WRITER: DAVID STOREY
I think this entry into my New Wave series is one of the most gritty, harsh, moving, honest, and realistic movies ever. It rocked me to my core.
The relationship between Richard Harris's character and Rachel Roberts was unlike any other I've seen in movies. Richard Harris plays a working-class Northern Englishman who plays rugby soccer as a way to reach a certain strata in society he couldn't have working in a coal mine, his previous job. It seemed to me he sought the money he earned for playing football(British term for soccer) in order to take care of and impress Rachel Roberts's character, a single and widowed mother with two children whom he wants very much to love him. He boards a room in her modest house and tries to win her over by giving her children gifts and showing them attention, but the lady's closed off emotionally.
Harris doesn't win her over, although they do eventually have sex together. Guilt then plagues her because they aren't married(among other reasons). The movie doesn't spell it out but she is a religious, puritanical woman who even calls herself dirty at one point for being with Harris and not married: a kept woman. They fight and argue. He slaps her in the face at one point while they stand outside a church. No happy ending for them. Not even a bittersweet one.
Like other British New Wave movies, in This Sporting Life the male character's ascent from the working class leads him into corruption and vice. The filmmakers's of these movies seem to be conveying through the medium that aspiration to the top of the ladder in society can only lead to unhappiness and disillusion.
I think Harris played caricatures of himself later in his career, I've seen a few later movies, but he's all tough and rough and jumpy here in what is probably his great screen performance.
Rachel Roberts gives what must be one of her finest screen performances as well. She disappears into her role. The scene between she and Harris sitting by the fireplace in the kitchen where she briefly smiles while reminiscing about her days working in a WWII bomb factory with her deceased husband is the most beautiful few seconds of screen acting I have ever seen. Roberts deserved that Oscar nomination and the Bafta award she won for Best British Actress. She lost the Oscar to Patricia Neal who won for for Hud.
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