Review of This Sporting Life (1963) by Afzal S — 24 Jun 2008

Part of the British 'New Wave', when radical British theatre directors like Anderson and Richardson moved into film, 1963's This Sporting Life is one of those films which detonated my Twenty First Century assumption about the cosiness of postwar British cinema! I couldn't believe a British film from the early 1960's could be so hard-edged and off-the-wall.

Richard Harris plays a powerful but discontented Northern Rugby League star, Frank Machin. He is fed up with being treated like a commodity by his superior bosses, and cheered by the baying masses for his cruel weekly performances. But he has nowhere else to go with his working class background. His options are severely limited and the only way forward is to continue knocking lumps out of people on the rugby field like a latter-day gladiator.

He seeks comfort in the worst place, in the chilly arms of his widowed landlady. But she only has eyes for her dead husband, a weak-bodied man of strong conviction and radical passion, and derides Machin for being a meathead who follows orders.

The resolutely grey cinematography of This Sporting Life suits its very grim post-war subject matter. The sense of moral outrage at the postwar English and their smug, backward attitudes becomes a force that drives the film on. It was a force which would similarly drive the later If...., Anderson's masterpiece.

If....expressed Anderson's outrage wonderfully through a chimerical fantasy in a context that he himself had experienced (the Public School), being upper middle class. However, This Sporting Life, to me at least, shows up Anderson as an outsider, a class tourist who lacks the vital personal understanding of Machin's small town predicament.

Anderson also shows his inexperience with film at this point- This Sporting Life is wonderfully offbeat and daring, like If...., but also overlong and over-theatrical, with its set-pieces full of intense but mannered acting and clunky narrative.

Still, with all the above faults, Anderson's This Sporting Life is an outstanding breakthrough in British film, though I do think this has as much to do with the contributions of actors Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, and writer David Storey.