A working class hero is an admirably fucked up thing to be: Lindsay Anderson’s “This Sporting Life”
Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film “This Sporting Life” was part of a movement in British cinema portraying working-class (and male) characters in films that would focus on social concerns by highlighting class dynamics. The trouble is in part that England is, on the one hand, Europe’s and the West’s most class conscious society, while, on the other hand, it is a very conservative one, and this often extends to aesthetic forms. Thus, the narrative structuring of a cinema about and ‘for’ the great working class (not necessarily ‘by’; in Anderson’s case, his background was in the colonial upper class) might well be a fairly traditional one.
I was struck in seeing this film recently by what I suspect most American viewers, especially today, will see in it: a social problematization more of gender than class, and a story focused on an individual, and that is both tragic and heroic. Indeed, Richard Harris as Frank Machin is not only in every scene, but in almost every shot in the film’s 130 minutes. I take Harris’s very strong and charismatic performance in the film to be analogous to Frank’s in the society of this unnamed northern English city. With Harris being of some resemblance in both looks and type to Brando, the character he plays has enough nobility and strength of character to more than offset his narcissism and foolish pride. We feel his pain, as his struggle with opportunity and situation, fate and destiny dominates the whole film from start to finish. Indeed, who else do we feel for? Margaret, the love interest? She is an unhappy woman, raising her kids in the hovel where she is landlord to Frank, in an unrelenting anger at the conditions of her life that she has no way of either changing or taking up an honorable role within, as he does. She is a figure of resentment. If the film has any hint of a redemptive politics, that is not a project for which she will be spokesperson. Her own two small kids being unusually consigned to a supporting role, more often seen than heard, she is completely powerless, except for her ability to direct all her frustrations at Frank.
I always look in a film for what I might call a problematic. This would be not so much a problem that a character solves, or an obstacle he or she overcomes — as in the epic theory of narrative sometimes championed in American film culture by partisans of the formulaic as oriented to (commercial) success — but a problem the film poses for us its viewers. While by itself such a didactic schema can only be reductive, the attempt to grasp something of this sort may be a major clue to the film’s meaning and importance. I think the film transferentially maps class struggle onto the struggle of a hero to rise from poverty and live a meaningful life, because this gives an individual working man a seemingly viable form of life or way of living. And I also think the film problematizes this fact, even as it also seems to celebrate the macho hero, and in ways that visually may be read as strikingly adulatory all the more for Anderson’s having been a closeted gay rumored as having a crush on Harris. As both object and subject of desires, in Frank sexual difference and identity are mixed with those of class.
Whatever we say about the film’s meaning, one starting point has to be with the way Machin, and Harris, dominate it. Both actor and character outdo everyone else in interest. He is so strongly self-possessed that even the frequent violence to which he seems by character disposed may strike a viewer as a tolerable vice, and no doubt this was even more true in 1963. He is a perfect example of what Gilles Deleuze called the cinema of the “sensory-motor action schema”: he is reactive, in ways that are always very physical, has a strong sense of integrity, certainly seeming to know what he wants, and the film is largely structured around this reactive quality that is inseparable from his own conscience, these things together giving him the tragic nobility that underscores his attractiveness as a figure. It is one of the many films where viewer identification is both solicited and troubled, its ethics if not politics depending partly on the latter.
Certainly in viewing the film today, Frank’s violence as well as his ceaselessly demonstrated bravado give the story a rather different resonance for many viewers, in light of, among other developments, feminism. For he is both a hero and something of a jerk, surely as a way of flaunting what he doubts. He is one of those tragic men whose success exceeds their happiness, and ultimately it is the terminally miserable and charmless Margaret only whose attentions he wants, and her death alone that brings him, literally, to his knees, and in a way that is not part of a game he must play. For English rugby is shown to be a very brutal game indeed, and his own feeling about being in it, and as a star, highly ambivalent.
His eponymous sporting life is lived in a world of men, in which he is the object of the masculine gaze of those men of a different class and type who observe and invest money, as well as the more typologically masculine one whose brutality depends on its being very tactile, rough, and dirty; the final rugby match scene is dominated by the mud that covers the face and body of the players. The film’s object of desire is a singularly masculine one, who is equally an object of identification.
As sports hero or star, Machin is useful to the wealthy (and mostly effete, the promoter Mr. Weaver especially) men who run the rugby team. An older man, whom Frank calls “Dad” on account of his age, dotes on Frank in a way that suggests a steadfast and always admiring but unrequited lover who knows he his relative worth and lack of power, as his day is past. The character of the promoter, Mr. Weaver, may appear as one of several references to the queer Communist director Visconti’s 1960 masterpiece “Rocco and His Brothers”; Weaver resembles a bit the shady closeted boxing promoter Duilio in that film, though without the latter’s need to himself appear tough. Weaver is plainly a weak man, and we can guess that his wife Anne is the true wearer of pants in their marriage. For Weaver, Frank, whom he surely admires for his strength and courage, is an investment opportunity to be used while he can.
Clearly this use ultimately includes not just that Frank help the team win games, but also that his character fits the role in a way that is useful to them. This is also a suggestion, to viewers alert to this sort of thing, that our own spectatorial gaze is implicated, largely, it seems to me, in identification with the hero. If true, this is another reason to think the film questions itself in this regard. For Frank’s role in relationship to the men who own the club and meet as a men’s club of owners, which corresponds and contrasts with the more physically ‘real’ one of the players, workers who certainly get their hands dirty, cannot fail to also reflect the role he has for us as viewers in the story. (One sure marker of class is that mental and physical labor are clearly presented as exclusive opposites.)
Mrs. Weaver wants power, and is perfectly willing to use sex to get it. In trying to seduce Frank, maybe in part to see better what he is made of (does he have the courage to say no, and does he even know what he wants, and not just with her but in general?), and doing so in her domain, a lavish apartment, where he will be reduced to acting in the mise-en-scène she has got him in, she is the only female character in the film who enjoys a sense of empowerment (quite the contrast to Margaret’s relentless resentment and desperation). She plays a game with Frank, a game that he knows can only be for him a dangerous one. Her way of wanting to use and control him contrasts with that of her husband — is he her rival for Frank’s attentions? Later, in the restaurant where Frank takes Weaver’s place at a reserved table, only to make an utter fool of himself demanding to have his whims satisfied, and living a coin as tip, as if to express his ambivalence towards being a mere parvenu but a man valued for the money he has (indeed) earned, Weaver seems either unaware, insouciant, or both, of Frank’s impropriety, while his wife now expresses to him her contempt for the foolishly arrogant footballer. I think she admires Frank for his courage and strength and at the same time detests him for not seeing what she does, which is his own vulnerability, and the ultimately inauthentic and so false character of the ambition that he seems to have realized.
We can doubt how much she loves her husband. He has obviously brought or sustained for her some amount of luxury; I think she finds this unsatisfying in a way she may not fully recognize, and would like, with stakes more certain than the outcome, to somehow turn the tables in this triangle. She attempts this having all the self-assurance as someone who, secure in her possession of wealth and power, may want, like many bullies, to teach a lesson to, or toughen up, the hero who is blind as she is not to his own vice and fallibility. The class superiority of which she is keenly conscious and self-confidently proud is for her expressed in the commodity of a knowledge: she knows what Frank does not. The insight into him that she thinks she has gives her a power she can use. Her stratagem is also a way of refocusing the men’s club’s ambivalent love of Frank away from money and onto more personal stakes. She fits a bit the Lacanian model of the hysteric as someone who in her ambivalence towards the power she nominally lacks, satisfies herself with finding a master, offering him a pedestal, and then, showing him that he is a fool, kicking it out from underneath him, the better to teach the master that he is not one, and that it is she, the master’s hysterical counterpart, on whom he is in fact dependent, who understands things. There might even be the moral equivalent of a noose accidentally dangling from the ceiling, but what would she care of that? She certainly isn’t motivated by love. It may be little surprise that Frank is the only one who, at least ultimately, will be. Indeed, he is not only the film’s dominant character, but in a way almost its only real one.
Ultimately, Frank doesn’t want power so much as he might seem to, given the way he is narcissistically able to invest himself with much pride in his role as athlete and as the type of man that seems to bring with it. One senses at times that that might be enough for him, contented master of a style as identity, even without success in gaining an object of desire.
Margaret seems an unlikely love interest. She is a naturalistic character, not only because her ultimate fate is surely determined by circumstance, but also because her visage, physique, and bearing are as decidedly unglamorous as the tenement household setting where we mostly see her (with Frank), in what seems to be a single room with kitchen, clothesline, and fireplace, though at times we see both his bedroom, with the bed often prominently in the foreground (reduced in the final shot of it to the set of metal springs that once held a mattress), and hers, where she has portrait photos of her late husband, as if her most private life is lived in a bit of a shrine in the mourning she is able to invoke without working through. She is a bit inscrutable in terms of the desire she may have that drives her to stay with Frank while also wanting him to leave. She does not want power, but to get by, while standing her ground in terms of where she was left by the death, in a time before the story in the film, of her factory worker husband, which may have been a suicide staged as industrial sabotage. She doesn’t want to give in to Frank’s rather aggressive overtures to her, but - what does she want? What feelings she has for him is a matter that is even a bit unclear. But the film is his story. After she tells him to leave, and he finally does for a flophouse for men down on luck, and before she can be persuaded to change her mind, she falls ill off-screen in a manner (a brain hemorrhage) that renders her unconscious and silent. Now he is free to determine alone his relationship to her. He has recently confessed to a footballer friend that she is the only one who makes him feel needed. And so her death is what finally brings him, literally, to his knees, in a scene that is a visual soliloquy. Some viewers must wish we were shown more of Margaret’s life, including before him, and how she thinks and feels.
But the film’s story is his, and there isn’t room in his life for anyone else to have much of one. The performance may strike many with an envy in way that is confident in enjoying what one knows to be a type, but a working class hero in early 60s Britain is a not necessarily very happy thing to be. The filmmaker has the decency to rise above his own admiration to leave us dissatisfied on this account, for therein seems the more enduring truth of the matter.