Classic Film Club: 'This Sporting Life'

Each week Tom Huddleston watches a classic film he's never seen before. The rules are simple: each film must be considered a masterpiece and each must be completely new to him. This week: Lindsey Anderson's 'This Sporting Life'(1963)

Much like their French counterparts, the British New Wave films of the mid-’60s have remained critically unassailable: filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson and stars like Richard Harris and Albert Finney swiftly became national treasures, the films they made in that brief period of kitchen sink experimentation lauded for their political and social bravery, and their dedication to artistic innovation.

But bravery and innovation don’t, in isolation, make a film great. ‘This Sporting Life’ is fiercely confrontational, flashily directed, visually striking and, for the most part, solidly entertaining. It’s also wildly melodramatic, derivative, rather shallow and poe-facedly convinced of its own cultural importance.

Through a flashback-and-forth narrative structure seemingly utilised for its novelty rather than any artistic suitability, the film tells the story of Harris’s ruggedly northern Frank Machin, a pitworker turned rugby bulldog who, despite his rise to fame on the pitch, can’t talk his icy, widowed landlady Mrs Hammond (Rachel Roberts) into bed. There’s a lot more to it, involving sporting diplomacy, rich and sexually ravenous housewives and the unflinching devotion of William Hartnell’s elderly retainer. But the focus of the film stays squarely on Machin’s paranoid proletarian inferiority and desperate need to be noticed, and on Richard Harris’s inner turmoil and sweaty-vested Brandoisms.

Harris gives an unusual performance, particularly for British cinema – physically bracing and consistently magnetic, owing a notable debt to the method school of the previous decade. His accent wanders up hill and down dale, from the Welsh valleys to the Yorkshire moors, and points in between. But Anderson, quite simply, gives him too much rein, and there are points where the sheer, overdeveloped masculine intensity of his performance strays into the laughable. This can partly be attributed to the times – ‘big’ performances were very much in vogue – but if Anderson was attempting a realistic portrait of working-class life, or of humanity in general, he should have kept his leading man on a shorter leash.

But it remains unclear how much Anderson really understands his characters. Coming from a staunchly leftist, free-cinema background, his intention to place the British working man at the centre of his artistic endeavours is laudable. But there’s a certain amount of patronising noble savagery being depicted here, as well. On a certain level, the rugby pitch stands as an apposite symbol for the hardship of northern life. But it could also be taken as a fairly insulting metaphor. Rugby is a game of violent, bruising physical struggle; it’s also largely bereft of emotional or intellectual development. Anderson did more than many of his contemporaries to shine a light into some of ’60s Britain’s dark forgotten corners, but he’s also guilty of a faintly Victorian attitude towards his subjects.

He’s also guilty of overstretching. At 134 minutes, ‘This Sporting Life’ is little short of an epic, and feels it. The film’s first two acts – Machin’s rise to fame, and his tempestuous romance with Mrs Hammond – feel self-contained, but then the film just doesn’t end, piling on one tragedy after another. A late sequence in a hospital goes for heartbreaking but feels simply overwrought and completely unnecessary – Anderson has already taken Machin to the brink of madness, now it just feels like he’s being punished. It doesn’t help that Harris chews the scenery to point where we half expect him to turn green and bust through his dirty white vest.

‘This Sporting Life’ has not aged well. There’s a huge amount to enjoy – the bone-crunching rugby scenes, some likeable incidental players, the stunning scenery. Fans of high camp will lap up the central performances, not to mention the pre-swinging fashions. Other films of the period – ‘Billy Liar’, even ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – stand up perfectly well to modern scrutiny. But ‘This Sporting Life’ feels wildly overcooked, and taken on it’s own merits simply lacks insight, either as social comment or as human drama.

---