This Sporting Life

This film is not currently available on DVD. 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.

Film Details Director Lindsay Anderson Starring Colin Blakely, Richard Harris, Arthur Lowe, Rachel Roberts   Country UK Language English   Year 1963

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Review by David Parkinson on 5th September 2007

A decade after his short, Thursday's Children (1953), won an Academy Award, Lindsay Anderson, the founding father of Free Cinema, finally made his feature bow. Unfortunately, the commercial failure of This Sporting Life, his glowering adaptation of David Storey's hard-hitting 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 galacticos 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, Margaret, whose psychological fragility after the suicide of her factory worker husband has hardened into an impenetrable indifference that Frank's clumsy efforts at affection simply 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, nevertheless, 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 not only reinforced the bleakness of the grim northern town, but also invited comparison with the expressionist imagery of John Ford and Ingmar Bergman, Anderson delivered an almost Antonionian 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 ready for such arthouse intensity.

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Article - "Screening the Island : British Cinema" by Liam Lowry
Thursday 4th December 2003

In 1933, Alexander Korda’s gleefully saucy, The Private Life of Henry VIII made a huge international impact. Starring the sublime Charles Laughton, and launching the career of Merle Oberon, it announced the arrival of a cinema uniquely different from European ...  View article in full

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BFI Top 100 British Films by MovieMail

In 1999 the British Film Institute surveyed 1000 people involved in UK film and television to create the BFI Top 100 British films made in the 20th century. Here is the result - each film here stands up to repeat viewings, and shows the incredible contribution Britain has made to cinema.

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