Slummox

This Sporting Life. In the past five years the Angry Generation of British moviemakers has whacked off several vivid slices of working-class life (Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey). Sooner or later it was bound to cut off a hunk of baloney, and this is it.

Adapted by David Storey from his novel of the same name, Life describes the tragedy of a man who was made with a huge body and a tiny soul. The man is a mill-town tough (Richard Harris) who becomes a professional rugby player. Big and strong and cunning, he soon becomes a star, and as a star he has everything a body could want: money, women, fame. But his soul is in torment because it cannot have the love of the woman he lives with (Rachel Roberts). He gives her expensive dinners and expensive furs. She doesn't really want them. What she wants is the love of another human being, and this he cannot give her--at best, he can give her the emotions of a beast. At the climax of their frustration, she dies of a brain hemorrhage and he batters himself to a bloody pulp on the football pitch.

The story makes more sense on paper than it does on film. Like a mirror smashed to splinters, the plot fractures into flashbacks, and the spectator spends half his time putting the pieces together. He spends the rest of the show trying to understand the principal characters. The hero is supposed to be a big stupid brute, but Actor Harris portrays him as a big sensitive brute. So of course the spectator can't understand why the heroine can't love him. She seems unreasonable and unmotivated, and before long the whole picture seems unreasonable and unmotivated.

Nevertheless, Life has energy and it has Harris, an Irish actor who at 29 is being touted as Britain's Brando. He does solicit the comparison, but happily he also displays two striking qualities of his own: a crude but considerable sense of gesture and violent vitality. He also has the careless Irish charm. At a rich man's party, the big slummox grabs a bottle of beer and then, grand as a lord, leans over and uses the nearest Bentley for a bottle opener.

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