A new film about Eric Liddell is being released on November 3 in select theaters and online simultaneously. I'll be fielding questions after two of the screenings in NYC.
This is an answer to a prayer I've been praying since 1981 when Chariots of Fire won four Academy Awards. I wanted to know more about what the supertitles ending
Chariots of Fire hinted at: “Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland mourned.”
In the year 2000 I started researching for
Beyond the Chariots, my one-man play that tells the rest of the
Chariots of Fire story from the perspective of Eric Liddell. We're planning to release a recording of my performance of the play at the Singapore Expo soon.
Sign up to get the announcement. Since I first started my research at the Eric Liddell Centre in Edinburgh I've tracked no less than seven attempts (including one of my own) to tell more of Eric Liddell's story on the big screen, so I'm overjoyed that this one finally made it across the finish line... but being so tied to the story, I feel let down on certain fronts.
Before I get to that, there is plenty to love about
On Wings of Eagles. I'll tried to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there are a few things I just have to mention....
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Joseph Fiennes portrays Eric Liddell
coaching his track team from the
Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College.
Xu Niu is far left. |
Though I did submit for the role, I'm completely thrilled with Joseph Fiennes' portrayal of one of my lifelong heroes. He captured the good natured charm and indefatigable joy I've picked up in the biographies and interviews with about a dozen people who remember Liddell.
On Wings of Eagles is a total reworking of a film entitled
The Last Race, which was released in Hong Kong and China last year. Producers Jim Green and Mark Bacino told me they took the raw footage and have reworked the storyline and introduced a narrator, the older voice of Xu Niu (played by Shawn Dou on screen and voiced by the older Bruce Locke). Though I haven't seen
The Last Race, from descriptions I've heard I believe this is a much better film for Western audiences.
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After my performance in Hong Kong
on 08/08/08, the opening day of the
Beijing Olympics with Leone and
Jim "Jamey" Hudson Taylor, III,
Chuck Allison, Steve Wible, and
H. K. Cheng. |
Xu Niu is, from what I can tell, a fictionalized runner on Liddell's track team at the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College. He follows Liddell throughout the story. In my play I also have a fictional student of Liddell's in a pivotal role. I call him Mai Ker. An actual former student of Liddell, H. K. Cheng, saw a couple of my performances of the play in Hong Kong, and after one of those performances he was kind enough to do an interview, which
we hope to release soon. I asked him if the fictional Mai Ker was similar to any of Liddell's actual students. He immediately thought of a classmate!
As a young runner I was inspired by Eric Liddell the athlete.
As a Christian I loved how
Chariots of Fire showed Liddell refusing to run on a Sunday in the 100m, where he might have proven that he was the fastest man alive. Instead he trained for the 400m and broke the world record at that distance.
One of the things I love most about
On Wings of Eagles is that it shows Liddell turning away from fame and fortune that was promised after his Olympic success to minister to the people who nearly killed his family shortly after his birth during the Boxer Rebellion. Jacob Shams in his otherwise excellent
review of the new film gets one thing wrong. He says, "...
after his racing days were over, Liddell returned to the home of his birth, China..." Liddell's racing days were far from over! He broke the world record at the Paris Olympics when he was 22, and he left for China the very next year.
I'll post more on Liddell's athletic accomplishments in China later, but the short version is that during a meet in China hosted by Japan for the Emperor's coronation, Liddell tied some of the winning times set in the 1928 Olympics earlier that year.
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Liddell (Fiennes) races against
Chen Quan (Simon Twu). |
Though the new film never shows Liddell running in his prime, there are two races, and in both Fiennes does a great job of showing him run beyond what his meager rations should allow. At one point we see him sharing his rations with children, which is a beautiful picture of who he was. At another point eggshells are being ground, and, indeed, they would add shells to meals to get every bit of protein they could. Doctors in the camp told Liddell they weren't eating enough for the youth to take place in athletics, but Liddell said without their bodies engaged, their souls would wither.
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Fiennes portrays Liddell as a science
teacher at the
Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College. |
The new film is shot in China, in Tianjin (spelled Tientsin when the story takes place), where Liddell taught science (not English as Shams says in his review), and in Weifang (spelled Weihsien when the story takes place), in the actual compound where Eric Liddell and his fellow Allied prisoners spent the end of World War II. There are a couple of scenes summarizing Liddell's life as a teacher and missionary before it cuts to him on board a ship with his family before it disembarks, carrying his wife Flo and daughters Patricia and Heather to their family home in Toronto. Flo (Elizabeth Arends, who made no attempt at a Canadian accent) was also pregnant with Maureen, now Maureen Moore. After seeing one of my performances of
Beyond the Chariots, she described that first trip as being in a cab with the windows rolled up. I was blessed to see the photo of Maureen as a baby take such a prominent place in the storyline, as Liddell was separated from his family during his final years.
The farewell on the ship is a scene that may have been inspired by the Prologue in my favorite biography on Liddell,
Pure Gold, by David McCasland, who saw my play and set up a tour of Tianjin for us
. I'll post more on that later. In both the biography and the movie, it is quite a moving scene.
It's not long (in the film and in reality) before Pearl Harbor is bombed and citizens of all Allied nations are put into internment camps. I performed my play for
Jim "Jamey" Hudson Taylor III, the great grandson of the prominent missionary to China.
I'll post more on that later. Jamey, his three siblings and his grandfather were in the internment camp with "Uncle Eric," as all the students called him. After two of the three performances of my play Jamey saw in Hong Kong, he described how Uncle Eric was a father figure to so many children who were separated from their families. The new film captures this, in part with a sign Jamey Taylor mentioned to me. There were so many visits to Uncle Eric's flat that his roommate put up a sign indicating "Uncle Eric is IN" or "Uncle Eric is OUT."
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Yoshinori Yumoto
(Shigeo Kobayashi) |
There's a moment in the film that a Japanese officer, Yoshinori Yumoto (played by Shigeo Kobayashi), interrupts a wedding ceremony that Uncle Eric is conducting. He takes the wedding rings from the couple. Though it's a fictional element of the story, it reminded me of how Jamey told me the Japanese put labels on people and things that read, "Property of the Japanese."
The couple is separated when they're brought into the internment camp, but the new groom insists on married housing. Yoshinori Yumoto asks for proof that they are married, but of course he's taken their rings. Uncle Eric says, "What God has joined together let no man put asunder." Yoshinori Yumoto tells him, "My emperor is the god here." That much is in the trailer you can see below. It's Uncle Eric's response that is one of my favorite moments in the film on a number of different levels. I'm planning to talk about that after the NYC screenings.
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From Stephen Metcalf's interview in
Olympic Hero in China. |
I love that there is an allusion in the new film to praying for their captors. Uncle Eric taught often on the
Sermon on the Mount, and dedicates the better part of a chapter to it in his book
The Disciplines of the Christian Life. In
Olympic Hero in China, the documentary I helped create and for which I do the English narration, Stephen Metcalf, who was a young runner in the internment camp, said that one day Uncle Eric was teaching them the passage from the Sermon on the Mount that says, "
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...." Metcalf said that Uncle Eric said, "'Prayer changes the whole situation. When you hate somebody, you're self-centered. When you pray for someone you become God-centered.' And so he said, 'I've been getting up early and praying for the Japanese.' And he challenged us to pray for the Japanese." Metcalf took up the challenge, and after carrying Uncle Eric's coffin to the grave he said, "I promised God that if I came out alive, I would go to Japan as a missionary like Eric." Metcalf served as a missionary to Japan for 40 years.
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