they'd know who Brian Clough was. Time magazine does the introductions via a review of The Damned United.
As for The Damned United, American audiences may find some aspects of the film unbelievable. Did British soccer players really have hair like Klaus Kinski's at the end of Aguirre? (Yes.) Was northern England in the '70s really that damp, dark and miserable? (No, it was worse.)
But the film is worth seeking out, and not just because of Sheen's extraordinary performance. In his research, Sheen discovered that Clough loved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the 1960 Karel Reisz film, starring Albert Finney, about a young working-class iconoclast and self-mythologizer — just like Clough. The Damned United is an homage to films of the British new wave — Saturday Night, A Kind of Loving — in the way that it exposes how Britain's old class divisions stunted countless lives. Clough and Revie were intelligent men for whom soccer promised a release from a life down the pit or in the factories. Then they discovered that the game was run by small-town businessmen with patronizing attitudes straight out of Dickens. The wonder is not that both men had a chip on their shoulder; it's that it wasn't a bloody plank.
4 comments:
There's a few factual howlers in the New York Times review of the film.
Apparently, Revie left the midlands club, Leeds Utd, to go manage the British national team. ;-)
Do they not have fact-checkers in the review section of the NYT?
Apparently not this time.
All the ex-pat NYT readers took great pleasure in pilling into the comments box to laugh at the reviewer, A.O. Scott.
Not a pretty sight.
There's a review here with the corrections acknowledged:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/movies/09damned.html
The new comments are still funny, mind you, and the U.S. trailers are amusing.
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