It is all about how others perceive him. His faith defines him negatively. He wants to fight prejudice by proving himself worthy, through running – to an Oscar®-score.

Oscar To The Greek

Synthetic soundtracks usually don’t age very well, and their composers rarely achieve more than cult status, e.g. Carpenter, Moroder, Wendy Carlos (for Kubrick), Tangerine Dream (for Michael Mann) and Vangelis. But did you know that Hans Zimmer’s early scores were largely synthesizer-based?

Nothing is more subjective than music, and I was expecting for Chariots Of Fire’s Oscar-winning score to be quite dated.

At the opening credit, my fear was confirmed.

As we see the Cambridge men running on the beach in slow motion, over Vangelis’ main theme, I cringe. The tune has been played to death, to a point that it distracts.

Director Hugh Hudson made a beginner’s mistake: images and music never carry any intrinsic cinematic emotion. Unless an emotion is set up through a character’s experience, the moment is shallow. To the mainstream audience at the time, this music cue appealed as a catchy tune, rather than an effective movie score. A lubricant into the actual movie. Thirty-five years on, it no longer works (to me).

Ars Electronica

That opening image with the famous tune may be what most punters remember about the movie, but it’s also devoid of emotion. We don’t know these guys yet. Pretty pictures, but we don’t really care.

To my surprise however, the rest of the score holds up fairly well, and one scene in particular jumps out.

There is a moment twenty minutes into act two that really works in terms of emotional – and musical – payoff. 

Chariots Of Fire – Movie Moment

Abrahams and Liddell meet for the first time in London in June 1923, when they race against each other in a British open. Liddell beats Abrahams, who takes it extremely badly.

Over the rhythmic clapping of the grandstand seats, sharp electronic shards from the legendary Yamaha CS80 synthesizer emphasise our Hero’s pain, alternating with more subtle filtered ‘pads’.

In that moment, Sybil appears, to comfort her lover. Now we see what our Hero’s real problem is: “I don’t run to take beatings. If I can’t win, I won’t run.” She realises it is all about his ego, and this is exactly what he needs to resolve before the movie is over.

“Ring me when you’ve sorted that one out. Try growing up.”

-Karel Segers

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Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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Soon after I first watched this movie, I had the fortune of meeting with composer David Raksin. He told me an anecdote that teaches us a thing or two about the issues that even seasoned filmmakers face. It also shows the power of the composer.

Preminger wanted to show how the main character – a detective – was falling in love with Laura. Or rather, he was falling in love with Laura’s portrait. She herself had been murdered. The critical scene didn’t work, and without it, the entire movie would fail.

The director asked the composer to fix it, by writing a suitable music cue.

Raksin struggled under the pressure. He lacked inspiration, as he was in a dark space. His girlfriend had just broken up with him … in a letter.

About to throw in the towel, Raksin sat down at the piano, and put the letter on the music rack. He read it again, while improvising a melody.  Raksin ended up composing what would become one of the most recorded love themes in cinema history.

Was it all a dream?

The story is that of Detective McPherson, who investigates the murder of Laura Hunt. In the process, he realises he is more than just intrigued with the victim.

About forty minutes into the film, for the first time McPherson is alone in Laura’s flat, and while he is admiring Laura’s portrait on the wall, the famous love theme plays.

This moment sits right at the movie’s mid point, and it could have had everything of a traditional love scene, if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that the lover is in fact … dead.

At the end of the scene, the detective has a drink and falls asleep, which has spurred some to claim that the rest of the movie could be interpreted as merely a dream.

In an alternative cut of the film, the ending had a character suggest that the whole story had been imagined.

As you may know, both options are among the worst possible ways to end any story, so the original cut was restored.

In love with a painting

While McPherson gets more and more familiar with Laura, her surroundings and her entourage, a knock on the door introduces Waldo Lydecker, a close friend to Laura, and a potential suspect in the murder case.

If Raksin’s love theme didn’t already communicate what was going on between McPherson and the painting, Lydecker states it in his own acerbic manner: “You better watch out, McPherson, or you’ll end up in a psychiatric ward. I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.”

The entire film abounds in spectacular, quotable dialogue, the type Robert McKee would urge you to cut.

Admittedly, the film was made over seventy years ago and today, the lines sound theatrical. In particular the character of Lydecker boasts a language that you would now only hear on the stage. Yet it sounds sharp, to the point, and appropriate for this character, a writer of short stories – and a narcissist.

Preminger deserves the credit for bringing this delightful character to the foreground, against the wishes of the original playwright Vera Caspary.

More proof that the last thing a movie adaptation needs to do, is honouring the original.

A remake of Laura has been announced, and before you panic: the writer is James Ellroy, genius behind Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.

-Karel Segers

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Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered, like the real world. But unlike most of real life (which tends to be badly written and edited), in a good film a set of themes emerge which embody a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story.

It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all others in terms of making the eventual movie as “cinematic” as possible: establishing point of view. The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters.

The writing needs to lay the groundwork for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the blueprint.

The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters.

Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the mill. But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad dreams.

The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice, with a range of “emotions” and “moods.” And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of elements elsewhere in the story.

None of this good stuff is likely to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows it to happen.

The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the “time border” between the “little boy” period and the “grown-up” period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his perception of them.

The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice.

Over a transition from one period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much intrinsic appeal or value.

On the other hand, when a sound changes over time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness grow exponentially.

-Randy Thom

Photocredits: Graphic Stock

Randy Thom

Randy Thom is the Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound.

He has been nominated for 14 Oscars, and received 2. One for The Right Stuff, and one for The Incredibles.