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This Sporting Life [1963] [DVD]

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Richard Harris (Actor), Lindsay Anderson (Director) Rated: Suitable for 12 years and over Format: DVD
4.4 out of 5 stars 45 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Actors: Richard Harris
  • Directors: Lindsay Anderson
  • Format: PAL
  • Language: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 12
  • Studio: Network
  • DVD Release Date: 3 Nov. 2008
  • Run Time: 91 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B000RJEIS4
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 21,551 in DVD & Blu-ray (See Top 100 in DVD & Blu-ray)

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Product Description

Product Description

Yorkshire miner turned rugby player Frank Machin (Richard Harris) has a number of women chasing after him, but only has eyes for his widowed landlady, Mrs Hammond (Rachel Roberts). However, she remains resolutely unresponsive to his advances. Meanwhile, Frank's rebelliousness at the club is tolerated as long as he is successful on the pitch, but as he comes to appreciate the emptiness of his existence his frustration begins to mount.

From Amazon.co.uk

Prolific British filmmaker Lindsay Anderson weaves this small, evocative tale of young life at the crossroads in early 1960s Northern England. A rough, sullen young man (Richard Harris) working in the local coal mines begins to make a name for himself as a star rugby player, but even as he begins to fall in love he cannot escape the harsh realities of the bleak life around him. The rugby sequences in the film are striking, but no more so than the depiction of downtrodden people living in the shadow of industry and corruption that too often crushes their spirit. Harris in one of his first roles, is remarkably effective as an unlikeable but sympathetic figure trying against hope to savour the small joys life has to offer, and the film also features the debut of renowned actress Glenda Jackson. One of a series of working-class, character-driven British imports, This Sporting Life is one of the best on the field. --Robert Lane --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsBest British Film Ever Made
By Wakefield, 2011 on 30 Jan. 2010
Format: DVD
Don't believe any of the stupid and insulting reviews of this film left here by people who are obviously out of sympathy with what it is trying to achieve. This represents the high-point of British film-making: a film about British people made FOR British people - in stark contrast to the junk we tend to produce today, sending ourselves up for the jollification of American onanists. Harris was never as impressive as this again and Rachel Roberts gives a heart-breaking performance as his landlady/love interest (sort of). The supporting cast is impeccable and as for the ending....absolutely devastating. No sense of it being rushed at all - absolutely perfect and right.

Be warned, though: this film is sugar and anaesthetic-free, largely unleavened by humour (and none the worse for that, I'd say). Anyone interested in BRITISH film-making (as opposed to 'films made in Britain') needs to see this film.
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5.0 out of 5 starsIt's about time you took that rock of weight off your shoulders.
By Spike Owen TOP 500 REVIEWER on 12 May 2013
Format: DVD
This Sporting Life is directed by Lindsay Anderson and written by David Storey. It stars Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel, William Hartnell, Colin Blakely, Vanda Godsell and Anne Cunningham. Music is by Roberto Gerhard and cinematography by Denys Coop.

Frank Machin (Harris) gets the opportunity to utilise his brute strength and angry nature out on the Rugby League field. It looks a match made in sporting heaven as Machin quickly establishes himself as a star in waiting, but off the field he is less successful at life's challenges...

You taking the jam out of someone's sandwich without asking for it?

Pigeon holed as Brit Kitchen Sink Drama or Brit New Wave, This Sporting Life is regardless a very unique and powerful film. It was director Anderson's first full length feature and also Harris' break out performance. What transpires over the course of the two hour plus running time, is a tale of mud, blood and emotionally fractured characters. Set to a grim back drop of a damp Yorkshire city, with coal mines and factories the means of employment, the streets are paved with stone and the terraced houses charred by the soot of the chimney smoke.

Just a big ape on the football field.

This back drop marries up perfectly with Machin's life, where even out on the pitch he comes to understand that he's in a vortex of unfulfillment. There are some bright spots dripped into proceedings, hope dangled like a golden carrot, especially with one beautiful sequence as Frank plays with Margaret's (Roberts) kids, but bleakness is never far away, the story demands that. Margaret is his landlady and object of his brutish desire, she's one of life's warriors but struggling to keep up the good fight.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsA Modern Tragedy
By M. J. Nelson on 10 Aug. 2010
Format: DVD
Having been a Rugby League player himself David Storey, author of both the original novel and the screenplay, knew what he was writing about. But the sporting background, characterised by the often brutal nature of the Rugby League game, is properly subsumed by a story of two people - the miner/player Frank Machin (Richard Harris) and the still young widow Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts) with whom he lodges - whose relationship is fatally flawed by the inherently violent nature of the former and the inherently repressed nature of the latter. The setting of a grim Northern town rings true, the match scenes, filmed in Wakefield, are vividly staged, the performances of the principals are outstanding and the rawness and passion of the story climaxes in a genuine - and heartbreaking - tragedy. This has some claim to be the finest of the North of England-based New Wave British films of the period.
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4.0 out of 5 starsThis Sporting Life
By It's me! on 25 Nov. 2004
Format: DVD
Uncompromising, claustrophobic, grubby, pitiless, deadly - this film succeeds in describing the essence of the industrial North before the winds of social change emanating from Swinging London really started to make themselves felt. It is almostly certainly cinema's most 'honest' portrayal of the British working-class milieu in the early-'sixties. For this reason alone it is well worth seeing, but it also features fine acting performances, not only from the two leads, but also from a surprisingly strong supporting cast, which includes a number of household names from the era.
One word of caution concerning this particular presentation: whether due to the original mono soundtrack or the DVD manufacturers/distributors, the audio is poor throughout the film and dialogue occasionally difficult to follow. Subtitles are however provided.
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3.0 out of 5 starsIt's cliched up north
By Trevor Willsmer HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWER on 9 Sept. 2006
Format: DVD Verified Purchase
Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life now seems more a mishmash of influences than an enduring classic. There's a very strong influence from Truffaut's 400 Blows, a dash of the British Free Cinema movement and a lot of melodramatic kitchen sink `realism,' while the accents are all over the place - set in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the accents veer from Ireland, Wales and all points north. The flashback structure now seems too forced a device to really allow you into the story for far too much of the running time, although the sledgehammer subtly of Roberto Gerhard's crashingly over-the-top monotonal avant-garde score doesn't help by constantly overstating the it's-grim-oop-north clichés as Greek tragedy.

Richard Harris' Frank Machin is very much in the angry-young-man mould of the day - if anything he manages to be more unpleasant than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning's Arthur Seaton and Look Back in Anger's Jimmy Porter combined, an inarticulate brute who thinks he can bulldoze his way to Rugby success (he can) and into landlady Rachel Roberts' heart (he can't, but it's hard to see why he'd want to), so naturally he's heading for a pre-ordained fall. Which, seen today, is part of the problem. The film follows the classic formula of all the kitchen sink films of the day, culminating in what can either be seen as the victory of the system or the triumph of the old moral censorship code - that such characters must always be seen to be punished or to repent. No surprises, not much impact but a surprisingly decent cast. No extras on the DVD either, but a reasonable transfer.
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