Top 10 Classic Sport Movies

Fighting, dying, hoping, hating … great sports films are about far more than sport itself. Here Guardian and Observer critics pick their 10 best.10.

This Sporting Life
Lindsay Anderson brought to bear on his adaptation of David Storey’s first novel, all the poetic-realist instincts he had been honing for the previous decade as a documentarian in the Humphrey Jennings mould. (Anderson had won the 1953 best doc Oscar for Thursday’s Children.) Filmed partly in Halifax and Leeds, but mainly in and around Wakefield Trinity Rugby League Club, one of its incidental attractions is its record of a northern, working-class sports culture that would change out of all recognition over the next couple of decades.

The story of Frank Machin, a miner who becomes a star on the rugby field, all the while knowing that he is considered as disposable property – a machin(e)? – by his club, and as “a great ape on a football field” by his landlady and lover (Rachel Roberts), is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, largely in flashbacks from a dentist’s chair, using some of the most inventive editing – by Peter Taylor – that British cinema had ever seen. Produced by Karel Reisz, it was perhaps the last gasp of the northern kitchen-sink boomlet inaugurated by Room at the Top and climaxing with Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and its failure at the box-office caused producers to withdraw from the genre.

Nonetheless, this is the movement’s artistic pinnacle, featuring marvellous black and white cinematography by Denys Coop, and performances that are still shattering to witness. Harris was just back from Tahiti, having played opposite Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty, and although he abhorred Brando, the cursed and luckless Machin – shirt number 13 – is as Brando-esque a performance as British cinema has ever produced.

And though the rugby scenes take up relatively little screen-time, they are vivid, violent and frenetic, with massed crowds of working men roaring on the touchline. The last match, with Harris physically exhausted and emotionally destroyed, and black with mud, is filmed like a day on the Somme.”

Read the full post here.