{"id":4591,"date":"2009-05-31T22:21:29","date_gmt":"2009-06-01T06:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4591"},"modified":"2009-06-04T21:04:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T05:04:07","slug":"this-sporting-life-lindsay-anderson-1963-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4591","title":{"rendered":"This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963): UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau<\/a>.\u00a0 Viewed on DVD.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lindsay Anderson\u2019s 1963 film, This Sporting Life<\/a><\/em>, is a rough and gritty film with moments of poignancy, and is carried by a powerful performance from Richard Harris, making it one of the finest of the “angry young man” British films of the sixties.<\/p>\n

The film begins violently on the football field as Frank Machin (Richard Harris) gets his teeth knocked out during a rugby game.\u00a0 Much of the story that follows is told in flashback as Frank sits unconscious in the dentist\u2019s chair getting the broken teeth pulled.\u00a0 Frank convinces \u201cDad\u201d Johnson (William Hartnell), who is a scout for the local rugby team, to get him a tryout.\u00a0 When Frank impresses enough to be signed by the team, he thinks he has finally broken out of his class and into a higher society.\u00a0 He continues to try and woo his widowed landlord Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), but she is extremely bitter and hostile, and still in love with the memory of her late husband.\u00a0 Even when she does give in to Frank, she is only able to give him sex, not affection.\u00a0 Frank soon comes to realize that despite the considerable money he is making, and the fancy car he now drives, the world just sees him as an \u201cape on a football field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard Harris won the Cannes Film Festival\u2019s Best Actor prize in 1963 and received an Oscar nomination for his gutsy, loud, barbaric, yet heartfelt performance.\u00a0 He comes across as, and even resembles, a young Marlon Brando.\u00a0 His performance is the heart and soul of the film.\u00a0 Rachel Roberts also received an Oscar nod for her performance, but her character is so angry and unable to enjoy anything that she is terribly off-putting.\u00a0 Still, Roberts does make her an interesting character.\u00a0 William Hartnell as the scout that gets Frank his chance and morally supports him afterwards is also a fascinating character, but unfortunately he disappears halfway through the film.\u00a0 Yet Hartnell does enough to make this character stick in your mind as an old man clinging to whatever life he can because he does not have much left of his own.\u00a0 Lindsay Anderson\u2019s direction is excellent in keeping a gritty sense of realism with the performances and the many real locations used in the film.\u00a0 Scenes of the players’ camaraderie and rough housing in the locker rooms lend the film an authenticity.\u00a0 Writer David Storey, who had been a former rugby player, adapted the screenplay from his own novel and his own experiences seem to have given the story much substance that only adds to the realistic quality of the film.\u00a0 Denys N. Coop\u2019s cinematography is able to show the grime of the lower class houses, pubs, and the mud-covered football field, but is still crisp enough to lend a real appreciable beauty to the compositions.\u00a0 The film succeeds on several levels, but can be a bit dour at times.\u00a0 However, it is worth seeing for the strong performance of Harris, and can be appreciated for several other qualities as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed on DVD. Lindsay Anderson\u2019s 1963 film, This Sporting Life, is a rough and gritty film with moments of poignancy, and is carried by a powerful performance from Richard Harris, making it one of the finest of the “angry young man” British films of the sixties. The film begins violently on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}