Running from the Past
At the Oscars ceremony in 1982, Best Screenplay winner Colin Welland waved his award and announced: ‘The British are coming!’1 Several decades ago, however, when I was talking to stage and film director Lindsay Anderson, who has a cameo in Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), he said: ‘You know, there was not a penny of British money in it.’2
The film seemed such a quintessentially British achievement that I found this hard to believe. There was apparently some controversy relating to the role of the British-based company Goldcrest Films, which had been described as the ‘maker’ or ‘producer’ of the film. A formal statement in 1986 claimed that ‘Allied Stars and Twentieth Century-Fox jointly financed the total cost of production of Chariots of Fire’,3 with no reference to the company that receives the film’s final credit: ‘Filmed in England and Scotland by Enigma Productions.’ Anderson may have exaggerated, but the American firm Fox seems to have been the most powerful generating force behind the film, and subsequently – along with another Hollywood giant in Warner Bros – its key international distributor. Fox also ‘insisted on having a couple of notable American names in the cast’ to bolster US distribution.4 Regardless of which companies funded or distributed the film, it was made entirely in the UK and by largely UK personnel.
Most viewers won’t care where the production money came from, but given that the film took off in the US, both critically and popularly, it does lead us to wonder: ‘How far is it a British film?’; or, even, ‘What is a British film?’ When Welland made his famous announcement, what could he have had in mind? The answer to this is, apparently, and according to Welland himself, that he was ‘completely misunderstood’. When doing research in Pennsylvania, he would walk into bars where friendly steelworkers would say: ‘Watch your wallets, the British are coming!’ His much-quoted remark at the Oscars was, he said, ‘never meant as a patriotic gesture’, even
