Watching Richard Harris' performance as Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson's 1963 masterpiece "This Sporting Life" you might be reminded of Marlon Brando's work in "A Streetcar Named Desire" or indeed of Robert De Niro's Jake La Motta in Scorsese's later "Raging Bull", (Scorsese's film owes a great deal to "This Sporting Life" without ever quite measuring up). All three characters share the same animalistic intensity and an inability to communicate except in the most primordial level. This was the film that made Harris a star and it's his greatest performance; he was nominated for the Oscar and won the Best Actor prize at Cannes. His co-star is the great Rachel Roberts as the widowed landlady who takes Machin into her bed. Like Harris, she too was nominated and deservedly so; she's as fine here as she was in Karl Reisz's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", (Reisz produced this film while Anderson made his feature debut as a director). David Storey did the superb adaptation from his own novel and the brilliant supporting cast included Alan Badel, William Hartnell and Colin Blakely. Denys Coop was responsible for the cinematography and Peter Taylor was the editor. It's still one of the finest of all films that uses sport both as a backdrop and as a metaphor and is one of the greatest of all 'kitchen-sink' movies.
Review of This Sporting Life
