This Sporting Life--Film Review

With melodrama from Tennessee Williams, performance styles from the Actors Studio, and his own awareness of the socio-political issues of his day, Lindsay Anderson put together one of the most influential British films of the time in This Sporting Life. Richard Harris stars as a miner turned rugby player who can’t cope with his change from blue-collar Yorkshire life to professional athlete and celebrity status. A truly angry young man, he uses the same methods in his personal life as he does on the field and, while one gains him success, the other ultimately destroys him. He locks his emotions in until it’s far too late and until all that’s left for him is a waning football career.

There might be too much of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in Harris’ performance, but his grasp on the character and his chemistry with Rachel Roberts overshadows most of that. Anderson’s juxtaposition of the upper and lower classes: Bentleys and fur coats on tenement streets, the circus attitude the aristocrats have toward their players, really add a lot of depth to a very narrow subject. Sometimes, the methodically told story, cynicism, and the emotional weight that’s carried in every action becomes hard to watch, but those are also the exact things that have so influenced later British directors. I’m mixed on it, but it is a good, if not always the most fun, film.

I also learned that I understand nothing about Rugby. It seems like the game we played as kids where we just violently attacked the kid with the ball, but there are referees and thousands of people cheering it on. I hear American football is rooted in it, but it doesn’t look like John Elway’s kind of game, so it’s clearly not football.