“I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what I am chasing.” Abrahams is determined to stand out, win and shave their snobbery up their noses. It is just after World War I, and disabled veterans are all about, as is anti-Semitism. “Monty” and we see the intensity of the Jewish Abrahams, and his prickliness. One of their number, Aubrey Montague ( Nicholas Farrell) writes a letter home, taking us back to 1919, when he met the great sprinter Harold Abrahams ( Ben Cross) as they enrolled in Trinity College in Cambridge.

Through that, we drift into that iconic image of the film, young track athletes training by running down a Scottish beach (Fife) just before the 1924 Olympics. In the “present,” we sit in on a 1978 memorial service for the Elder Statesman of British sport. The story is a flashback within a flashback. There are lush sacred choral works, snippets of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, bagpipes and bands laced throughout. And the synthesizer wasn’t the only music in it. Lump them in the with stars of the PBS import “Brideshead Revisited” and you could feel a tidal wave, a whole generation of British actors about to wash over world cinema thanks to what the Brits would spend the ensuing decades proving that they do best - recreating their recent and distant past. The cast, a blend of the fresh-faced and the legendary, is remarkable. There’s the immaculate period-perfect production design, the world of weathered stone and inherited, poshly-turned-out privilege it depicts. It’s not just the stunning images of “Out of Africa,” “Moonstruck” and “Memphis Belle” director of photography David Watkin, or the crystalline synthesizer score of Vangelis Papathanassiou. And I remember getting downright teary over just how beautiful this lovely period piece unfolding before me was. The movies that matter in your life burn into the memory that first encounter with them.I saw “Chariots of Fire” at a preview in Charlotte, N.C., with local college and high school track teams in attendance, at a now long-closed cinema near now-renamed UNC-Charlotte.

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