Ready for another depressing British kitchen sink film? Then you’re ready for This Sporting Life, about fictional rugby star1 Frank Machin (Richard Harris). After a Christmas Eve game where a bunch of his teeth are knocked out, Machin has a series of flashbacks recalling how he went from poor coal miner to sporting sensation.
I dig the Rocky-esque setup, but instead of delivering training montages and “Gonna Fly Now,” the film focuses on Machin’s relationship with his landlady, the widow Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts). They’re forever at each other’s throats—he hates her frigidity and devotion to her dead husband, she hates that he’s “a great ape.” They begin sleeping together2, but after one of their many routine cataclysmic fights, she dies of a brain hemorrhage and the movie ends.
Rating: 3/10. As Chappell Roan is teaching us, just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re entitled to have them love you back.
Cast and Crew
One way Richard Harris is remembered is for originating the role of Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies.3 That’s a long way from 1963. But in 1963, you might have hoped for more, since the young Harris has a remarkable movie star face—depending on the angle, he can look like Brando, Newman, De Niro, or Tony Curtis.
This Sporting Life was Harris’ first lead role4 and we’ll discuss his later films when he returns to the column. Today, let’s touch on Richard Harris, pop star. He was the first to record “MacArthur Park,” a song memorable for its weird lyrical cake symbolism.5 It’s not a joke song or actor vanity project, though—the 1968 album it anchored was nominated for Album of the Year. Harris also played King Arthur in the film version of the musical Camelot (1967) and sang his own songs, so yeah, singing Richard Harris had some juice.
The Trivia
This movie is about rugby, so let’s get you up to speed on the rugby information people might want you to know. Rugby gets its name from a public school in the town of Rugby in central England. The legend is that a soccer player there, William Webb Ellis, picked up a soccer ball and ran it into the goal, thereby inventing a new sport.
We’ll discuss three forms of rugby: rugby union, rugby league, and rugby sevens.6 A big difference between the three is the number of players per side—sevens has seven, league has thirteen, and union has fifteen. But before we describe more differences, let’s get into what rugby even is.
In simple terms, the goal for the offense is to score a try (the equivalent of an American football touchdown) by getting the ball into their opponent’s tryzone (akin to the endzone). The offense can only throw the ball backwards and isn’t allowed to block defenders, which leads to ball carriers being tackled often. When someone with the ball gets tackled, then:
In rugby league, the play ends. (Note that, in league, the offense has six plays to score or the ball goes to the other team.)
In rugby union and sevens, there’s either a ruck or a maul, and both of those are complicated.7
In union and sevens, tries are worth five points, while in league, they’re worth four. After the try, the scoring player does a conversion, where they have to kick the ball through the goal posts for two more points.8
If the ball goes out of bounds, there’s a lineout (for union/sevens), which looks sort of like a throw-in in soccer except that players are lifted by their teammates up into the air.
Another way to restart a play is with a scrum, which happens after a minor infraction. The teams’ forwards link arms in a big circle, the ball is rolled in, and the teams’ hookers use their feet to try and get the ball to a teammate to gain possession. For serious infractions, players are put in the sin bin.
No one’s ever asked me to name a rugby player, but if you want a name chambered, take Jonah Lomu, who played for New Zealand, the team known as the All Blacks.9 He’s been voted greatest rugby player ever, and this video helps explain why—it’s due to his ability to both blow by you and truck you into oblivion.
Odds and Ends
William Hartnell, who played a rugby scout in the film, was the original Doctor on “Doctor Who”…rugby player David Storey wrote the novel that This Sporting Life was based on; he later won the Booker Prize for his novel “Saville”…in a poker game on the bus, Machin performs an absolutely vicious slow roll…Rachel Roberts, who was married to Rex Harrison, was up for the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Margaret…check out Gareth Edwards and rugby’s “greatest try ever scored”…I look really geeky in those rugby shirts with the alternating vertical stripes…this isn’t the last rugby movie we’ll watch for this column (though the next one will have fewer brooding Englishmen and way more Nelson Mandela).
Though Machin doesn’t refer to himself as a star. He says “we don’t have stars in this game—that’s soccer.”
Their relationship echoes the toxic dynamic between Doris Day and James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me—including how the men in both films turn their rape victims into long-term paramours.
After Harris died, he was succeeded in the role by Michael Gambon. In the Fantastic Beasts films, a young Dumbledore is played by Jude Law.
Though he had third billing in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), just under Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.
The chorus:
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again, oh no.
Or maybe you’d rather hear Andy Kaufman read you the lyrics. Yeah, this song is rightfully ripped on. Still, Donna Summer’s disco version, with producer Giorgio Moroder, is a banger.
You might have seen rugby sevens in the Olympics, where the American women walked it off in dramatic fashion during the bronze medal match. Rugby league is what is played in This Sporting Life.
First, the ruck: when a player with the ball is taken off their feet, they no longer have rights to the ball and need to relinquish it. They want to make sure their teammates get the ball so they retain possession (called “recycling”), so they place it behind them so their cleaners can get it while avoiding enemy poachers who try and steal it. Here’s twenty minutes on the ruck. A maul, on the other hand, begins when a ball carrier is still on his feet and is engaged with at least two other players (one from each team). It just looks like a bunch of dudes pushing each other.
Note that there’s some variation in how the conversion is done between the variants of rugby.
The All Blacks are the most successful team in rugby and are basically synonymous with New Zealand. Of note is they perform a Maori war dance called the Haka before games. Their biggest rival is the Springboks of South Africa.