Unfairly dismissed by some as an empty exercise in cheap schmaltz, this has an old-fashioned innocence that celebrates the human spirit with a lot of careful detail. It's a powerful tale about two British athletes - one a contemplative Scottish missionary, the other an anxious Jewish student - aiming for glory in the 1924 Olympics, and it contains a compelling study of their characters and those of their competitors. Their experiences are drawn in thoughtfully by Hugh Hudson's direction and Colin Welland's Oscar-winning script. Indeed, it was Welland who exclaimed at the Oscar ceremony that "the British are coming!". The two British actors on screen here, Ian Charleson (the missionary) and Ben Cross (the student), prove that, at a time when British cinema had such talent to fall back on, Welland should have been right.

In the class-obsessed and religiously divided UK of the early 1920s, two determined young runners train for the 1924 Paris Olympics. Eric Liddell, a devout Christian born to Scottish missionaries in China, sees running as part of his worship of God's glory and refuses to train or compete on the Sabbath. Harold Abrahams overcomes anti-Semitism and class bias, but neglects his beloved sweetheart in his single-minded quest.