Richard Harris plays the West Yorkshire rugby player Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film This Sporting Life. (Rank Organization/Criterion Collection)
Many of us are old enough to remember the 1970s and its endless debates, battles, and even “war of the sexes,” when feminism emerged from its nascent forms and became a seismic force. How many of us, by contrast, cringe at the seemingly endless debate of what it means to “be a man,” what should or must define “masculinity,” and whether or not manhood is in full-blown “crisis”?
The field of this debate is ripe with takers, pundits, and opportunists. Canadian psychologist and writer Jordan Peterson considers it his mission to inform of how and why “manhood matters.” What started in 1990 as a method of exploring male psychology through myth via American poet Robert Bly’s best-selling book Iron John became, somewhere in the early 2010s, a journey into harrowing masculinity via power, domination, and, in time, alt-right politics. In addition to coining now-familiar terms such as “incel,” “cuck,” and “soy boy” this camp crafted sentences that read more like headlocks inflicted on anonymous opponents who dared argue otherwise. “A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave,” wrote Jack Donovan in his 2012 book The Way of Men. Fast forward to 2022, and we have pundit Tucker Carlson endorsing testicle tanning to increase testosterone levels.
The conversation around masculinity is now so freighted with partisanship that the best way to enter this noisy room is through the side doors of films and books that remove the topic from the threats and rancor of our current era. There is no better way to do that than by turning toward old films and books, to a time when manhood and masculinity were not hot topics of debate. If there is one film that says more about manhood and masculinity than any other without having to shout it out loud, that film would have to be British director Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life.
At least one decade before the Rocky franchise portrayed the glory of one man’s victory in sport, and almost two decades before Martin Scorsese turned that same story upside down to portray the male athlete’s agonized machismo in Raging Bull (1980) Anderson’s 1963 project was built from similar materials but stirs the viewer’s soul in more powerful ways than either of its successors.
The setting is a mining town in West Yorkshire that could be anywhere in the north of England. The actor is a young Richard Harris, playing the gaunt, terse character of Frank Machin from the David Storey book by the same title that Anderson adapts for the screen. Hungry for respect beyond his workdays as a coal miner and eager to win the affections of the widow and single mother he lodges with, Mrs. Hammond, Machin sets his sights on stardom through the local rugby team. Machin makes the team. Machin, despite his working-class background, earns respect from a mostly vapid social circle. He sees his name celebrated in the sports pages of the town newspaper. What he fails to win is love or any sense of reaching the shore to find rest from the vast ocean of his torrid ego.
The film starts, literally, with a kick to the teeth during a rugby match before a crowded stadium. His whole front row of teeth gone, Machin takes his nitrous oxide like a man at the dentist’s office. Once under, his subconscious memories flow in scenes alternating between wins and losses, acceptances and rejections, clear paths and obstructions. A rhythm takes hold, and we see the past experiences that make the present culmination of one man.
For an instant here and there, Anderson exposes us to Machin’s small charms. Near the town’s river beside the ruins of an old church, he plays with Mrs. Hammond’s children. Basking in his success with the team, he shares a rare laugh with the widow who has taken his heart when she tells him of her days working in a wartime munitions factory. Otherwise, though, Machin is all drive, stubbornness, strength, and open cruelty, even at times toward those who care enough to help him. When “Dad” Johnson, the man who first shows Machin the ropes of rugby success, asks Frank to stop twisting his hand inside a pub, he refuses without saying a word. “You’re hurting me, Frank,” he says. “Frank, you’re hurting me.”
Pain received. Pain inflicted. These are the measures of power that march over the film and mark its parameters. In our current partisan framework of masculinity, we might say these depictions of pain measured out are inseparable from masculinity. As the film progresses, and as our eyes recoil from Machin’s abuse despite the limited sympathy we hold for him, Anderson shows how false that binary is in service of defining anyone by gender, let alone one man. The subject at hand in This Sporting Life is not “man” or “manhood,” but the subject of its title: life.
Without any mention or alarm over any “crisis of manhood,” this film artifact from 1963 shows us that the power to sustain pain and the power to inflict it on others, whether on or off the athletic field, is the binary that either separates us from or joins us together with other people. No one, whether an authentic man or woman, will best understand another soul through force. People are too subtle and complicated for such a blunt tool.
When Anderson first read Storey’s book prior to adapting it he commented on the ways it “labors to balance the ambiguities of our nature: male and female, tenderness and violence, isolation and love.” When British film critic John Russell Taylor reassessed Anderson’s adaptation of Storey’s book in 1980 he wrote, “every scene in the film is charged with the passion of what is not said and done, as well as what is.”
Watching This Sporting Life, the viewer marvels at how Machin keeps on “winning” at every turn yet still fails to find the elusive victory he craves. No one he interacts with fails to recognize for one moment that he is, as we might say, “all man.” Instead, what many of them recognize is that Machin, for all his manhood on display, is not quite there. He is not quite whole. For all his force, power, and winning in the world, he cannot be victorious in finding himself.
