Cricket may be England's national sport- certainly our national summer sport- but we have made very few feature films centred upon the game. Other cricket-playing nations don't seem to do a lot better; about the only one I can remember seeing was the Indian "Azhar", a fictionalised biography of India's Test captain Mohammed Azharuddin. (There are also surprisingly few feature films made about our national winter sport, football).
Harold Pinter, himself a keen amateur cricketer, wrote cricketing scenes into some of his film-scripts, such as "Accident" and "The Go-Between", but in neither case is the sport the main focus of the film. "The Final Test" from 1953 is about the only British film I can think of that focuses mainly on cricket. The script was written by Terence Rattigan, another amateur cricketer, and directed by Anthony Asquith, who had collaborated with Rattigan on a number of other films, including "French without Tears", "The Winslow Boy" and "The Browning Version".
Despite Rattigan's cricketing background, this is as much a human drama as a sporting one, and for most of the time the drama is not centred upon events on the pitch. England are playing Australia in the fifth and final test of an Ashes series at the Oval. The match seems certain to end in a draw; Australia have made a huge first-innings score, which England look likely to match, and a whole day's play has been lost to rain. Even if one side or the other can conjure up an unlikely victory, that will not affect the result of the series, which it is implied Australia have already won.
Several England cricketers- Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Alec Bedser, Godfrey Evans, Jim Laker and Cyril Washbrook- appear as themselves. (Hutton's part is quite a large one). The main character, however, is a fictitious one, Sam Palmer, once a great batsman but now coming to the end of his career. (Rattigan seems to have based him on the legendary Australian batsman Don Bradman and the events of his final Test in 1948). Sam knows that this will be his last appearance for England and wants his teenage son Reggie to be at The Oval to watch him. Reggie, however, has little interest in cricket; he sees himself as a budding intellectual and his great passion is for poetry. He does not want to be at The Oval because he has a chance to meet his great hero, the poet and dramatist Alexander Whitehead. When the two meet, however, Reggie is surprised to discover that Whitehead is himself a cricket fanatic. Another plot line concerns the love-triangle which develops between Sam, his young England team-mate Frank Weller and Cora, the barmaid at Sam's local pub.
The weakest thing about the film is, in my opinion (and, it would seem, in the opinion of a number of other reviewers as well) is the miscasting of Jack Warner as Sam. Sam is probably supposed to be in his early forties, but Warner would have been 58 in 1953, far too old for a professional cricketer. He doesn't even look younger. I like the suggestion of another reviewer who thought that John Mills (45 at the time, and slimmer than Warner) would have been a good match for the role. The relationship between Sam and Cora would also have seemed more convincing if he had not looked old enough to be her father.
Warner had form for this sort of thing. Three years earlier he had also looked too old for a part when, at 55, he played a police constable in "The Blue Lamp", but his advancing years did not prevent his character, George Dixon, from being resurrected in the TV show "Dixon of Dock Green". Warner went on playing the character until he was 80!
There is an amusing contribution from Robert Morley as Whitehead, who despite his literary fame comes across as a pompous, self-important jackass (like a lot of characters Morley played), partially redeemed by his genuine love of cricket. I wondered if Rattigan was using the character to settle scores with some rival playwrights; we see one of Whitehead's plays being broadcast on television, an obvious parody of the verse drama of T S Eliot and Christopher Fry which was popular around this time.
In 1953 Rattigan was at the height of his fame; he was later to be eclipsed by the rise of the theatrical "Angry Young men" such as John Osborne, but he had a gift for writing dialogue and for his ability to create believable human relationships, such as the one between Sam and Reggie in this film. Both end up appreciating and sympathising with the other's position more than they would have thought possible at one time. With a better leading man my mark might well have been higher. 7/10.
