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This Sporting Life
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (31st October 2008). |
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The Film
 Produced by Karel Reisz and directed by Lindsay Anderson, This Sporting Life appeared at the tail end of the British ‘new wave’ and its exploration of social realism (or ‘kitchen sink realism’). It was the first film that Anderson directed after taking a five year break from television; between 1957 and 1962 Anderson had turned his attention towards working in the theatre, directing performances of such plays as Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall. This Sporting Life was also the first feature film that Anderson had directed: prior to 1957 Anderson had worked mainly in television and had been directing documentaries since the late 1940s, becoming known as a key figure within the ‘Free Cinema’ movement (alongside Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz). The film was adapted from the novel by David Storey and was set in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, where Anderson’s last four documentaries had been made. Like many of the British ‘new wave’ films, This Sporting Life focuses on an archetypal ‘angry young man’, Frank Machin (Richard Harris), who works as a miner and lives with Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts). Both Frank’s landlady and his lover, Margaret is a repressed, life-rejecting widow whose husband died in an industrial accident with a lathe. Frank is recruited into Wakefield’s Rugby League team, and sees this as an opportunity to escape his dreary and insular life. However, Frank discovers that the dream of sport as means of escaping from the exploitation inherent within working-class life is a myth: within the rugby team, he finds that he is once again exploited by the club’s middle-class owners and also by their wives, and his position will always be at the bottom of the scrum. Frank also begins a relationship of sorts with Margaret, but this rapidly deteriorates and leads the film towards an unavoidably tragic conclusion. Anderson imposes a non-linear structure on the film which, at the time of its initial release, drew comparisons with the French New Wave filmmakers; Anderson’s film was compared specifically to Alain Resnais’ disorienting L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). This Sporting Life begins on the rugby field, where Frank is injured; his front teeth broken, Frank is taken to an out-of-hours dentist and put under anaesthetic, and for much of the film Anderson uses parallel editing as Frank remembers how he became involved in rugby and his combative relationship with Margaret. However, although the flashback structure led critics to assert that Anderson’s film had been heavily shaped by Resnais, in actuality This Sporting Life’s non-linear structure was already present in Storey’s novel (see Walker, 1974: 173). At the centre of the narrative is Frank’s aggressive nature, and from the outset this aggression is signalled both visually and aurally. The film begins with an abstract, discordant main title theme (composed by Roberto Gerhard) that is interrupted by sounds of a crowd of spectators cheering encouragement. The chanting is threatening and primal, and these crowd noises appear at various points throughout the film, underpinning scenes of Frank’s rage and aggression. Following the main titles, the film opens with a rugby game which sets the tone for the scenes of the sport that we see throughout the film: the game is presented in a montage of violent close-ups of collisions, and the scrum is represented through a series of very tight shots of the participants struggling against one another. When Frank is injured by one of the members of the opposing team, he is carried off the field and the crowd’s chants segue into the sound of a heavy industrial drill; as Frank walks towards the camera Anderson dissolves to a close-up of a large mining drill (wielded by Frank) biting into the earth. This is the beginning of Frank’s memories about his association with the sport of rugby, and in the sequences in which deploy parallel editing, cutting between the past and the present, Anderson frequently uses overlapping sounds as a bridge between one scene and the next, as if Frank’s memories are triggered by the association of certain sounds with memories of the past. This expressionistic use of sound as a means of carrying the audience in to the internal state of the protagonist works in a similar to the use of sound in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) during the sequence depicting the final fight between Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) and Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro). Throughout the film, Frank’s rage is emphasised, and Harris plays this aspect of the character splendidly. Frank’s tendency to act like a predator in prowling through scenes is underscored by the other characters within the film: at one point, Mrs Weaver (Vanda Goodsell) declares that Frank is ‘like a big cat’ who ‘never stop[s] moving’. In an early sequence, Frank prowls around a night club before starting a fight for no apparent reason, and later in the film he brutally twists the arm of an elderly man (Johnson, played by William Hartnell) in order to get information out of him. (Johnson responds by saying ‘You get far too excited, lad’.) Many of Harris’ lines are spat through clenched teeth, and the character of Frank lives by a solipsistic philosophy of self-reliance: when Margaret tells him ‘Some people have life made for them’, Frank responds by angrily declaring that ‘That’s right, Mrs Hammond, and some people make it for themselves’. Later, he tells Mrs Weaver that ‘It’s like this, Mrs Weaver: you see something, and you go out and you get it. It’s as simple as that’. The only outlet for Frank’s rage and aggression is on the rugby field and, more subtly, through his combative interactions with Margaret. However, Frank’s aggression is tempered by scenes which show his tenderness in dealing with children, whether those children are Mrs Hammond’s or simply a crowd of youngsters who crowd around Frank in order to get his autograph. According to Anderson, Frank has ‘an ambiguity of nature, half overbearing, half acutely sensitive, that fascinated me without my being fully aware that I understood him. The same was true of his tortured, impossible relationship with the woman in the story, a bleak northern affair of powerful, inarticulate emotions frustrated or deformed by Puritanism or inhibition. Their background was rough and hard, no room here for charm or sentimental proletarianism’ (Anderson, quoted in Walker, 1974: 174). Frank’s relationship with Margaret is represented in a very bleak manner. Margaret is depicted as a self-denying widow, and in one scene Frank forces himself onto her in a moment that would later cause problems for the British censors. The director of the BBFC, John Trevelyan, found this scene problematic and, in the censor’s list of ‘cautions’ prepared before the film went into production, claimed that the script was characterised by ‘a “feel” of violence’ (Trevelyan, quoted in Walker, 1974: 176). Trevelyan also expressed disapproval at the ‘bad’ language within the film, claiming that even ‘for an X. film there are limits to what we would accept and we think that this script goes beyond them’ (ibid.). The censor also objected to the scene in which Frank rapes Margaret and the suggestion of male nudity in the scenes set in the changing rooms. The relationship between Frank and Margaret is fraught with violence and verbal sparring, due to Frank’s inability to express his love in a tender way and Margaret’s repressed sexuality: in his 1974 book Hollywood England, Alexander Walker suggests that the story is ‘one of self-punishment, of masochistically “missed connections” in which the male partner can’t embody his love in tenderness, and the female one won’t accept the pleasure of her own repressed sexuality’ (Walker, 1974: 174). It is this troubled relationship between Frank and Margaret that is at the centre of the film: for Alexander Walker, the film’s ‘subject was working-class: but what it illuminated was the emotional space inside its characters, not the industrial landscape around them’ (ibid.: 169). In this way, the film differs from many of the other films within the British ‘new wave’, and one of the ways in which This Sporting Life pulls its focus in to the ‘emotional space’ inside Frank is through its use of parallel editing and its expressionistic use of sound, as outlined above. Frank and Margaret orbit one another throughout the film, and their interactions occasionally explode into conflict. When Frank reveals to Margaret that he has been given a thousand pounds to play for the rugby club, Margaret reminds him that the money he has been given is more than the money she received when her husband died. Later, Frank takes Margaret to dinner in an upmarket restaurant, where Frank demonstrates a lack of proper etiquette: when the waiter asks Frank if he wants anything to drink and Frank replies that he does, the waiter offers to send the wine waiter over, and Frank asks him ‘Well, what the bloody hell did you ask me for?’ At the end of the meal, Margaret asserts that Frank is ‘act[ing] like a pig’, and Frank responds by gesturing to the other customers in the restaurant, stating that ‘Well, if I’m a pig, what’s this load of fat bastards, then?’ Frank asserts his contempt for the people who allow themselves to be exploited and repressed. When Margaret declares to Frank that ‘They all laugh at you and point you out. Didn’t you know that? Trying to be different’, Frank responds by angrily stating that ‘You want me to be like them. You want me to crawl about just like the rest. Well, just have a look at the rest [….] Take a good look at the bloody people around you. There isn’t a bleedin’ man amongst them: you’re flat on your back from the go, crawling about you. Because they haven’t got the guts. Do you understand that? They haven’t got the guts to stand up and walk about like me’. However, Frank eventually comes to realise that he is no less ‘better off’ within the rugby team than he was when he was working as a miner: the sport offers a sense of freedom that is illusory and is as much based on inequality, class prejudice and exploitation as Frank’s previous job as a miner. This Sporting Life was one of the last of the British ‘new wave’ films; the distributors, the Rank Organisation, struggled to determine how to market the film, especially due to its bleak and oppressive tone. As Walker asserts, the film is ‘puritan in the self-denying English tradition, yet romantic in the self-destructive Byronic one’ (ibid.: 169) and this proved a hard formula for the distributors to market. Although the film is one of the most fondly-remembered (and atypical) of the British ‘new wave’ pictures of the early 1960s, at the time of its release it was not a commercial success. However, for a fan of British cinema it is a must-watch, thanks to Anderson's almost abstract approach to the subject matter and a dynamite performance by Richard Harris.
Video
The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1, with anamorphic enhancement. The restoration is crisp and shows off the cinematography by Denys Coop, which makes expressionistic use of light and shadows.
Audio
The sound is presented in English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono; audio is clear and crisp, and dialogue is clearly audible. There are no subtitles.
Extras
The disc includes the film’s original Theatrical Trailer (2:17) and a Stills gallery (4:49). The packaging includes a booklet with an essay by Dave Rolinson, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull.
Overall
This Sporting Life is an excellent film, one of the best of the British ‘new wave’ pictures. Network’s DVD, the first time the film has been presented in its original cinema ratio on home video in the UK, contains a stunning restoration of the film and is highly recommended; it is a huge upgrade over the older UK DVD releases. References: Walker, Alexander, 1974: Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties. London: Orion For more information, please visit the website of Network DVD.
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