This Sporting Life

Another of the movies that I'd never done a blog post on that showed up on TCM several months back was This Sporting Life. As always, I recently sat down to watch it in able to be able to do that blog post.

The movie is more of a character story, although there is somewhat of a plot in the form of the main character's romance. That main character is Frank Machin (Richard Harris), who is a miner in one of those grimy northern England towns that helped fuel the UK's industrial rise but would fall in economic status in the decades following the making of the movie. Frank is an "angry young man" reminiscent of other kitchen sink movies like Look Back in Anger or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Frank doesn't have much of a life, living as the tenant of the widowed Mrs. Margaret Hammond (Rachel Robert), a woman with two children whose husband used to work at the same mine where Frank now works. Frank is interested in Margaret, but she's not so sure she wants to get back in another relationship.

Part of Frank's anger is directed at the upper-class people who still run the country even though Britain's class system was beginning to collapse by this time. However, Frank also takes it out on some of the rugby players from the local rugby league team, which gains him the notice of the team's owner, Mr. Weaver (Alan Badel). Even though Frank isn't that much of a rugby player, his agression is something Weaver wants for the team, so he signs Frank to a contract.

This contract, along with Frank's rise within the team, gives Frank a fair bit of money, something he's never really had in his life. However, it doesn't give him any upgrade in his social class, or even any class period. Frank has made the decision that he's going to keep acting like a boor, just because he's so darn angry with the rest of the world. He doesn't seem to see, or care, how much it's turning off everybody around him. This includes Margaret, who has to face all the scorn from the other women in her life because she's got a boyfriend who's just so déclassé.

Most of the critics of the time had good things to say about This Sporting Life, and it's easy to see why. It's the sort of movie that at the time would have been a breath of fresh air, considering the sort of thing Hollywood was making and even a lot of what the UK was making. The movie also has two very fine performances from Harris and Roberts, with both earning an Oscar nomination.

However, the movie is not without its flaws. One is that the movie runs rather longer than it probably should. It's the sort of story that should clock in at the 90-100 minute mark, I think, but actually runs 134 minutes, and feels like a slog at times. It doesn't help that much of the first half is told in flashbacks. The other issue is that Frank is at times such an unlikeable character that it makes it hard to have sympathy for him. This certainly isn't Harris' fault; the character is written that way. But it is a bit of a mistake on the part of the writer and director.

Still, people who want something different and out of their comfort zone would be well advised to give This Sporting Life a watch, both for the performances as well as the look at the northern England of the early 1960s.