Chariots of Fire [VHS] [1981]: Nicholas Farrell, Nigel Havers, Ian Charleson, Ben Cross, Daniel Gerroll, Ian Holm, John Gielgud, Lindsay Anderson, Nigel Davenport, Cheryl Campbell, Alice Krige, Dennis Christopher, Brad Davis, Patrick Magee, Peter Egan, Hugh Hudson: Amazon.co.uk: Video

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

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 synthesised 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

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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

3.9 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant film - lousy DVD, 3 Oct 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Chariots Of Fire [1981] [DVD] (DVD)

Probably one of my favourite films of all time and the film deserves 6 stars!! The cast, acting, filming and music are all superb. Of course there is a lot of 'poetic license' in the content but it captures the spirit of the age beautifully. I must have seen it dozens of times but a tear still comes to the eye when Sam hears the national anthem following Abrahams' victory in the 100 yards dash final and also when Eric breaks the world record in the 400 yards final, a discipline he didn't specialise in.

An interesting fact (not mentioned in the film) is that Harold Abrahams also set the British long jump record which stood for 30 years !!

I already had it on VHS where the sound quality was somewhat iffy (even in a NICAM player) so I splashed out on the DVD. The sound quality if anything is even worse. You have to crank up the volume to hear the dialogue to the point where there is an annoyingly audible hiss, and then the music deafens you when it comes in.

As has been stated before there are no extras (apart from subtitles)

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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars great film, terrible DVD, 31 Aug 2004

By	skeleton bob - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chariots Of Fire [DVD] [1981] (DVD)

Film: 5
DVD: 0

The film is, of course wonderful. I will not go over ground covered in the other reviews here, except to say that this is a beautiful, moving and inspiring film. I remember seeing it in my school hall when I was 9 years old and hadn't seen it again until I viewed this DVD. The years have only sderved to improve the film; comparing it to modern movies is a bit like comparing the 1924 Olympiad to Athens 2004- we seem to have lost something wonderful in the interim.

The DVD, however, is terrible. Others have mentioned the sound: this is not an isolated problem. Throughout the film the speech is muddy, the music harsh and distorted. Often there is mismatch between speech and film- an unforgivable offence. For such a beautiful film the picture itself is grainy; although this may be a deliberate cinematic effect (I can't quite believe that!), given that the sound is so bad it is more likely just poor transfer. As for extras, erm... what extras? I'm not usually too bothered but in a film like this, a Best Picture Oscar winner and a historical tale to boot, I would expect a little more, even a short documentary of the true facts, pictures of the athletes or brief biographies of the protagonists would be nice. Particularly galling as that this is billed as a "Special Commemorative Edition" yet is identical to the previous edition bar a cardboard slipcase bearing the words "Commemorative Edition"!; commemorative of what, exactly? 80 years since the events shown? Then why no documentary abut the 1924 Olympics or the development of the Olympic movement? Or perhaps commemorative of this year's (Athens) olympics? I suspect the words "cash" and "in" are involved here.

I can't help but feel that the producers of this DVD have betrayed the ideals which they promote so highly in this film.

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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Atrocious - what a letdown., 3 Nov 2004

By	TheMelster (Edinburgh, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chariots Of Fire [1981] [DVD] (DVD)

This DVD is awful. I watch on a portable player with headphones and the sound was so bad it made the movie unwatchable. A pity as the film itself is one of the greatest made in britain post sixties (the academy award winning soundtrack it's centrepiece) and certainly a favourite of mine. The picture was a little better but the dark tones are extremely grainy (would definitely benefit from an anamorphic release) and the picture at the start of the film is full of scratches and marks. Is this supposed to replicate a cinema going experience? I have serious doubts about some of the colour values too. This is just laziness by 20th century fox. Other films of this era have been successfully transferred to 5.1 sound and if this was an example of the best film negative they could find to transfer onto DVD then a full digital restoration is urgently called for. Until then, you'll enjoy this movie more on VHS.