This Sporting Life

Plot

Set in Wakefield, the film concerns a bitter young Yorkshire coal miner, Frank Machin (Harris). Following a nightclub altercation, in which he takes on the captain of the local rugby league club and punches a couple of the others, he is recruited by the team's manager, who sees profit in his aggressive streak.

Although at first somewhat uncoordinated at league, he impresses the team's owner, Gerald Weaver (Badel), with the spirit and brutality of his playing style during the trial. He is signed up to the top team as a loose forward (number 13) and impresses all with his aggressive forward play. He often punches or elbows the opposition players throughout the game.

Off the field, Frank is much less successful. His recently widowed landlady, Mrs Margaret Hammond (Roberts), a mother of two young children, lost her husband in an accident at Weaver's engineering firm but received no financial compensation because the death was ruled a suicide. Frank eventually has sexual relations with Margaret, but in her grief she cannot return any affection. She sometimes insults him, referring to him as "just a great ape", and finds his boorish behaviour at a smart restaurant off-putting. He is occasionally violent towards her. He leaves and stays at a homeless men's shelter after a row over her late husband. He has another quarrel with Weaver and his predatory wife, whose advances he rejects, much to her chagrin. Intending a reconciliation with Margaret, he finds that she is in a hospital. She is unconscious, having suffered a brain haemorrhage shortly after their split, and she dies without regaining consciousness. In the end he is seen as "just a great ape on a football field", vulnerable to the ravages of time and injury.

Cast

Production

This was Anderson's first feature film as director, although he had won an Oscar for his short documentary, Thursday's Children (1954), one of many documentaries he had made in the previous decade. The project had first been discussed by the Rank Organisation as a possible project for Joseph Losey, the exiled American film maker, and then was passed to Karel Reisz who, reluctant to direct another film on a Northern England subject so soon after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), suggested that Lindsay Anderson direct it with himself producing.

Among the supporting cast is William Hartnell, who shortly afterwards began playing the Doctor in Doctor Who. It was his role in This Sporting Life that brought Hartnell to the attention of Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert. The film also features the future Dad's Army star, Arthur Lowe, who appeared in four more films directed by Anderson.

Filming locations

Many of the scenes in This Sporting Life were filmed at Wakefield Trinity's stadium, Belle Vue and at Halifax's stadium Thrum Hall. The scene where Frank (Richard Harris) leaps from a bus to buy a newspaper, then leaps back onto the bus was filmed at the top of Westgate, Wakefield. The location is still instantly recognisable today and has changed very little, apart from the addition of small bars and clubs. The houses filmed for the outdoor scenes in This Sporting Life were in Servia Terrace in Leeds.

Editing

Anthony Sloman wrote:

"By 1963 the British New Wave had beached, and Peter Taylor edited the superb This Sporting Life, the début feature of the cine-literate director Lindsay Anderson. It is a remarkable study of working class angst, with a cutting style like no other British feature before it, an ever-underrated achievement by Taylor..."

A specific description of the editing says:

From the start, Lindsay Anderson and his editor Peter Taylor show a determination to pursue a flashback-based narrative using bold-cut transitions. ... Cut-transitions link these plangent and understated images together in way that seems to demand that their meanings be understood. It is an important restatement of the way that image-driven filmmaking engages the spectator.

Lindsay Anderson on directing Richard Harris

Anderson wrote in his diary on 23 April 1962, after the first month or so of production: "the most striking feature of it all, I suppose, has been the splendour and misery of my work and relationship with Richard." He felt that Harris was acting better than ever before in his career, but feared his feelings for Harris, whose combination of physicality, affection and cruelty fascinated him, meant that he lacked the detachment he needed as a director. "I ought to be calm and detached with him. Instead I am impulsive, affectionate, infinitely susceptible."

Critical reception

Though on first release the film was lauded by critics, it was a commercial disaster with the home audiences, and prompted John Davis, by now the Chairman of the Rank Organisation Board to announce that he was pulling out of British New Wave, "kitchen sink" drama, nor would his company make such a "squalid" film again. In the United States, the film was well received. Variety praised its "gutsy vitality", and praised the production of Reisz and the directorial feature début of Anderson, who "brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line."

John Russell Taylor in 1980 thought it a mistake to link This Sporting Life with the "kitchen sink" films released in the preceding few years, because its "emotionalism" made it "unique", apart from Anderson's other work:

"every scene in the film is charged with the passion of what is not said and done, as well as what is. ... Though real enough and believable enough, this kind of amour fou is remote indeed from what the staid middle class cinema would generally consider as realism."

On 22 January 2008, the film was released as a Region 1 DVD by the Criterion Collection.