This is a movie that fascinates me for a variety of reasons: the Edwardian attitudes in a time of moral upheaval (post-WWI), the contrast between a "muscular Christian" and a man running to beat the anti-Semitic bias of his time, etc. Because the movie asserted that it is "A True Story" I figured it would be fun to find out more about the various characters. What a disillusionment. The more I was able to find out the facts, the more the central conflicts in the movie fell apart. Harold Abrahams, while he did hire a professional trainer, was considered one of the most popular students at university and, if he was snubbed, it didn't bother him much. He certainly wasn't motivated to run by any anti-Semitism he encountered. He didn't meet He didn't meet Sybil Gordon until after his career was ended by a broken leg while demonstrating the long jump for reporters. His good friend and roommate, Aubrey Montague, turned out to be a rival runner at Oxford, who once wrote his mother after losing to Abrahams that he hoped Abrahams' Cambridge teamates, who had triumphantly carried him off the field, would drop him and break his leg. (The two became friends later in life, when they served together in amateur athletic organizations.) Abrahams was not the first runner to beat the school clock chimes; that was done by a brash aristocratic sprinter whose personality resembles the entirely fictional Lord Lindsay in the movie.
Eric Lidell was aware months before the team left for Paris that heat was scheduled for a Sunday and was always slated to run in the 400 -- no last minute switch to avoid running on the Sabbath. (Something like what was depicted did happen in the 1912 Olympics, but the runners were Americans from Penn, if I recall correctly.) Jennie Lidell never discourage Eric from training for Olympics. Jackson Scholz barely met Eric Lidell and never gave him an encouraging note. (I talked to Scholz by phone before he died at his home in Del Ray Beach and he told me that if he had given Lidell a note it wouldn't have been a biblical quotation because "my religious training was, well, a little casual.")
Scholz and Jennie Lidell, who were listed as technical advisers to the movie, were both more than a little offended by the inaccuracies in the movie and Scholz refused to see it because he felt it portrayed the Americans as overbearing and egotistical; he said that, in reality, "you couldn't have wanted to meet a bunch of nicer guys."
Does it matter? Probably not, but if it doesn't, why pretend the movie is true? Why not "based on actual events," or something of that sort? It really takes something away from the movie when you realize that none of the main characters had any of the personal, social or religious motivations the movie relies on to create drama. It makes one wonder what really motivated the real characters. I wrote and called Colin Welland a few times, but he never responded.
I still enjoy the movie, but now it's about a bunch of fictional characters, about whom it's harder to feel much interest. Sort as if one learned that Becket was, in fact, not killed by Henry II's barons, but was merely mugged in the park. Somehow the movie wouldn't be the same afterwards.
I wonder what kind of a movie could have been made about the real characters and events of the 1924 Olympics?
