Jean-Luc Godard was typical of younger Paris film critics in his feelings
about British cinema. “One really has to rack one’s brain to find anything
to say about a British film”, he wrote in July 1958, claiming that there
wasn’t a single exception “to prove the rule”, and expressing curiosity as
to how “the descendants of Daniel Defoe, Thomas Hardy and George Meredith”
had “reached such a degree of incomprehension in matters of art”. Although
Godard refused to despair of the situation – “to despair of British cinema
would be to admit that it exists” – he remained baffled by it. “Like
football”, he claimed, “the British cinema is as much an enigma as it is a
legend.”
A clarification of sorts was offered four years later by another Paris-born
film critic, Godard’s friend and by this time fellow surfer on the New Wave,
François Truffaut. Less than a decade after identifying a “certain tendency”
in French cinema for psychological realism that was neither real nor
properly psychological, he spoke to Alfred Hitchcock of “a certain
incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’”, presenting the
problem not in the way Godard had, as a case of national decline, but as a
peculiar national incapacity. (Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, made in 1966,
depicts Britain as a joyless dystopia in which firemen are employed to burn
all reading matter – including copies of Cahiers du Cinéma.) Among the
national characteristics which Truffaut identified as inhospitable to
suspense and stylization were the countryside (“antidramatic in a sense”),
the weather (“anticinematic”), and humour (“somehow a deterrent to strong
emotion”), but it is also tempting to think about football in this
connection, since the game has an obscure kinship with British cinema, as
Godard had already hinted. The English national team has, after all,
subjected its followers to a similar succession of false dawns, and both
have been enlivened by the presence of Leytonstone lads with dreams of
success in America – David Beckham and Alfred Hitchcock.
The attacks on British cinema mounted by Godard and Truffaut were, by
implication, celebrations of American cinema, and the contrast between these
two national film cultures is visibly at play in films about sport. Football
in Britain has provided the setting or backdrop for tales of hooliganism
(The Firm, 1988, Green Street, 2005), romantic comedies (Gregory’s Girl,
1981, Fever Pitch, 1997), and wish-fulfilment fantasies (Bend It Like
Beckham, 2002, There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble, 2000); never to a modern
re-telling of the Arthur legend, as baseball did in Barry Levinson’s
adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1984), or to a
group coming-of-age tale, as cycling did in Peter Yates’s film Breaking
Away, in which the State of the Union seems to be resting on the boys’
success. The fault seems to lie with British cinema rather than with a lack
of potential for feeling or drama in British football. Jason Cowley, in his
nimble, affecting new book The Last Game: Love, death and football, uses a
single game – Liverpool vs Arsenal, the climax of the 1988/89 season – as
the springboard for an analysis of Britain at the tail-end of Thatcherism,
an elegy for football as it was, and a memoir of his father. But the
sincerity of Cowley’s book almost never flourishes in British film-making,
where the dominant philosophy is a mixture of defensive irony and apologetic
modesty.
These suspicions are corroborated, rather than allayed, by Tom Hooper’s
adaptation of David Peace’s novel The Damned United, because the film owes
it effectiveness almost entirely to Hooper’s realization that England has
her humour and her weather still, and that British film and British football
do not mix. The film is concerned with Brian Clough’s tenure as manager of
Leeds United Football Club – forty-four miserable days at the start of the
1974/75 season. Clough arrived at Elland Road with a reputation for turning
around the fortunes of decrepit clubs and for speaking his mind; Leeds, the
best team in England and for its thirteen years under the previous manager
Don Revie a harmonious one, was in need of neither of these strengths.
(Revie died on May 26, 1989, the day of Cowley’s “last game”.)
Like Jean-Luc Godard, whom he does not otherwise resemble, Clough was always
keen to make his feelings known. In an act of madness well-handled in the
film, he told the Leeds players that though they had won every medal going,
they could throw them away because they had done it all by “bloody
cheating”. Clough claims at one point that he believes in fairies, and the
film depicts the collision of this straight-talking, uncompromising dreamer
– the figure who, in an American sport film, would overcome all obstacles –
with a situation resistant to his approach. To this end, Hooper generates a
number of ways to depict the dashing of Clough’s hopes, for the most part
rejecting the easy routes offered by the sitcom. The result is a spry,
streamlined comedy, rich in moments of bathos and deflation, less concerned
with football than with failure.
Hooper and the casting director Daniel Hubbard have chosen a strong team,
headed by an exceptional star player. As Clough, Michael Sheen does another
of his freaky body-snatches, following Tony Blair (The Deal, 2003, The
Queen, 2006), David Frost (Frost/Nixon, 2008), and Kenneth Williams
(Fantabulosa, 2006). One of the two central challenges here is Clough’s
Middlesborough drawl, with its disdain for conventional vowel sounds; Sheen,
who is Welsh, gets by just fine, pronouncing “faces” as “faeces”. The other
challenge is to catch Clough’s easy way with self-aggrandizement, the
real-life rendition of which is amply available on YouTube. Here, Sheen does
more than is required, delivering not just a deft impersonation but a limber
performance, full of entertaining mischief; when he cracks his toothy grin,
he looks like the Cheshire cat that got the cream. Among Clough’s sparring
partners are Revie, with whom Clough is obsessively competitive, played by
Colm Meaney with a gluey stack of ginger hair parted to one side like the
world’s most elaborate comb-over; and Peter Taylor, Clough’s closest ally
and wisest critic, played by Timothy Spall, a brilliant actor, but also an
unnerving one, who seems to have fewer teeth than he does chins.
The film benefits from very sensible exclusions, the crucial one being
football. During one key match, Clough stays in the dressing room, watching
the silhouettes of fans on the windows, listening to their cheers and jeers,
for clues to the score. On another occasion, when he sits glum and sodden in
the dugout, play is represented almost abstractly, as a splashy collision of
boots, mud, rain, and floodlight. We are only shown things that are better
seen as well as heard about, such as the brutality of the Leeds players.
Another exclusion is period detail, a strength of Peter Morgan’s previous
screenplays. (He has not always been well-served in this by his
collaborators; Blair’s bookcases in The Queen, set in 1997, contained a
number of novels that had not yet been published.) It is also a strength of
David Peace’s fiction, one that other adapters have attempted to transpose.
In the first part of Red Riding, a trio of dramas based on Peace’s first
three novels, which was shown on Channel 4 earlier this month, Yorkshire in
1974 was represented by an abundance of hypnotic wall-paper and teepee
flares. In The Damned United there is a song by Tom Jones and a reference to
Ted Heath’s power cuts; otherwise, we are left to take it on trust that a
scene is set when the subtitle claims it is. This choice represents an act
of courage, given that anachronistic nudges to the viewer have become the
prime merchandise of period comedy.
Peace’s novel consists of two discrete but alternating sections – one
concerning Clough’s time at Leeds, the other his more successful tenure at
Derby County from 1967 to 1973. In the film, these frequent transitions have
been relaxed into a leisurely back-and-forth which encourages us to see
Clough’s rise at Derby only in terms of his fall at Leeds – as strides
towards a dead end, or a deep hole. This works well enough as a strategy in
a comedy about individual hubris, but it has a kind of futility in a work of
historical fiction, where viewers are able to supply their own contexts, and
may choose instead to see Clough’s difficulties at Leeds, or his early
success at Derby, as merely the prelude to his greater success as manager of
Nottingham Forest from 1975 to 1993.
The Damned United offers a very partial version of Leeds United history –
Brian Clough’s version, as conjectured by Peace and dramatized by Morgan.
One receives a different version – indeed a different order of experience
altogether – at Elland Road, where I travelled to see Leeds play Scunthorpe,
a game that counts as a big clash on the bare landscape of League One (the
third division). Clough may be the wronged, righteous hero of Peace’s tale,
but he is a figure of no significance at the club’s home ground. To the
south east of the stadium there is a statue of Billy Bremner, the club’s
most famous player, portrayed in the film (by Stephen Graham) as a brute.
The stadium’s north stand is named after Don Revie; there is not even a hot
dog stand named after Brian Clough. Unsurprisingly, Peace’s novel has been
the subject of much criticism, some of it litigious. Among the books on
their way to set the record straight are Phil Rostron’s The Real Damned
United – taking its cue, presumably, from the football instruction video
Really Bend It Like Beckham (2004).
With some exceptions – like the Frenchman Eric Cantona – Leeds never again had
players of the calibre of the Revie team: Bremner, Johnny Giles, Allan
Clarke. Nowadays they are very ordinary indeed. Although there were five
goals – the home team won 3-2 – the Leeds-Scunthorpe game was comprised
almost entirely of fouls, errors, and bewilderingly myopic decisions from
the referee, Iain Williamson. Leeds have retained a large following; there
was an attendance of more than 24,000 at Elland Road on the Saturday I went,
almost ten times higher than at some other League One matches. But at
present, they are hardly worth paying – as much as £31 – to see.
This is the fate to which Peter Ridsdale, the chairman from 1997 until 2003,
consigned the club with his profligacy and risk-taking; the phrase “doing a
Leeds” is now a recognized one to describe a major club that fades away. A
Leeds fan of forty-two years, who gave me a brief account of the “tough
time” he had endured, seemed optimistic: “Give the lads three years, and
they’ll be back in the top flight again”. For the time being, though, the
Leeds fans seem to be embracing the team’s inglorious form, often forgoing
traditional chants like “Marching on Together” in favour of upbeat
expressions of despair, sung to the tune of “Bread of heaven”, with “Feed me
’til I want no more” becoming “We’re not famous any more”.
It is fortunate that The Damned United is the best British film about football
– or at least in the top one, as Clough said of his own position among
English managers – because its release coincides with the re-release of
another directing debut, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Anthony Minghella once
compared the excesses of first-time directors to the fancy footwork of the
brilliant but maddening French winger David Ginola. Despite the reputation
of the early New Wave films, Truffaut was mostly un-Ginola-like. Hooper, by
contrast, is Ginola-like in the best sense – he clearly feels liberated
after more than a decade working in television – and The Damned United, with
its Playdo colours, centred compositions, and crisp widescreen images,
belongs to that small group of British films that have been made as if
people might actually want to look at them.
The two films are also in competition because The 400 Blows at times seems
like an attack on football. “Just think, your honour, he hates sport”, says
Mrs Doinel (Claire Maurier) of her truanting, thieving son Antoine
(Jean-Pierre Léaud), based on the truanting, thieving young François. In the
film’s most affectionate scene, a long line of schoolboys following their
gym teacher through the Paris streets to football practice gradually
diminishes as the boys hide in doorways, around corners, and behind cars.
And in the film’s famous ending – copied in different ways by the British
youth films, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner (1961), Quadrophenia
(1979), Sweet Sixteen (2002), and This Is England (2006) – Antoine, having
suffered various other indignities at the Observation Centre, only flees
after being called on to deliver that most uncinematic football move, the
throw-in.
In 2007, there was a screening at the Cannes Film Festival of Chacun son
Cinéma, an omnibus film – the form popularized by the New Wave – consisting
of thirty-three shorts, made to commemorate the festival’s sixtieth
anniversary. The brief was that the short should express the director’s
feelings towards cinema. In Walter Salles’s contribution, “5,777 Miles From
Cannes”, two Brazilian men rap to each other outside a cinema showing The
400 Blows, which had received its first showing at Cannes forty-eight years
earlier. Almost all of the shorts were affectionate or celebratory in some
way. One memorable exception was the final one, in which a father and son,
after struggling to decide on a film to see, resolve to go to a football
match instead. “Now that’s the sort of choice I like”, the father exclaims.
The short, entitled “Happy Ending”, was directed by Ken Loach; it was the
only British contribution.
THE DAMNED UNITED
THE 400 BLOWS
Various cinemas
LEEDS UTD vs SCUNTHORPE UTD
Elland Road, Leeds
Leo Robson is a freelance reviewer. He is currently studying for an MA
in Film Studies at the University of Warwick.
