A Man Called Harris by Michael Sheridan

Author:Michael Sheridan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780750951623
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-09-05T07:00:00+00:00

10

RAGING RUGBY BULL

David Storey, the son of a Welsh miner, was a squad member of Leeds Rugby League Club for five years in the mid-1950s, the earnings from which he put towards his further education at Slade College of Fine Art. He was the side’s regular half-back and it could be said that no rugby league player combined such aesthetic interest with the rough-and-tumble of sporting activity. He also put his experience on the field to good use, writing a novel entitled This Sporting Life, which was published in 1960.

The book is set in a nameless town in the north of England and the central character, Arthur Machin, is a young working-class man employed in a factory as a lathe worker, who sees playing rugby league for his local professional team as a means to escape his boring, poorly paid job and as a path to a more affluent lifestyle. The narrative traces his journey from his first outing on trial until his body begins to fail him in a match ten years later.

Following the success of adapted films from similar working-class arenas such as Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning it was inevitable that This Sporting Life would reach the screen. After its publication it attracted the attention of Lindsay Anderson, an Oscar award-winning documentary film-maker and leader of the radical Free Cinema movement. He took it to Woodfall, a production company run by film director Tony Richardson and playwright John Osborne. They turned it down with the idea that they might make it themselves, but were outbid for the rights by the Rank organisation. Rank offered it to Karol Reisz, who had had a big success with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Reisz was not interested but saw it as an opportunity to introduce his friend Anderson into feature film, and Reisz would act in the production as a mentor. After visiting the shooting location of The Guns of Navarone he became convinced that Richard Harris, even though he had only a small part in that film, would be ideal to play the lead in This Sporting Life.

It was the first feature film to be directed by Anderson. The screenplay, adapted by Storey, sets the location as Wakefield, a mining town in Yorkshire, and follows the story of Frank Machin (changed from Arthur), a bitter young coal miner who impresses the captain of a local rugby league team during a nightclub altercation. During a trial for a place on the team, his aggressive playing style convinces the owner Gerald Weaver, played by Alan Badel, and he signs him as a loose forward wearing the number 13 shirt.

The cast of characters in this journey include: the other working-class players; the rich businessmen who own the club, Weaver and Slomer; a probably homosexual loner Johnston, who gets Machin his initial break; and the player’s landlady Mrs Hammond (Rachel Roberts), whose husband has died in Weaver’s factory, apparently by suicide. Machin has a sexual relationship with her in an effort to break away from his image of himself as a masculine beast on the rugby pitch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.