If there's one thing wealthy English middle-class film directors like to do its patronise those unfortunates who are forced to live outside the area now bounded by the M25.Of course in 1963 it was strictly a notional boundary,as the world's biggest car park was just a gleam in some town planner's eye,but a boundary it was nonetheless. If such a director was to set his intrepid foot in the direction marked "North" on the compass,he would return home with his daily rushes as proud as Armand and Michaela Dennis with their exotic shots of life in Africa. Life in Yorkshire was as unfathomable to the Bryanston Mafia as tribal customs in Rwanda. The makers of "This sporting life" have failed to comprehend that in making a film highlighting the hypocrisy of middle class northerners exploiting the talent of their own working class they are looking into a mirror like Caliban.Either that or they are exercising an even greater hypocrisy of their own. Yorkshire in 1963 seemed hardly to have recovered from the depression,it was like one of those Eastern European countries under the Soviet yoke,with beer instead of vodka to keep the population manageable.The archetypal warm-hearted Northerner full of mother wit and good cheer had yet to be invented by the TV companies and the people seemed cold of eye and repressed.Then,as now,sport seemed to be the only conduit to wealth for poorly educated barely literate young men. Frank Machin,clearly a bear of very little brain,is good at rugby.Up North this is not a gentlemanly game with japes in the showers and a few rude songs in the bar afterwards,it is deadly serious.Then,Mr Machin is not exactly the life and soul of the party.He is the sort of bloke beloved of Guardianistas everywhere,the inarticulate working man,unable to express his feelings except through physical action,how utterly utterly unlike their own home life of course.They nod wisely when his frustrations explode,cooing with sympathy but making sure they are nowhere near him when it happens. However unlikely it may seem,Frank,fit young and virile sportsman that he is,fancies his landlady,an embittered,dried up widow with a mouth like a rattrap,and old enough to be his mother.Dark stuff this. The rest you can work out from "The film and TV scriptwriters' guide to stereotypical Northern drama". The film was ludicrously overpraised on its release and I saw it in an East London cinema that was 80% empty.A fair number of the remaining 20% voted with their feet long before the end.I sat it out because I had paid 3 shillings and ninepence(about 18p) for the privilege and I was only earning £9 per week so it constituted a sizeable proportion of my daily wage.Rugby League players in Yorkshire wouldn't have got out of bed for that.Especially their landladies' bed. "This sporting life" is too clever by far,a positive plethora of directors' tricks,flashy camera-work and nostalgie de la boue.Richard Harris overacts wildly with that grim determination to be true to life that ends up being nothing like real life at all.Rachel Roberts ,poor thing,spends most of the film looking dead before she actually does pass away.Many British thesps polish up their sort "a"s and nobody says"There's trooble at 't' mill" as far as I can remember,but much of the dialogue is at that level.Mr Anderson carried on in much the same vein for some years and gained the reputation as a sympathetic chronicler of the working class.Well,sympathetic he might have been - accurate he wasn't.With sympathy and £1.99 I can buy a Big Mac.
Review of This Sporting Life
