Lindsay Anderson (1963)

Plenty of punches are thrown in the course of This Sporting Life but it wasn’t these Penelope Gilliatt had in mind when, in her Observer review in 1963, she described Lindsay Anderson’s first dramatic feature as ‘a stupendous film’ with ‘a blow like a fist’.  From the opening shots of a rugby match, with a hand-held camera up close to bodies in a scrum, This Sporting Life is in your face.  The grimness that lies ahead is announced immediately by Roberto Gerhard’s foreboding music, which continues to push the same message for the next two hours or so.  The singular quality that Gilliatt saw in the film and so admired now seems a chief expression of its limitations.  Anderson’s direction has impact all right:  watching This Sporting Life soon turns into – to adapt Gilliatt’s metaphor – a bludgeoning of the viewer.

I don’t think it’s unfair to judge a sixty-year-old film – not this one, anyway – according to how it ‘now seems’.  For one thing, I felt the same about This Sporting Life when I last saw it, around twenty years ago.  For another, the strong-arm treatment of emotional ‘violence’ and ‘pain’ was its USP, an emblem of advancement from earlier British New Wave cinema.  Penelope Gilliatt had ‘never seen an English picture’ like it – and that’s clearly what Lindsay Anderson wanted his audience to feel.  His protagonist, Frank Machin, is an ex-miner who becomes a high-flying rugby-league professional but Anderson is on record as saying – in 1963 – that:

‘This Sporting Life is not a film about sport.  Nor is it to be categorised as a “North Country working-class story.”  It is a film about a man.  A man of extraordinary power and aggressiveness, both temperamental and physical, but with a great innate sensitiveness and a need for love of which he is hardly aware.’

It’s fair at least to assess the film in terms of its success in realising Anderson’s idea of what it ‘is’.

The source material is a 1960 novel of the same name by David Storey (1933-2017), who also wrote the screenplay.  The son of a coal miner, Storey went to grammar school in his home town of Wakefield before studying at the Slade School; during his years as an art student, he also played rugby league for Leeds (the train journey between London and Leeds in those days must have made this very time-consuming …).  Regardless of the autobiographical connection, rugby league is a good choice of sport for Frank Machin’s story:  even in the late 1950s, it was the poor relation of soccer in terms of players’ wages; the fact that rugby league players were paid at all meant that, beside rugby union, it was socially despised (pro sport was not for gentlemen).  Successful businessmen still call the tune today in rugby league management; even so, ‘t’committee’ of self-made locals who virtually run the club in This Sporting Life puts it in a socially specific time and place.  Although the characters always refer to the club simply as ‘City’, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Wakefield Trinity, the help of whose staff and players is acknowledged in the opening credits.  Frank and his teammates wear a strip either identical or very similar to the actual Trinity strip of the 1960s (lodged in my memory thanks chiefly to poor Don Fox’s in-front-of-the-sticks missed conversion kick in the last seconds of the 1968 Challenge Cup Final at Wembley, which handed the Cup to David Storey’s old team, Leeds).

In the opening match, Frank (Richard Harris) gets his front teeth broken and, although it’s Christmas Eve, instant dental treatment.   At first, This Sporting Life comprises a series of flashbacks, supposedly experienced by Frank under anaesthetic in the dentist’s chair – an awkwardly unrealistic device abandoned halfway through the film, when he leaves the dentist (Frank Windsor) and heads for a Christmas party.  The remaining narrative moves forward linearly.  The early flashbacks describe how Frank, after a brawl with some City players at a night club, persuades Johnson (William Hartnell), a City scout, to get him a trial with the club.  Frank impresses Gerald Weaver (Alan Badel), one of City’s owners, with his fearless, aggressive verve on the field:  not only does Weaver sign him; Frank joins the club with the large signing bonus that he insists on without really expecting to get.  (Weaver accepts Frank’s terms partly in order to spite Slomer (Arthur Lowe), Weaver’s bugbear on the management committee.)  The flashbacks also prepare the ground for the film’s central relationship, between Frank and his landlady, Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), a widowed mother of two and bitterly unhappy:  her husband died in an incident at Weaver’s factory; Margaret received paltry compensation on the grounds that suicide couldn’t be ruled out.  It’s clear from an early stage that Frank desires her sexually; she’s attracted to him, too, but repeatedly resists until he forces himself on her, and she submits.

Penelope Gilliatt found This Sporting Life ‘hard to write about because everything important about it is really subverbal’.  Robert Vas’s contemporary review in Sight and Sound (Spring 1963), which BFI is using as a programme note for the film’s screenings in their Lindsay Anderson retrospective, implies something similar.  For a ‘subverbal’ drama, This Sporting Life is very talky, and you rarely get the impression that characters are meaning or feeling something different from what they’re saying.  The numerous exchanges between Frank and Margaret are no exception:  dramatic tension might have been strengthened, and the viewer’s sense of being hit over the head reduced, if the principals had been less voluble.

The film would also be better with a better lead performance.  (Not sure from whom:  although Albert Finney comes to mind, he had already been a working-class hero in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and was probably busy with Tom Jones (1963) when This Sporting Life was in production.)  Playing Frank Machin made Richard Harris a star.  He’s undoubtedly charismatic but he was never a great actor – although he and his admiring director appear to think different.  Harris does his best work when he acts least – for example, when Frank plays games with Margaret’s kids (Bernadette Benson and Andrew Nolan) during a day trip he takes the family on, in his newly-acquired flash car.  And he’s good in a scene where City players drink in a club holding a talent contest and Frank unwillingly ends up on stage, singing ‘Here in My Heart’:  he sings pretty badly but he keeps going and, because he’s now a local celebrity, goes down a storm.  Too often, though, Harris is so aware of the camera that he seems to be performing in slow motion.  He makes Frank’s actions and words too considered; you rarely get the sense of a man behaving impulsively badly.

Technical accuracy in a simulated regional accent is sometimes dismissed as mere (by implication, shallow) mimicry but Richard Harris badly needs it here:  with those around him sounding at least plausibly Yorkshire, he’s incongruous.  A thin layer of broad West Riding laid on top of Harris’s own Irish accent results in something that occasionally sounds a bit Welsh but more often like a put-on voice from nowhere in particular.  Rachel Roberts, who actually was Welsh, comes off better – but only by hardly trying (it seems) to disguise her own origins.  Although there’s no reason, in theory, why Margaret Hammond shouldn’t be Welsh (or Frank Machin, for that matter), David Storey’s keen ear for West Yorkshire phraseology means that some of his dialogue doesn’t sound quite right in a different accent.  Lindsay Anderson showcases his lead actress also but to a lesser extent than he does his lead actor – and most of the momentum in the pair’s arguments comes from the tension that Rachel Roberts generates.  The rare occasions when clenched, resentful Margaret softens a little, as when recalling happier times with her husband, are a welcome respite.

In the supporting cast, Colin Blakely is outstanding as City’s captain, Maurice Braithwaite:  Blakely’s thoroughly naturalistic playing is much more humanly expressive than Richard Harris’s willed intensity.  There are other strong contributions in smaller roles – Arthur Lowe, Anne Cunningham (as Maurice’s girlfriend then wife) – but, for each satisfying performance, there seem to be two or three unsatisfying ones.  Because there’s not much to most of the roles, the actors tend to explain their character on their first appearance, after which they merely reiterate – so the more time they spend on screen, the worse it is.  Alan Badel as suave, snake-like Weaver, is a prime example.  William Hartnell (a matter of months before he became the first Doctor Who) is much too busy as ingratiating Johnson – it’s a relief when he disappears from the story.  As Weaver’s wife, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Frank, Vanda Godsell is monotonous; ditto Leonard Rossiter, as a local journalist.  An uncredited Edward Fox pops up momentarily as a barman but the best reason for keeping your eyes peeled for surprising cast members is a young woman in a group of guests at Weaver’s Christmas party, singing ‘For He’’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ to their host:  it’s Glenda Jackson, in her first screen appearance.

Anderson’s storytelling is sometimes careless.  Weaver and Slomer change their minds about Frank:  while you accept that, with these two, one U-turn dictates another, it’s unclear what causes Weaver’s, which appears to happen before his wife makes overtures to Frank.  A sequence in a posh restaurant, where Frank chucks his weight about and Margaret leaves in embarrassment, makes next to no sense where it occurs in the narrative.  (Robert Vas’s S&S review notes that the scene takes place at a much earlier stage of Storey’s novel.)  Back on the rugby pitch in the film’s finale, Frank appears to be wearing his dentures rather than a gumshield:  you almost hope this is a goof rather than a bizarre illustration that the hero is still asking for trouble.  A much bigger problem are the protracted, gruesome build-up and aftermath to Margaret’s death (from a brain haemorrhage:  all too easy to believe this woman’s blood pressure is off the scale).  When he accuses her of driving her first husband to suicide, Margaret chucks Frank out.  He gets a room in a cheap boarding house in a bomb-damaged area of town, leaving his Bentley parked outside.  As he sits at unconscious Margaret’s bedside in hospital, he watches a huge spider on the wall and, when he looks back at Margaret, sees blood coming from her mouth.  She’s pronounced dead and he punches the spider.  He returns to Margaret’s house, breaks in and wanders through the place moaning her name.

Lindsay Anderson was a film critic before he was a film-maker, and made plenty of documentary shorts before he tried his hand at screen fiction.  Whenever his focus extends beyond the claustrophobic, supposedly intense drama, Anderson’s documentary flair is evident.  In exterior sequences, he and his cinematographer, Denys Coop (who shot the film in black and white), have a knack for looking beyond the obvious centre of an image to its larger physical context:  the gasometers visible from the City rugby ground in the film’s closing shot are a good example.  These bits of documentary texture are double-edged, though.  They render all the more artificial the self-conscious, worked-up brutality of This Sporting Life.

23 May 2024