CYCLE 3 ・ 5/10 ・ UNITED KINGDOM
This Sporting Life (1963, Lindsay Anderson)
Lindsay Anderson is most famous for the films he made with Malcolm McDowell, such as 1968's If... and 1973's O Lucky Man! But This Sporting Life also deserves a place alongside those classics. Starring Richard Harris in a dynamic performance as the alternately surly and sensitive rugby star Frank Machin, This Sporting Life is striking for its brutal directness - established immediately in the visceral opening sequence, as we see men writhing around in the dirt and crashing into each other at lightning speed, resulting in a bloody loss of teeth.
This decades cycle makes the passage of time very clear, in terms of cinematic history, despite the fact that each film is from a different country. For a number of reasons, This Sporting Life is a film that just simply couldn't have been made any earlier than the 1960s. Its chilly reception upon its initial British release suggests that it may have even arrived too soon. The head-on approach to portraying life and the drama of everyday life, the visual correlation of graphic physical violence (here in the context of sports) and personal struggles, the roughshod dismantling of time and space to get inside a character's head and convey their thoughts. Even for the "kitchen sink" movement of the British New Wave, Lindsay Anderson was a cut above the rest, and essentially drove the nail into the coffin of the short-lived subgenre with this cutting-edge film.













