Interestingly, while I was making up the link to
the Browser interview on baseball books, just below, I was listening
to a debate on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, discussing
sports movies to help promo the launch of Fast Girls, where
the panel seemed to conclude that all sports movies are about
triumphing over adversity (perhaps on the basis that Fast Girls appears to be a pretty bog standard example of the type). You might argue this is the basis of most
movie scripts--but the reality is that the best sports movies are
dominated by boxing and baseball, and I'd say the four best boxing
movies (Raging Bull, The Set-Up, Fat City, and Rocky),
many of the best baseball movies (including my co-favourite Eight
Men Out) as well as the best American football movie (North
Dallas 40) are all about various forms of failure--although Rocky
is the best example of the situation where sporting failure is
personal triumph.
They mentioned Chariots of Fire, which had
come ninth in an LA Times poll of the best sporting movies ever, the
top British performance. It probably is the best British sports
movie, and it's very much about triumph over adversity, but the
second-best British sporting film is This Sporting Life, and
it is very much about failure. The top film on the LA Times list was
Hoosiers, which does fit that
triumph formula, although it's done very well. My other co-favourite
baseball movie, Major League,
is a perfectly crafted success-against-the-odds film, maybe the best
ever, while the film version of Bang The Drum Slowly, like
the novel which is among my five picks in The Browser interview, is a
classic precisely because within that formula lies a more important
kind of triumph, which proves literally short-lived.
