Critical Reception
Though on first release the film was lauded by critics, it was a commercial disaster with the home audiences and the critics, and prompted John Davis, by now the Chairman of the Rank Organisation Board to announce that he was pulling out of British New Wave, "kitchen sink" drama, nor would his company make such a "squalid" film again. In the United States, the film was well received. Variety praised its "gutsy vitality", and praised the production of Reisz and the directorial feature début of Anderson, who "brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line."
John Russell Taylor in 1980 thought it a mistake to link This Sporting Life with the 'kitchen sink' films released in the preceding few years, because its "emotionalism" made it "unique", apart from Anderson's other work:
"every scene in the film is charged with the passion of what is not said and done, as well as what is. ... Though real enough and believable enough, this kind of amour fou is remote indeed from what the staid middle class cinema would generally consider as realism."
On January 22, 2008, the film was released as a Region 1 DVD by The Criterion Collection.
Read more about this topic: This Sporting Life
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