Word: soccering
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...1970s, Brian Clough was one of the best-known figures in Britain. A talented soccer player whose career was cut short by injury, he went into management, leading not one but two unfashionable clubs to the English championship and then winning the European Cup two years in a row. He was a clever, cocky, working-class hero with an opinion on everything from Margaret Thatcher (against) to striking miners (for). Brilliant, needy, self-destructive - he was an alcoholic and had a liver transplant before he died in 2004 - he combined humor, bombast, friendships and rivalries in a long and very...
...Clough is barely known outside Britain, and The Damned United is unlikely to get a wide release. That's a shame; great though Sheen's Blair and Frost were, his Clough is of an even higher order, combining psychological insight with dead-on accuracy. (See TIME's photo-esay "Soccer in the Time of Swine...
...best club in England, while embroiled in a fierce rivalry with their former manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney) and smarting from a bitter quarrel with his best friend Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Sheen, 40, has just the pedigree for the part. In his youth, he was a talented-enough soccer player to be offered a trial by the London club Arsenal, and he proves on film that he hasn't lost his touch. He comes from Port Talbot, the same South Wales steel town that produced Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Sheen says he spends three months studying characters, "looking...
...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...
...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...