This Sporting Life is a 1963 British kitchen sinkdrama film directed by Lindsay Anderson. Based on the 1960 novel of the same name by David Storey, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award, it recounts the story of a rugby league footballer in Wakefield, a mining city in Yorkshire, whose romantic life is not as successful as his sporting life. Storey, a former professional rugby league footballer, also wrote the screenplay.
Set in the fictional city of City, the film is about Frank Machin, a bitter young coal miner from the West Riding of Yorkshire. The first part of the story is told through a series of flashbacks when Frank is anaesthetised in a dentist's chair, having had his front teeth broken in a rugby league match, and recovering at a Christmas party. The second part takes place after he has fully regained his senses, and proceeds without flashbacks.
Following a nightclub altercation, in which Frank takes on the captain of the local rugby league club and punches a couple of other players, he asks a scout for the team to help him get a tryout. Although at first somewhat uncoordinated at the sport, he impresses Gerald Weaver, one of the team's owners, with the spirit and brutality of his playing style during the trial game. He receives a large signing bonus to join the top team as a loose forward (number 13) and impresses all with his aggressive forward play. He often punches or elbows the opposing players—and sometimes even those of his own team.
Off the field, Frank is much less successful. His recently-widowed landlady, Mrs Margaret Hammond, a mother of two young children, rebuffs Frank's attempts to court her and treats him rudely and abrasively. She lost her husband in an accident at Weaver's engraving firm, but received little financial compensation, because the death was suspected to be a suicide. One day, Frank takes Margaret and her children to play in the River Wharfe next to Bolton Priory. Another time, Margaret gets annoyed when Frank comes home drunk. He desires her sexually and, eventually, grabs her and forces her onto his bed. Her daughter interrupts them, but then she acquiesces and they have sexual relations.
At Weaver's Christmas party, Frank quarrels with Weaver and his predatory wife, whose advances Frank had rejected, much to her chagrin, and it is clear that he has lost Weaver's favour, though Slomer, the team's other owner, still supports him. When he gets home after the party, Margaret agrees to share his bed to keep him warm, as he looks unwell with his swollen face and missing teeth, but, in her grief, she cannot really return his affection, saying she is scared to invest her feelings in one person, as they might go away or die. She sometimes insults him, referring to him as "just a great ape", and, on their first proper date, Frank insults the staff and flaunts protocol at the fancy restaurant to which he takes her. Margaret is embarrassed and leaves, and the scene is witnessed by the Weavers.
Maurice, Frank's friend and teammate, gets married, and Frank and Margaret attend the ceremony. When Frank goes over to congratulate the couple, Margaret walks away. She says she feels ashamed, like a kept woman, especially since Frank bought her a fur coat. He strikes her, and then says he thought she was finally becoming happy. On another occasion, she says that their neighbours think she is a slut and she and the children are not "proper people" because of Frank. They have a row, and Frank goes out drinking with Maurice. He says he wants another job, "something permanent", and believes Margaret needs him, though she does not realise it.
Frank tries to talk to Margaret, but she defends her privacy, saying he knows nothing about Eric, her husband. He says she drove Eric to suicide, and Margaret, outraged, demands that Frank leave and starts throwing his belongings out of his room. Frank says he loves her, but she is furious with him. Eventually, he goes to stay at a cheap boarding house in a bombed-out area, leaving his Jaguar incongruously parked outside.
Intending a reconciliation with Margaret, Frank returns to her house, but a neighbour says she is in hospital. The doctor tells him that Margaret is unconscious, having suffered a brain haemorrhage, and that she may not have the strength, or perhaps the will, to survive. Frank sits with her, holding her hand and talking gently. Distracted by a large spider on the wall, when he looks back at Margaret, blood seeps from her mouth, and she dies. In his rage, Frank punches the spider. He does not speak to the children or their minder when he leaves the hospital. Returning to Margaret's house and breaking in by the back door, Frank wanders through the empty space and calls out her name before collapsing in tears.
In the closing scene, Frank is seen on the rugby field, now exhausted and vulnerable to the ravages of time and injury.
Kim Leslie as the singer at the nightclub (uncredited)
Edward Fox as Bruce, the barman at the restaurant (uncredited)
Ian Thompson as the Batley Town captain (uncredited)[citation needed]
Production
Background
This Sporting Life was Anderson's first feature film as director, though he had made numerous short documentaries in the previous fifteen years, and even won an Oscar for 1954's Thursday's Children. The film had first been discussed by The Rank Organisation as a possible project for Joseph Losey, and then Karel Reisz, who, reluctant to direct another film with a similar setting and theme to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), suggested that Anderson direct it, with himself serving as producer.
Many of the scenes in This Sporting Life were filmed at Belle Vue, the home stadium of Wakefield Trinity, and Thrum Hall, the home stadium of Halifax. The scene where Frank (Richard Harris) leaps from a bus to buy a newspaper, and then leaps back onto the bus, was filmed at the top of Westgate, Wakefield. The location is still instantly recognisable, and has changed little in the decades since. The houses used for filming the outdoor scenes in This Sporting Life were in Servia Terrace in Leeds.[citation needed] The riverside location where Frank takes Margaret and her family for an outing in his new car is Bolton Priory in the Yorkshire Dales.
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.[5]
Another 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.[6]
Direction
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, continuing: "I ought to be calm and detached with him. Instead I am impulsive, affectionate, infinitely susceptible."[7]
Release
Critical reception and box office
Critical response to the film was favourable. In the United States, the Reuters news agency described it as being praised unanimously by the critics for New York City publications.[8]Variety praised the film's "gutsy vitality", as well as the production of Reisz and the directorial efforts of Anderson, who "brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line".[9]
On its initial release, the film was a commercial flop with British audiences and did not recoup its cost.[10]John Davis, the Chairman of The Rank Organisation, announced that the company would not venture further with "kitchen sink" film projects, nor would his company make such a "squalid" film again,[11] and This Sporting Life has been seen more generally as ending producers' willingness to back such British New Wave films.[12] However, after 13 years, the film had earned a distributor’s gross of £92,612 in the UK and £128,599 from overseas.[2]
Writing in 1980, John Russell Taylor 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", setting it apart from the earlier works:
...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."[13]
Lindsay Gordon Anderson was a British feature-film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and of the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for his 1968 film if...., which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1969 and marked Malcolm McDowell's cinematic debut. He is also notable, though not a professional actor, for playing a minor role in the Academy Award-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire. McDowell produced a 2007 documentary about his experiences with Anderson, Never Apologize.
William Henry Hartnell was an English actor, who is best known for portraying the first incarnation of the Doctor, in the long-running British science-fiction television series Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966; he reprised the role in 1972–1973. In film, Hartnell notably appeared in Brighton Rock (1949), The Mouse That Roared (1959) and This Sporting Life (1963). He was associated with military roles, playing Company Sergeant Major Percy Bullimore in the ITV sitcom The Army Game and Sergeant Grimshaw, the title character in the first Carry On film Carry On Sergeant (1958).
Room at the Top is a 1959 British drama film based on the 1957 novel by John Braine. It was adapted by Neil Paterson, directed by Jack Clayton, and produced by John and James Woolf. The film stars Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston, and Hermione Baddeley.
Richard St John Francis Harris was an Irish actor and singer. Having studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he rose to prominence as an icon of the British New Wave. He received numerous accolades including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor, and a Grammy Award. In 2020, he was listed at number 3 on The Irish Times's list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
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The L-Shaped Room is a 1962 British drama romance film directed by Bryan Forbes, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Lynne Reid Banks. It tells the story of Jane Fosset, a young French woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a cheap London boarding house, befriending a young man, Toby, in the building. The work is considered part of the kitchen sink realism school of British drama. The film reflected a trend in British films of greater frankness about sex and displays a sympathetic treatment of outsiders "unmarried mothers, lesbian or black" as well as a "largely natural and non-judgmental handling of their problems". As director, Forbes represents "a more romantic, wistful type of realism" than that of Tony Richardson or Lindsay Anderson.
Rachel Roberts was a Welsh actress. She is best remembered for her screen performances as the older mistress of the central male characters in both Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963). For each, she won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress. She was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for This Sporting Life. Her other notable film appearances included Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Yanks (1979).
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David Malcolm Storey was an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a professional rugby league player. He won the Booker Prize in 1976 for his novel Saville. He also won the MacMillan Fiction Award for This Sporting Life in 1960.
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The Country Girl is a 1954 American drama film written and directed by George Seaton and starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and William Holden. Adapted by Seaton from Clifford Odets's 1950 play of the same name, the film is about an alcoholic has-been actor who is given one last chance to resurrect his career. The film was entered in the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.
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Vanda Godsell was an English actress. Hal Erickson writes in Allmovie, "Vanda Godsell specialised in playing disheveled housewives, busybody landladies and blowsy domestics." She appeared as Mrs Weaver in This Sporting Life (1963), Mrs Pitt in Bitter Harvest (1965), and Mrs Goodge in The Wrong Box (1967).
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This Sporting Life is a 1960 novel by the English writer David Storey. It is set in Northern England and follows a man who tries to make it as a professional rugby league footballer. It was the debut novel of Storey, himself a former player for Leeds.
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References
↑ Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England, Stein and Day, 1974 p176
1 2 Chapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press p 191.
↑ John Russell Taylor "Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema", in Richard Roud (ed) Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Volume One, 1980, London: Secker & Warburg, p76-82, 79
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