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The metaphor is admirably blunt, low-angled rugby combatants slamming in the mud, "a rough game." The star bruiser (Richard Harris) gets his teeth knocked out and is rushed to the dentist, under the ether he recalls the tale. Wakefield, a small town with nuclear chimneys behind the stadium. "Do you want a thumping, luv?" "Aye." Locker-room roughhousing, raucous parties, the grave vulnerability that peeks out from behind the brutish armor when singing "This Is My Heart" with arms crossed. "Something permanent" is the need, "numbers and figures" on a contract or cheering spectators or a new car, above all a response from the widowed landlady (Rachel Roberts) who's "put up the shutters and stopped living." Underneath the surface realism of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a charged soulscape mined by Lindsay Anderson. Physicality and emotionalism are paramount in what might be the former critic's critique of Elia Kazan, and there's Harris clenched like Brando. (A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront are visible throughout.) The big ape on the field and his "subconscious whatnots," a tiger to the boss' wife and a pig to the reluctant mistress who made bombs during the war. Memories on Christmas Eve, in and out of it, hurting like the Dickens. A day at the lake and a night at the fancy restaurant, not enough to eclipse the Lawrentian pair of boots by the fireplace. Drill and boulder, the rupture is a brain hemorrhage plus the silent arachnid God (cf. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly). "He'll have to learn he has to pay something for his ambition." Rossen's The Hustler sets up the arena, Scorsese follows through with Raging Bull. Cinematography by Denys Coop. With Alan Badel, William Hartnell, Colin Blakely, Vanda Godsell, Anne Cunningham, Arthur Lowe, Jack Watson, Harry Markham, and Leonard Rossiter. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |