This Sporting Life

A young Richard Harris is startlingly Brando-esque -- Stanley Kowalski with a Yorkshire accent -- in Lindsay Anderson’s film about a professional rugby player, and the widowed landlady he brutishly woos, played by Rachel Roberts. Whether referred to as Free Cinema or British New Wave or Cockney Neorealism, the English films of that era were significant to me at the time, and certainly set the stage for some of my favorites to come, like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, but on re-viewing they tend to seem excessively gray and overwrought. This one in particular is freighted with a fractured time scheme that is hard to follow, set out in flashback as the protagonist is undergoing anasthesia while getting stumps of broken teeth removed after a face-bashing on the field. Its raw power and unflinching gaze are notable, but no longer the shock to the system they once were. (1963, TCM/T, r.) *6+*