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This Sporting Life, originally uploaded by 160507.

You love the movies, you love rugby, here’s a movie about rugby. “The British New Wave of the late ’50s and early ’60s, much like its more loudly heralded French counterpart, arose from filmmakers who rejected the bourgeois timidity of their national cinema and strove to liberate the form. Alongside fellow directors like Karel Reisz (Saturday Night And Sunday Morning) and Tony Richardson (The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner), Lindsay Anderson released a “Free Cinema” manifesto which advocated productions outside the system—made on the cheap and in black-and-white—that cast an eye on the ordinary struggles of working-class Brits. These “kitchen-sink” melodramas would henceforth become a hallmark of British cinema, and none was better than Anderson’s 1963 debut feature, This Sporting Life, which is all raw nerves and volcanic emotion.” (Scott Tobias in the Onion A.V. Club)