This Sporting Life (1963) - film review

Frank Machin is a young coal miner in the Yorkshire town of Wakefield, but he has big ambitions.  With the help of an elderly football scout, he makes such an impression on the owners of the local rugby league club that they cannot resist signing him up for the season.  Frank’s success on the football field earns him prestige and easy money but does not satisfy his emotional needs.  He is love with his landlady, Mrs Hammond, a young widow with two children who still mourns the death of her husband.  Although he showers her with gifts and manages to talk her into sleeping with him, she remains aloof and disdains his success.  Having sustained a severe facial injury during a Christmas Eve match, Frank looks back on his recent past and realises he has lost far more than he has gained.

Although it received mixed reviews and was a commercial disaster on its first release, This Sporting Life is now considered one of the defining films of the British New Wave and arguably the best example of the so-called kitchen sink drama.  The film’s realism owes much to the fact that it was scripted by David Storey, who was a professional rugby league player before he turned to writing.  In a remarkable feature debut, director Lindsay Anderson paints a harrowingly grim picture of British life in the early 1960s, achingly vivid in its portrayal of a country divided by class and still struggling to emerge from post-war austerity.  The film’s resounding failure at the box office proved to be the final nail in the coffin as far as social realist drama in British cinema was concerned, at least until Ken Loach appeared on the scene with his realist masterpiece Kes (1969).  

Two things particularly mark This Sporting Life out as a great film - a remarkable central performance from Richard Harris and the film’s striking visual design.  As the brash class-conscious Frank Machin, Harris perfectly evokes the frustrations and pent-up angst of an angry young working class man desperate to escape from the dismal social milieu he was born into.  In what is assuredly the finest screen performance of his career, Harris brings something of the raw energy and visceral intensity of Marlon Brando’s early film roles, as well as a profound sense of emotional realism, a kind of half-strangled humanity.  Although Machin is an egoistical little thug with very few redeeming features, Harris succeeds in rendering him sympathetic, so that his moments of inner suffering are keenly felt and hard to forget.  

Whilst it is not easy to get past Richard Harris’s dominating tour de force performance, the film also offers some impressive supporting contributions, which add a great deal to its searing authenticity.  Rachel Roberts is heartbreaking as the widow who tragically cannot allow herself to return the love of the man who adores her.  William Hartnell gives a remarkably poignant turn as a scout whose motive for helping Machin has a subtly homoerotic, and again tragic, tinge to it.  Alan Badel and Colin Blakely are no less convincing as the ruthless club owner Weaver and Machin’s buddy Maurice, whilst Arthur Lowe is memorable in the first of his five films for Anderson.  Over the course of the next decade, both Hartnell and Lowe would go on to become major stars of iconic British television shows, Doctor Who and Dad’s Army respectively.

Complementing Harris’s tortured performance, the film’s second masterstroke is the inspired way in which it is shot and edited, so as to make its subject that much more stark and brutal.  Denys Coop’s sombre black and white cinematography brings a striking reality to the film, giving it the abrasive texture of a hard-hitting documentary, whilst Roberto Gerhard’s unconventional otherworldly score lends a bleak poetic quality.  The sharp editing (particularly of the football match sequences) accentuates the violent nature of the film’s protagonist and the world he inhabits - to the extent that you almost feel as though you are being repeatedly hit in the face by a football. 

Another distinctive feature of the film is its unusual narrative structure, which inter-cuts present and past experiences through the use of the flashback.  This merges the boundary between reality and imagination to the extent that you can never be quite sure where the one ends and the other takes over.  The disjointed narrative adds to the impression of a life that has become fragmented by cruel experience and shattered hopes, into muddled shards of consciousness.  Every element of the film’s unsettling composition has the effect of drawing us further and further into Machin’s rough, loveless world, imprisoning us in a vortex of never-ending despair.  With its uncompromising realism, harrowing performances and barbed poetry, This Sporting Life is undeniably one of the great achievements of British cinema, a film which, like the sport it portrays, is as exhilarating to watch as it is emotionally draining.

© James Travers 2010

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