THIS SPORTING LIFE

Frank Machin, a rugby player is hit on the chin during a match. He is taken to the dentist, anesthetized, and operated upon. Under anesthesia, Machin looks back upon the most important moments of his life. An exminer he arrived in the city and rented a room in the house of Mrs. Hammond, a widow who he is secretly and awkwardly in love with. After some encounters with the local rugby team, he is taken on because Weaver the manager had a good opinion of him. After the operation, while he still is unable to speak, Machin joins his teammates in Weaver's country house at a birthday party. But he had already had a chance to sample the corruption of this setting and it gets him sick. After a few days, he tries to clarify his relationship with Mrs. Hammond, who rejects him, still tied to her sense of duty towards the memory of her husband who died in the mines. Machin moves away and begins a life of wandering around. When he finds out that Mrs. Hammond was sent to the hospital for a cerebral hemorrhage, he runs to her bedside. But the woman is already unconscious. She dies. Machin returns to his former house and, in the last shot of the film, plays in another rugby match.


"It is easier to say what a film is not about. This Sporting Life is not a film about sport. Nor is it to be categorised as a 'North Country workingclass story'… I suppose that the film is primarily a study of temperament, it is a film about a man. A man of extraordinary power and aggressiveness, both temperamental and physical... Flying in the face of fashion, we have tried to make a tragedy. Here the achievement has been the opening up of new territories, both of subjects and of the social backgrounds in which they are set. But it could also be restrictive if we make films for too long with an eye on what is representative film about working class people looked at objectively, almost with a documentarist's vision. Of course, too. it must rule tragedy out; for tragedy is concerned with what is unique, not what is representative… No doubt I shall be accused, or congratulated, for having deserted the ranks of 'commitment'. Both accusations and congratulations will be misplaced. All works of art have political implications: but they have political implications because they are works of art, not vice versa." (Lindsay Anderson, Sport Life and Art, "Films and Filming", n. 5, February 1963, pp. 1618)

Director: Lindsay Anderson.
Screenplay: David Storey, dal suo romanzo omonimo.
Director of photography: Denys Coop.
Editor: Peter Taylor.
Art director: Alan Withy.
Costume designer: Sophie Devine.
Music: Roberto Gerhard.
Cast: Richard Harris (Frank Machin), Rachel Roberts (Mrs. Hammond), Alan Badel (Weaver), William Hartnell (Johnson), Colin Blakely (Maurice), Vanda Godsell (Mrs. Weaver), Arthur Lowe (Sloamer), Anne Cunningham (Judith), Jack Watson (Len Miller), Harry Markham (Wade), George Sewell (Jeff), Leonard Rossiter (Phillips).
Production company: Karel Reisz, Julian Wintle e Leslie Parkin per la lndependent Artists.