[In This Sporting Life] Lindsay Anderson is the first to free himself from what seven years ago he was the first to aim at: the direct attack, the deliberate harnessing of poetry to propaganda, which came then as a shot in the arm but which has gradually been left behind by the complexity of life itself, so that it now seems a constricting rather than a liberating attitude. Here Anderson demonstrates that his social consciousness is not, and never really was, a programme: it is the sine qua non of the exist...

[This Sporting Life] is more about life than sport, less about kitchen sinks than the people who live near them. It is also unique: which in Britain means it risks being misunderstood by the public, torn to shreds by the critics and ridiculed by the Wardour-street hucksters. I had expected a simple film about simple people. What Anderson has done is to make as complicated a film as Welles' Citizen Kane about people as complicated as … you or me. It is the intensity of thought that has gone int...

So many things seem to me wrong about [the killing of the hapless spider at the end of This Sporting Life], it is hard to know where to begin to criticize—or better still, exorcise—such an image. On the simplest and most literal level, unless one is trying to document lapses of sanitation under the National Health, one doesn't find spiders in hospital rooms. The spider is out of place there. It doesn't belong. It's an intrusion, an imposition, an importation. Perhaps a mor...