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Film Description
Adapted from David Storey's novel of the same title, this is an unblinking look at life in the coal mining region of Northern England as seen through the eyes of Frank Machin, who quits his job as a miner to follow his dream of becoming a professional rugby player. Richard Harris gives a powerful performance as Machin and the film's visual style ranks it among the very best of British films of the 1960s.
A decade after his short film Thursday’s Children won an Academy Award, Lindsay Anderson finally made his feature bow. Unfortunately, the commercial failure of This Sp... more >
A decade after his short film Thursday’s Children won an Academy Award, Lindsay Anderson finally made his feature bow. Unfortunately, the commercial failure of This Sporting Life, his glowering adaptation of David Storey’s novel, marked the end of the kitchen sink era, in which angry young men vented their spleen against a world that didn’t understand them, and a new phase of swinging escapism was ushered in by Tony Richardson’s freewheeling take on Henry Fielding’s period romp, Tom Jones. However, the story of Frank Machin, the Yorkshire miner who briefly samples the high life while playing rugby league for his hometown team, has since been reappraised as social realism’s most complex picture.
The footballers currently scooping obscene sums for parading their skills in the Premier League would do well to watch this uncompromising study of the transient benefits of sporting celebrity. Machin may be a terrace favourite for his brutish approach to the game. But his prowess counts for little with either the club’s self-serving owners, his envious teammates or his landlady, whose psychological fragility after the suicide of her factory worker husband has hardened into an impenetrable indifference that Frank’s clumsy efforts at affection can’t breach.
The Oscar-nominated Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts occasionally struggle to disguise their respective Irish and Welsh accents, and Harris is sometimes uncertain whether he’s playing Marlon Brando, Richard Burton or an emotionally and intellectually stunted everyman, but Anderson is more interested in their passion and repression than their regional authenticity. Never had the pains and pleasures, fantasies and frustrations of the British proletariat been so starkly depicted on screen. Largely telling his tale in flashback and filming in a dour monochrome that reinforced the bleakness of the grim northern town, but also invited comparison with the expressionist imagery of Ingmar Bergman, Anderson delivered a treatise on alienation and the inability to communicate that complemented the more cynical asides on class, gender and fame. Sadly, neither the industry nor the audience were then ready for such arthouse intensity. < less
