Most of these are available to view online but for copyright reasons we have included only the official trailers. It is obviously very much a subjective evaluation so please feel free to nominate your own favourites in either category in the comments section.
1. Strangers on a Train
Tennis could have been peripheral to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, deployed solely to define the essential wholesomeness of Farley Granger’s conflicted Guy Haines to contrast with the immoral, manipulative, ultimately psychotic charm of Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony. And yet it plays an integral role in this beguiling thriller’s climax, making Haines’ anxiety infectious to the audience as he scurries desperately to win a tennis match at Forest Hills in time to thwart Antony framing him for the murder of Haines’ wife.
Trailer – https://goo.gl/c4dweh
3. Big Wednesday
Is surfing a sport? If it’s good enough for the judges of the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, who are we to quibble? Selecting between 1978’s Big Wednesday and The Endless Summer from 12 years earlier as films would be fairly tight, the latter narrowly wins for this author but the former has the more arresting scene. Loved as much for its wistfulnesss and the authenticity of the gnomic dialogue, the climactic shots when the three friends ‘the big names, the kings, our royalty’ reunite 10 years on to surf ‘The Great Swell of 74’ are superbly photographed.
The director, John Milius, captures the giddying scale of the skyscraper waves, the acrobatic dexterity required to ride them and the sense of spiritual adventure and courage that compels his heroes whilst also transmitting the thrillingly precarious feeling of what it must be like to board a monster ‘pipeline’.
Trailer – https://goo.gl/jpS5Tl
4. Eight Men Out
John Sayles’ film is exceptional, telling the story of the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919 with a penetrating eye for the nuances of the players’ predicaments and a panoramic perspective of the cancer of corruption. Unusually, all of those cast in playing roles had the skill and shape to carry them off which gave the scenes on the diamonds of the American League and in the World Series itself dynamism and authenticity.
But it’s the end of the film that resonates most when years later the suspended Buck Weaver and Shoeless Joe Jackson, two of the coerced, magnificent players exploited and made patsies and scapegoats by gamblers and the game itself, coincide at a minor league game.
Weaver has already given the film its definition of why we play games. “When the bat meets the ball and you can just feel that ball just give,” he says, “you know it’s going to go a long way. Damn if you don’t feel like you’re going to live forever.” And there he is again at the end, broken but undefeated to remind us of that spirit of innocence and why sport entrances us.
Trailer – https://goo.gl/g1BwwR
5. Downhill Racer
Tempting though it was to champion the schmaltzy, seductive, distorted end of The Natural as Robert Redford’s entry on this list, Eight Men Out is a superior baseball film and Redford’s Winter Olympics drama from 1969 trumps it for its breathtaking but credible depiction of sport in action.
Redford plays the fittingly frosty, graceless narcissist David Chappellet as a sociopath with a phenomenal gift for skiing, a tungsten will to win and no other quality. It’s almost as if the Sundance Kid wanted to show his range by playing the Snowdance Git.
The racing shots come from the skiers point of view which gives the audience a strikingly visceral sensation of what it must be like and Chapellet’s duel with team-mate Johnny Creech which demonstrates his ruthlessness when he forces his rival into a wall is electrifying.
He subsequently goes on to win gold, of course, not that it brings him any satisfaction but the battle with Creech is vertigo-inducing and pulsates with jeopardy which the battle against the clock in the Olympic final cannot match.
Trailer – https://goo.gl/k4Ezm2
6. Kes
Brian Glover’s Mr Sugden, an archetypally callous PE teacher, is simply magnificent in Ken Loach’s film and the scenes he was in were peppered with wonderful lines.
The one where he explains why he’s wearing Manchester United’s No9 shirt instead of his usual No10 is arguably the best in fictional football. “Charlton today, lad, all over the field. Too cold for striker,” he says. “Anyway, Denis Law’s in the wash this week.”
His warm-up routine to the ‘de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum’ of BBC Sports Report’s Out of the Blue and his rich Barnsley accent barking “Skiving again?” as the boys dally in the dressing room before getting changed are perfect.
And as a minor victory for all oppressed schoolchildren who have had to put up with a schoolmaster joining in and greedily dominating the game, no one has topped a better putdown of a teacher after Sugden commits a foul than: “Tha fat tw–. He wants flamin’ milkin.'”
Trailer – https://goo.gl/jNTGZJ