# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This SimpleViewer gallery requires Macromedia Flash. Please open this post in your browser or get Macromedia Flash here.
This is a WPSimpleViewerGallery

Lindsay Anderson's "This Sporting Life" is a theatrical social drama. It follows the story of a coal miner named Frank (played by Richard Harris) who attempts to escape his working class background by becoming a professional rugby player. But despite his success on the pitch, and his ability to achieve his dream of becoming a rugby star, Frank is ultimately unable to escape his working class roots, or to impress his working class love interest enough to woo her. He becomes caught in a tragic isolation between two classes- the first which will not accept him, and the second which will not have him back. Suspended between classes, Frank becomes violent and despondent, disenchanted with a life that had seemed so promising.
In the Kitchen: British Social Realism
Anderson's motives in this film are almost certainly tied to the mission of the "kitchen sink realists" who had hoped to utilize the cinema as a agent for social change. A part of Britain's brief New Wave of film, "This Sporting Life" seems to chaste society itself for consuming people like Frank as sports icons, but in the process denying them a human life. Anderson also seems critical of the middle class in this film, who use their power and wealth to transform athletes like Frank into objects or commodities. Finally, the film criticizes the pig-headedness of the proleteriat, whose jealousy over Frank's success becomes a vengeful willing for his misfortune. Desperately clinging to an idea of their noble impoverishment, the working class (represented by Mrs. Hammond) is unable to validate Frank's success, seeing him as a "ape on the football field" rather than a man who has made his own fortune. In all of these situations, Frank is inherently de-humanized. This seems to be a theme of the film. From every side, Frank is denied his humanity, which is to say his ability to feel pain, to love, to hope, to desire, to be vulnerable, and in short, to emote.
Against the American Athletic Hero
Watching this film from an American standpoint is particularly interesting. This is because, in the US, the story of the athlete who rose from the working class and became wealthy, is ALWAYS presented as something good. Something amazing. Something to cheer about, like the sporting events these athletes realize. In films like "Jerry Maguire" or "Miracle" or "A League of their own" or "Mystery, Alaska" or even "Space Jam" part of the narrative is always the social transformation of a poor talented athlete into a potent, bourgeoisie sports icon. The cliche is so embedded in American culture, that it would disorienting for the average American film goer to see a sports film where the protagonist is wealthy to start with. Sports are synomous in American lore with social mobility. They represent a will to succeed. They are the modernization of the Horatio Alger story.

But in "This Sporting Life" we read that for the British sports are not a way out of the proletriat. At least, not in 1960. Frank is trapped, and an anxiety hangs over the film as the spectator yearns for something to give. For a scene or two, it seems that Mrs. Hammond will relent on her hatred for Frank and warm-up. But then she goes cold again. At other times, it seems that Frank is finally breaking through, and that he will soon stop clinging to the comfort of the working class world he knows so well.
Angst & Anxiety
Like all social dramas, "This Sporting Life" encourages the spectator to see ways out for the protagonist. But the divide between the cinema and the spectator disallows our transgression into that space to call out "just leave her Frank!"or "move out!" Anderson intentionally draws out these moments when the spectator most wants to enter the fiction and assist the protagonists. So we become hostage to the drama, voyeurs of the spectacle which is all to familiar. We come to pity Frank, as he seems to want to do the right thing, but ultimately we cannot forgive his violence and lack of understanding. It is his will to succeed that both allows him to achieve his rugby dreams and fails to allow him the compassion to see Mrs. Hammond's plight. Like a true modern drama, Frank is not a victim of over-reaching, but simply a victim of his own success. He becomes a painful mascot of the working class struggle, as he represents a life where even the successes are doomed to become failures.

Unable to escape his habits of the stage, Anderson shot this movie as though it were on a stage. The lighting and blocking are straight from the theatre, and the acting is likewise overblown. Harris, himself a stage actor originally, is still projecting his voice. He and Anderson have not yet realized what the film camera is capable of in terms of subtlety. Fortunately, Frank's loud, boisterous demeanor is complimented by Harris' theatrical overacting, and the social drama of this film is brought firmly to life by its theatricality.
Conclusions
In all, "This Sporting Life" is of more interest to political cinema as a contextual document than as a end in and of itself. And what the context presented? A certain social observation- a view that may seen as a foundation for work like Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" or Anderson's second feature "If....". Viewed from this film, both of those works can be read as nuanced interrogations of class and social structures. Without the context of "This Sporting Life" however, one might miss the forest for the trees- "If...." for instance almost never escapes the context of the upper class, boarding school experience. But that doesn't mean it is not there. Instead, we must see the setting and the narrative of the film as something that is inherently other from the working class struggle, but part of the same world. The question "why can't they co-exist?" is one that is answered by their stark seperation: because that is the nature of British society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Sporting Life: Theatrical Social Drama

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This SimpleViewer gallery requires Macromedia Flash. Please open this post in your browser or get Macromedia Flash here. This is a WPSimpleViewerGallery Lindsay Anderson's "This Sporting Life" is a theatrical social drama. It follows the story of a coal miner named Frank (played by Richard Harris) who attempts to escape his working class background by becoming a professional rugby player.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discussion of themes and motifs in David Storey's This Sporting Life. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of This Sporting Life so you can excel on your essay or test.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Midway through David Storey's novel This Sporting Life, published in 1960, the widow Mrs. Hammond tells the hero that her relationship with him is making her feel "dirty." "I couldn't think why she should say all this," he muses, "and the shortest way of stopping it I found was to hit her."

Lindsay Anderson's film of the novel replicates that moment and typifies its tone and theme. This Sporting Life (1963) is a clenched fist of a movie. Its hero, Frank Machin (Richard Harris), is a professional Rugby League player who instinctively channels feeling through physical aggression. Early in the film, when he is still working as a coal miner, he provokes a fight in a dance hall simply, it seems, out of envy. In his trial game for the club, he deliberately injures a player on his own side when he feels that teammate is affecting his performance. His first love scene with Mrs. Hammond (Rachel Roberts) is more like rape than romance, presaging a relationship that develops into a tormented struggle, she still in mourning over the death of her husband, he brutally-and in the end, fatally-trying to pull her out of her shell of coldness and withdrawal.

Most sporting films involve pain, but they will end in triumph for their hero, usually as reward for his moral redemption. By contrast, This Sporting Life starts in the realm of pain-Frank is thumped in the face during a match before the narrative proper has even begun-and never leaves it. The rugby field is a battleground of brutality, fitness, and survival. Some scenes between Machin and Mrs. Hammond are more like brawls than arguments, making you flinch (the distinguished cameraman Walter Lassally thought they had an emotional power unequaled in any British film). An outspoken critic in his younger days of the timidity of British cinema, director Lindsay Anderson was bringing his bold ideas onto the screen.

Born in India in 1923, the son of a Scottish major-general, and educated at Cheltenham public school and Wadham College, Oxford, Anderson had first made a name for himself as the founder of the film magazine Sequence in 1947. In its pages he championed the poetic cinema of Jean Vigo, Humphrey Jennings, and John Ford, directors whose films had what he called "larger implications than the surface realities might suggest," and extolled the critical precepts of commitment, courage, and conviction that were to be the watchwords of his own cinematic practice. That practice began shortly thereafter, with a series of short fiction and documentary works in the late forties and early fifties. After winning an Oscar for Thursday's Children (1954), a sensitive documentary about a school for deaf and dumb children, codirected with Guy Brenton, he became the driving force behind the so-called Free Cinema movement of the mid-1950s, where "free" was a synonym for "personal." It featured six programs of films by new directors at London's National Film Theatre, including Anderson's own O Dreamland (1953) and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which aimed to bring a new working-class realism to the screen. These films coincided with a similar trend toward social realism and rebellion against the inherent conservatism of British culture and society in the plays of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and others, and in the contemporary working-class novels of John Braine ( Room at the Top), Alan Sillitoe ( Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Stan Barstow ( A Kind of Loving), and David Storey, whose unusual sexual and social frankness were highly acclaimed and very popular. The screen adaptations of these novels in the late fifties and early sixties ushered in a new era of British film and formed the core of what was to be known as the British new wave, a movement of which the later This Sporting Life was perhaps the most forceful expression.

Anderson had read This Sporting Life with great admiration. He knew its north of England milieu, as he had made a number of documentaries for the mining engineering company Sutcliffe Ltd. in Wakefield in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and also a documentary, Wakefield Express (1952), about the workings of the local newspaper. ( This Sporting Life was shot on location in the town and uses some of the players from the Wakefield Trinity team to add authenticity to the rugby scenes.) But what really impressed Anderson was the quality of the writing. "He seeks to penetrate the soul," he said of Storey, "yet he never forgets the relevance of the social world in which souls meet, conflict, and struggle. He labors to balance the ambiguities of our nature: male and female, tenderness and violence, isolation and love." In discussing Storey in such terms, Anderson was also disclosing something of himself.

Storey was a divided individual, a coal miner's son and a professional rugby player who, before the publication of the novel, had also financed his way through art college. If the ambiguities of Machin's character clearly echoed those of the author, they struck a strong chord in Anderson too, a closeted homosexual privately infatuated with his leading actor, Richard Harris, and, perhaps because of this, empathizing with the repressed Mrs. Hammond, who is alternately awed and appalled by Machin's oppressive masculinity. "A bleak northern affair of powerful, inarticulate emotions frustrated or deformed by puritanism and inhibition" was the way Anderson described the central relationship, adding ruefully, "No room here for charm or sentimental proletarianism." True enough: when the phrase "I love you" finally escapes Machin's lips, Mrs. Hammond spits in his face. It is one of the most harrowing relationships in British film, but it sears the soul because both Harris and Roberts give the performances of their lives. They were both to be nominated for Oscars, and Harris was to secure the best actor prize at the Cannes festival, while Roberts was to win a British Academy award as best actress.

Still, the film did not make for comfortable viewing, and it was not a commercial success. Its timing was unfortunate. Although in some ways it is the culminating achievement of the British new wave, in terms of theme (Harris's Machin the most extreme case of the movement's angry young men) and in terms of style (with its audacious montage and complicated flashback structure), audiences were by this time beginning to tire of L-shaped rooms and lonely long-distance runners: around the corner were the more exuberant spectacles of James Bond, Tom Jones, the Beatles, and Swingin' London. Audiences also found it difficult to relate to a hero whom even Anderson described as "half overbearing, half acutely sensitive." The film seemed overlong and overstated to some, particularly in the notorious deathbed scene of Mrs. Hammond in hospital, where a Bergmanesque spider stalks the wall, only to be crushed by Machin's fist when he learns of her death (typical even here, though, that grief can only be expressed by an act of violence). The film has its tender moments, however, and the slow-motion coda carries a real weight of sadness and even tragedy, as Frank trudges across the rugby field, now out of favor with both management and fans, before jogging away from the camera, into an obscure and uncertain future.

Fortunately, Anderson was to have his day in the sun at the end of the decade with If.... (1968), his scathing satire of the British public-school system, which was described (to Anderson's delight) as "an insult to the nation" by the British ambassador to France but which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes and caught the late 1960s mood of anarchy and iconoclasm as well as any film of that era. He was to continue his professional collaboration with David Storey, directing a number of Storey's plays, one of which, In Celebration, he was to film in 1974 with the original cast for Ely Landau's American Film Theatre. Later films such as O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982) acquired a following, and his last film, Is That All There Is? (1993), made for the BBC, was a documentary self-portrait of great wit and poignancy.

The film that stands up best, however, still seems to me to be This Sporting Life, an utterly uncompromising work, the toughness of its vision eloquently augmented by Denys Coop's chilly black-and-white photography and by Roberto Gerhard's spare, almost atonal score. Its observations on the way sporting clubs become the playthings of businessmen now seem very prescient, and Alan Badel's club owner, Weaver, has something of the Mephistophelian menace of George C. Scott in The Hustler (1961), ostensibly interested in the hero's welfare, actually after his soul. Indeed, far from dated, the film today seems, curiously, to anticipate great 1970s cinema, and particularly the films of Martin Scorsese. Watching Machin admiring and shadowboxing with his image in the mirror, and out on a date with a woman he cares about but that he clumsily turns into an embarrassing fiasco, one cannot help thinking of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, from 1976 (according to the writer David Sherwin, Scorsese told him the name Travis had been chosen as homage to the Malcolm McDowell character in If....). And if one considers the film's brutal sporting background, the dynamic leading performance, the oppressive physicality and masculinity, and a hero whose main outlet for inner turmoil is external violence, then Frank Machin suddenly looks like Jake La Motta in a rugby shirt, and This Sporting Life a British precursor to Raging Bull (1980).

When Anderson died in 1994, a vital voice in, and on, British cinema was silenced. The voice could certainly be cantankerous: pity that poor critic who tentatively began a question to Anderson with the words "Were you trying to say . . . ?" only to be slapped down with the imperious response "I wasn't trying to say anything; I said it." Yet it could be as compassionate as it was impassioned. To me this is particularly seen in This Sporting Life. Anderson once said that he sometimes thought of himself as being like the boy who stood on the burning deck: stubborn, defiant even in isolation, but not quite certain in his own mind whether he is being a hero or a bloody idiot. No wonder he understood Machin so well, particularly in those moments of bluff bravado or in gestures of generosity so clumsily delivered that they provoke embarrassment more than gratitude. He feels things deeply, but the articulation of these feelings is so difficult. I think particularly of that nightclub scene where Machin, whose insecurity and isolation here have been very sensitively suggested, is prevailed upon to sing. Sportingly, he does so, and in a clenched, awkward, and somewhat abashed manner reveals something essential at his core-and maybe Anderson's too. "Here in my heart," he sings plaintively, "I'm alone and so lonely."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Midway through David Storey's novel This Sporting Life, published in 1960, the widow Mrs. Hammond tells the hero that her relationship with him is making her feel "dirty." "I couldn't think why she should say all this," he muses, "and the shortest way of stopping it I found was to hit her."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This Sporting Life (1963) dir. Lindsay Anderson writ. David Storey (from his novel) cine. Denys Coop edt. Peter Taylor music Roberto Gerhard star. Richard Harris (Frank Machin), Rachel Roberts (Margaret Hammond), Alan Badel (Weaver), William Hartnell (Johnson), Colin Blakely (Maurice), Vanda Godsell (Anne Weaver), Anne Cunninghamm (Judith), Arthur Lowe (Slomer), Jack Watson (Len) Janus an ape on a football field Rugby football: what is it?

# data[].attributes.headline
The Guardian, article about the working class theme

# data[].attributes.subject
The Guardian, article about the working class theme

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
avid Storey, in an unforgettable partnership with the director Lindsay Anderson, provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy, smashing at the dullness, the complacency and hypocrisy of class-ridden Britain. Storey adapted his own 1960 novel This Sporting Life for the screen: Lindsay Anderson directed it, and won from Richard Harris a performance to rival Brando. He is Frank Machin, a gifted sportsman who wants to make it as a professional rugby league player (like Storey himself), but is poignantly in love with his widowed landlady, played by Rachel Roberts. Frank is a superstar on the field; he has money, success with women and a cocksure sense of himself that irritates the stuffy ruling class. Frank is that rarest of things in British cinema of that time: a success. Billy Liar might fantasise. Frank Machin lives the dream.

Storey's movie took Britain beyond the miserable period between the end of the Chatterley ban in 1960 and the Beatles' first LP - released a month after the film, in March 1963. Four years later, the contraceptive pill was made available to unmarried women, as well as to married women. There was more freedom, less snobbery, more prosperity, a little. But sex, and the unspoken fear of pregnancy, hung over everything. Sport was the displacement activity. When Frank crashes against other players, covered in mud, part warrior, part caveman, he's working off frustration that any man can understand. And the fact that he's doing it on the rugby field is brilliantly judged. Football would be too obviously déclassé: the game for gentlemen played by ruffians. Cricket wouldn't interest Frank. But rugby lets Frank rub the posh types' noses in it.

This Sporting Life is a fascinating film because it is about something that would grow to obsess everyone: celebrity. Frank rises through the social ranks, not through work, not through marriage, not through commercial success or perhaps a brilliant career in the armed forces - all things that the upper classes would find annoying but familiar. He does it through the new magic of celebrity, like the forthcoming pop stars, actors and fashion photographers of the 60s. He is famous: and he wants to make it pay.

Storey creates a brilliant scene in which Frank negotiates his pay using some deadpan brinkmanship with the pompous and self-important blazered types in charge (as arrogant, in their own way, as the private schoolmasters and prefects of Anderson's If...). Again, Storey took his muddy boot to the humbug shamateurism of British sport - an affectation designed to keep out un-leisured, un-moneyed types who had to work for a living. Storey gives Frank a great line to celebrate his success: "I only enjoy it if I get paid a lot for it!" In This Sporting Life, Storey created a great working-class hero for the screen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How David Storey's This Sporting Life created a great working-class film hero

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
avid Storey, in an unforgettable partnership with the director Lindsay Anderson, provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy, smashing at the dullness, the complacency and hypocrisy of class-ridden Britain. Storey adapted his own 1960 novel This Sporting Life for the screen: Lindsay Anderson directed it, and won from Richard Harris a performance to rival Brando.