Chariots of Fire

Chariots of Fire is a celebration of a number of things, not the least of which is a kind of highly committed, emotionally involving drama that knows the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. It also introduces more a than half-dozen talents, mostly English, and celebrates the British film industry... It`s to the credit of both Mr. Hudson and Mr. Welland that Chariots of Fire is simultaneously romantic and commonsensical, lyrical and comic. David Watkin`s photography is very fine, and the track sequences - even to someone who has no real interest in track - are charged with poetry. Though Chariots of Fire is mostly about the very privileged, it is so carefully balanced that it doesn`t deny the realities of lives less privileged. It`s an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.

Vincent Canby, 1981, New York Times

Four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Script, Costumes, Music.

Hudson was born in London, the only son of Michael Donaldson-Hudson and his second wife Jacynth Ellerton from a family of Shropshire landowners, with West coast Scottish connections . He was sent to boarding school at the age of about 7 and thereafter he was educated at Eton. In the sixties, after three years editing documentaries in Paris, Hudson headed a documentary film company with partners Robert Brownjoh and David Camell, producing, amongst others, award winning documentaries A for Apple and The Tortoise and the Hare. He then embarked on a rewarding career in advertising, producing and directing , alongside fellow British director Ridley Scott, many prizewinning adverts. This allowed him entrance to the world of film-making. His first job was as a second-unit director on Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. In 1973-1975 he wrote and directed Fangio. A life at 300 Kms per Hour. A seminal film about motor racing seen through the eyes of Juan Manuel Fangio - 5 times world Formula 1 Champion, and considered by the sport to be the greatest driver of all time. In 1979-1980 Hudson directed what is now regarded as his most accomplished and well-known film, Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two British track runners, one a devout Christian and the other an ambitious Jew, in the run-up to the 1924 Olympic Games. The film is said to have revitalized the fading British film industry, and it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Hudson earned a nomination for Best Director. His old friend and colleague Vangelis produced an Academy award winning score for the film. After this success, Hudson’s later productions included Greystoke – The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), and Revolution (1985), which depicted the American War of Independence, and which jeopardised what could have been a prosperous career in Hollywood for Hudson. In 2008 Hudson re-edited Revolution giving the film a narration spoken by Al Pacino, and finally creating the film that was envisioned by Hudson and Pacino 20 years earlier. It had been forced into distribution before it was finished - much against the wishes of its star and its director. Philip French writing about the new version says ... Revolution was misunderstood and unjustly treated on its first appearance twenty years ago. Seeing it again in the director’s slightly revised version it now strikes me as a masterpiece - profound, poetic and original. Hudson’s film should take it’s place among the great movies about history and about individual citizens living in times of dramatic social change. One hopes it will finally find the wide audience it deserves. In 1988 he directed a 2½ minute advert for British Rail, a parody of the Post Office Film Unit’s 25 minute documentary, Night Mail, made in 1936. The much loved poet W. H. Auden wrote his famous verse specifically to fit the film’s footage, that cleverly showed the enormous scale of BR’s daily operation and the structure of the ‘sectorised’ business. The opening sequence features the northbound Travelling Post Office with Auden’s original verse, narrated by Sir Tom Courtenay. Music by Vangelis. In 2006 he was reported to be working , together with producer John Heyman, on an historical epic based on the life of the monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The film centres around their tempestuous relationship. He was planning to direct an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s book Norwegian Wood in the near future. However, it was announced in July 2008 that French-Vietnamese film-maker Tran Anh Hung would direct an adaptation of the novel. He is in active development of a film adaptation of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, to star Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Gerard Depardieu. He is also in development of A Bend in the River a screen adaptation of Nobel Prize winner V.S.Naipaul’s book of the same name. His first marriage was with painter Susan Michie at the Chelsea Register Office on 25th August 1977. In November 2003 he married actress Maryam d’Abo. August 2007: in Nimes, France, Un Realisateur dans la Ville, a festival created by Gerard Depardieu and Jean Claude Carriere to showcase the work of one director, featured the work of Hugh Hudson, showing eight films over 5 days and premiered an Al Pacino narrated version of Revolution called Revolution Re-visited. In October 2008 at the Dinard Festival of British Film his work is to be honored. As a tribute five of his films will be shown , with My Life so Far opening the festival. HUGH HUDSON REVOLUTION The history of the British film industry has been less a series of New Waves than a succession of brief surges propelled by singular individuals responding to historical circumstances. One of the most significant was initiated in the late 1970s by David Puttnam, a major figure in the advertising world. There had been a lull in British filmmaking after an American-financed boom in the 1960s, and Puttnam decided the time was ripe to launch some ambitious directors of television commercials onto the big screen to challenge the Movie Brats who were taking over Hollywood. The principal filmmakers Puttnam had in mind were Hugh Hudson, Ridley Scott, Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker. All four went on to direct major box-office successes, but the biggest hit of the Puttnam-produced debuts, both critically and commercially, was Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (1981). It won four of the seven Academy Awards for which it was nominated: best film, original screenplay, music and costumes. Clutching his Oscar on stage in Los Angeles, the Chariot screenwriter Colin Welland uttered his famously hubristic challenge, ‘The British are coming.’ Born in 1936, Hudson was the oldest of Puttnam’s protégés and by any reckoning the most complex. He was born into a wealthy, long-established landowning Shropshire family and educated at Eton. After two years National Service with a crack cavalry regiment in Germany he turned against his privileged background, refusing either to join the family business or go to Oxbridge. Film was his passion, and he studied editing in Paris before working in advertising, directing award-winning TV commercials and making documentaries, usually for companies he helped create. The most celebrated (though rarely seen) documentary is the stunning Fangio: Una Vita a 300 all’ora (1975), a stylish portrait of the Argentinian Grand Prix driver Juan Fangio. One of its cinematographers was Kubrick’s regular collaborator John Alcott, who would later shoot Hudson’s Greystoke. Another was the French cameraman Bernard Lutic, who was to be director of photography on Hudson’s Revolution, My Life So Far and I Dream of Africa, as well as working with Hudson on the second unit of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Hudson rejected numerous feature film offers before discovering in Chariots of Fire certain themes that engaged him. They include questions of class distinction, racial prejudice, national identity, rebellion against hieratic establishments and received moral authority, the relations between fathers and sons, and radical social change. These preoccupations he pursued in three films, which in retrospect constitute an informal trilogy, treating them in greater depth and with more subtlety as the settings broadened and moved back in time from the 1920s to the 18th Century. Unfolded in flashback from the 1960s, the lyrical, richly textured Chariots of Fire covers five years leading up to the 1924 Olympic Games as they effect three social outsiders. First, the Scottish lay preacher and son of missionaries, Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a great athlete whose religious principles forbade him to run on Sundays. Second, the great sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), patronised by anti-Semitic dons at his Cambridge college for his Jewish immigrant background and his ‘ungentlemanly’ ambition. The third, Sam Mussabini, the paternal working-class trainer of Arabian-Italian stock, takes Abrahams under his wing; as the harbinger of professionalism he rings the death knell for the upper-class amateur tradition. Vangelis’s score is upbeat, the film’s tone is elegiac and premonitory. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan of the Apes (1984) set aside six decades of primitive Me Tarzan, You Jane movies to engage with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original 1912 novel. It tells the story of how John Clayton, the future Earl of Greystoke, raised by apes in Africa following the death of his shipwrecked parents, returns to late 19th Century England to confront his aristocratic family. Only with his paternal grandfather (a great performance by Ralph Richardson in his final screen appearance) does he establish a loving bond that transcends prejudice and ignorance. Finally he returns to Africa accompanied by the Belgian explorer (Ian Holm, who appeared as Mussabini in Chariots) who’s become his surrogate father, and his devoted girlfriend Jane. In a crucial scene, John opens a new wing of the Natural History Museum dedicated to Charles Darwin. This is a film of tragic beauty. Hudson’s most complex and underrated picture, Revolution (1985), is a flawed masterpiece that follows the contrasted fortunes of three people caught up in the social and political turbulence of the American War of Independence, where real and surrogate parents abound and a British colony kills the father to become a new-born Republic. The film’s true rebel, a middle-class New York idealist (Nastassja Kinski), defies her Tory parents by throwing in her lot with the Revolution. An illiterate fur trapper (Al Pacino), attempting to avoid involvement in a cause he cannot understand, is cheated by both sides as he seeks to protect his one remaining son. A martinet English sergeant-major (Donald Sutherland) soldiers on year after year, attempting to do his duty and serve his paternalistic king. A colourful, ironic epic drawing on Griffith, DeMille and Brecht, the film was cruelly and casually dismissed in 1986. As with Michael Cimino’s unjustly rejected Heaven’s Gate, the time has come for Revolution to find the appreciative audience it deserves. Since Revolution Hudson has made only three features - the social problem movie Lost Angels (1989), his only film made in America; the charming rite-of-passage story My Life So Far (1999), about growing up in an eccentric upper-middle-class Scottish family; and I Dream of Africa (2000), the true story, reminiscent of Out of Africa, of an Italian aristocrat’s adventures in Kenya. His current project, set to star Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, is a screen version of Homage to Catalonia, the classic memoir by another Old Etonian rebel, George Orwell, about his service in the Spanish Civil War. In 1941, not long after Homage to Catalonia, Orwell wrote: ‘A family with the wrong members in control - that perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.’ It could well be the epigraph for Hudson’s oeuvre. Philip French, Film Critic The Observer.

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA