This Sporting Life (1963) on Netflix
Frank Machin, a coal miner in Yorkshire, wins a place as a loose forward on the local rugby league team. His widowed landlady, Margaret Hammond, refuses his advances.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.5/107,743 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Frank Machin works as a coal miner and plays his rugby hard and rough, and a nightclub brawl with players from the local league club leads him to ask a team scout he calls Dad for a tryout. Unpolished but forceful, he catches the eye of Gerald Weaver, one of the club's owners, and signs for the top side as a loose forward, with a large bonus and a habit of punching and elbowing opponents. Away from the field he does badly. He lodges with Margaret Hammond, a widow raising two children; her husband died in an accident at Weaver's engraving firm and she received little compensation. She answers Frank's courtship with rudeness, while Anne Weaver, the owner's wife, makes advances he has already turned down.
Cast
- Anne Cunninghamas Judith
- Harry Markhamas Wade
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about This Sporting Life (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- This Sporting Life failed to recoup its cost, and Rank Organisation chairman John Davis declared his company would make no more such "squalid" films; the film is seen as ending producers' willingness to back British New Wave cinema.
- William Hartnell, in the supporting cast, began playing the Doctor in Doctor Who shortly afterwards; it was his role in This Sporting Life that brought him to the attention of Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert.
- This Sporting Life was Lindsay Anderson's first feature film as a director, after fifteen years making short documentaries, including the Oscar-winning 1954 film Thursday's Children.
