Sporting Aspects
The Sporting Films
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU YEARS ago I saw a racing film, You can tell it was years ago because the story turned on that new invention, the slow-motion camera, which unmasked the full villainousness of a rival jockey in stunning the hero's horse with a riding crop as they raced neck and neck for the finish. The hero of this film was a jockey. But jockeys, as you know, are small, whereas the heroes of my childhood films had always to be huge and granite-like. I remember that, when this par- ticular hero mounted his horse before the Big Race, the horse, who was no actor, sagged several inches in the middle. This made us all laugh so much that we could not even believe in the slow-motion camera.
I remember, too, the first and only boxing film I ever saw. It was called The Abysmal Brute: and it starred Reginald Denney. Half-way through the Big Fight, when Denney was taking a terrible battering and the friends of his Park Avenue girl were sneering as only silent film actors could sneer, this caption, an instruction from his second, was flashed on the screen : " Stick your left out." Thereafter for some thirty seconds we saw Denney dancing round the ring with his left arm rigidly horizontal. After that no one in the fourpennies cared whether he won the fight or not; and even when, many years later, I saw Denney act, and act finely, parts that were within his range, that frozen left arm came between me and his art.
As films grew up, they began to employ doubles and trick photography. I remember Pat O'Brien, after the coming of talkies, playing the lead in one of., those American football epics. O'Brien, it appeared, was a firilliant player who unfor- tunately suffered from nerves. He could win a match or lose it, and the coach was afraid to play him until, at a desperately critical moment in the Big Game, and as a final gamble, the coach threw him in. We then saw O'Brien's double do a wonderful run the whole length of the field to score a touch- down. After the long shot of this wonderful run the camera cut to a close-up of O'Brien lying ,with the ball over the line and saying to the coach " Well, I made it."
I suppose that a really critical spectator would have asked how on earth the coach had kept up with the flying O'Brien, and, having kept up with him, what on earth he was doing on the field of play. But my attention was distracted to other things. I had, as it happened, seen one man, Percy Catcheside, run the whole length of the field to score a try in real English rugger. At the end of his run, Percy made no speeches. Instead he was sick. But there was O'Brien, in all his untrained flabbiness, running the length of the field and still having breath to talk back to his coach. It turned out in the film that O'Brien had scored against his own side. Hi had run the wrong way. But I no longer cared about that. I knew that.he had not run at all.
Perhaps that explains why sporting films and even plays are supposed to be box-office poison. A cricketer can play cricket, but he cannot act. An actor can act, but he cannot perform. I remember how Anthony Asquith directed a football-film in the 'thirties with Clifford Mollinson in the lead and the Arsenal football team in support. Mollinson looked a wonderful actor until he went on the field, and the Arsenal football team looked wonderful players until they came off it. I could not believe that Mollinson bad ever kicked a ball. I could not believe that the Arsenal players had ever done anything else. So I did not believe in the film, and nor did anyone else. As a generalisation, I would say "that the introduction of sport info films has been successful only when the sport was incidental and seen through a long shot, as with the perfunctory over sent down by Ronald Colman in Raffles or the distant school game in Young Woodley or when any sporting activity took place strictly off stage. In Edgar Wallace's The Calendar, for example, or in Ian: Hay's The Sport of Kings no one on the stage had actually to ride a horse. The illusion was there- fore maintained until the end.
Last week, however, I saw. a film which contradicted all this. 1 fear to rush in where Miss Graham treads so surely; so I will say little about The Final Test as a film—except that I enjoyed it unreservedly. But I will say something about the cricket. The leading actor is Jack Warner, as one of those sturdy, lovable cricketers whp go in Number Five and who become surrounded by legend—a sort of Maurice Leyland. Throughout the film 1 continued to believe that Jack Warner really could go in Number Five for England—because we never saw him bat. We saw him sitting in the pavilion waiting for a wicket to fall, we saw him go into bat, we saw his face as the Australian fast bowler delivered his thunderbolts, and we saw him walk away when he was out. But we never saw him put bat to ball. Through the genius of Anthony Asquith, who had obviously learned by his experience with Clifford Mollinson, or of Terence Rattigan, who wrote the script, we followed the whole of Jack Warner's five-ball innings through the commentary of John Arlott—and those of you who have heard John Arlott's commentaries must have wondered whether actual sight of the match could possibly be more enthralling than his flat-voiced descriptions. So Jack Warner, the mag- nificent actor, gets airy with it as England's magnificent Number Five.
The actual cricketing is left to real cricketers. You see shots of Hutton's cover drive—a drive that no other cricketer, let alone an actor, could emulate. You see Washbrook and Compton as they were at their peak. That is all sensible and safe enough. But Asquith as direc:tor was not content • with that. He uses Hutton, Compton and the rest not only as cricketers but also as actors, and I would have betted all Yorkshire to a Minor County that he would come unstuck as he did come unstuck when he tried years ago to make actors out of the Arsenal. But I would have lost my bet.
An Observer profile once said of Hutton that he was the most perfect batsman in the world and that, apart from that, he was the most perfect batsman in the world. I knew long ago that Hutton had more to him even than superb batsman- ship, and now anyone who sees this film will realise that he is also a remarkable actor. But so, too, is Dennis Compton. He can grimace his opinion of an unpleasant character with the same sureness thdt he uses in glancing a hoStile ball to the boundary. Or is it that a director with the experience of Anthony Asquith can turn any one of us into actors ?
If that is so, and if writers like Rattigan will give their minds to it, there is now no reason why we should not have a series of first-class sporting films. There have been many films about American football. Why not one about rugger ? ,Anthony Asquith could make even Charles Laughton convincing as a wing three quarter on the field, and how easily off the field would Laughton play that bit about breaking training and so imperilling victory ? Why not films about athletics ? There would be no need to drag in a close-up of Errol Flynn breast- ing the tape, his brow dripping with studio grease, while some stooges did the actual running. Leave it to Bannister and Chattaway, whose Miles are as dramatic as anything to be seen on the screen and' who, with Asquith's help, would cope with the drama off the track as well.
Of course, there are dangers about it. Lesser directors would try to cash in on the new stunt. We should have those heavy melodramas with Mary Pickford as the tennis champion battling even unto death for her amateur status and interminable serials of the Lancashire and Yorkshire match : Episode I- Makepeace Takes Guard. But at least they'll never tie Pearl White to the wicket. That would be too safe.
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