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Critics Consensus: Appropriately hard-hitting on narrative as well as physical levels, The Sporting Life remains a British "kitchen sink" classic that's beautiful to look at and leaves a lingering mark.
Critic Consensus: Appropriately hard-hitting on narrative as well as physical levels, The Sporting Life remains a British "kitchen sink" classic that's beautiful to look at and leaves a lingering mark.
All Critics (19) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (0) | DVD (1)
The film is raw and confident, but it's a little shallow, too.
This Sporting Life shrewdly anticipates modern Britain: a dour, yet thrilling and exhilarating film.
Lindsay Anderson, making his debut as a feature director, brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line.
A reminder that something really was stirring in those days of the British New Wave before it frittered itself away.
It's impossible not to appreciate the remarkable performances (both Harris and Roberts were nominated for Oscars) or the realistic rugby scenes that earned Harris a broken leg.
Probably the best crafted of the British 'kitchen sink' movies.
This has its flaws and certainly its detractors but this dated British social-realist epic has a power to it.
This unique and essential film stands out as being the best of its genre, showcasing a blunt sexuality along with a modern, smartly-edited sensibility.
Anderson's visual sense is remarkably strong for a film that relies for much of its length on a highly complex and intriguing flashback narrative.
Leagues above the sanitized picture of organized professional athletics exemplified by '42,' 'This Sporting Life' wallows in the mud of the moral dirt that surrounds and runs the whole.
I can't think of a sport movie that is better photographed. The black and white cinematography is gorgeously stark, the perfect medium for this bleakly unforgiving tale.
I'm tempted to see it as one of the strongest films of that period, every frame of which pulsates with drama, class confusion and erotic force.
Richard Harris gives a very 'Brando-esque' performance in this UK classic. Simply fantastic from start to finish.
Super Reviewer
"This Sporting Life" is one of the most famous of the British "kitchen sink" dramas of the 1950s and 1960s ("kitchen sink" films were very gritty, social realist films which were very popular in Britain at one time). Frank Machin (Richard Harris) is a brutal, young miner in a city in northern England. Hoping for fame and fortune, he becomes a successful Rugby League football player. He uses his fame and fortune, along with physical violence, to try to force his widowed landlady (Rachel Roberts) to fall for him. Photographed in bleak black-and-white, the film's scenes of emotional and physical domestic violence are still shocking today. Also notable are the violent, stylishly-shot rugby matches. The cast are brilliant without exception, especially Richard Harris who manages to invest even his totally unsympathetic character with some degree of humanity.
The British Raging Bull.
One of the original angry young man films is extremely well acted by the leads but is a rather dispiriting experience to sit through.
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