The Great Game (1953) User Reviews

Not Much has changed then

[malcolmgsw · 6/10 · 10 January 2011]

This film was made at Brentford FC in 1953 when i believe that they were either a Division 2 or Division Three South Club.I went to watch matches at Brentford at the sixties and nothing much had changed of the stadium in the intervening period.The same could be said for the story.This is about the tapping up of a star player by the chairman of another club.Read Barcelona and Ces Fabregas as the modern equivalent and you will know what i mean.Interestingly enough there is a little speech by the stars wife which echoes the Bosman case.She asks the chairman why they don't pay less for transfers so that they can pay more to the player ,which of course now happens on a regular basis.At the end of the film James Hayter talks out loud of other sports he can get into.He comes up with floodlit cricket....on ice.Well almost right.A fascinating film well worth a view.

The Business of Football

[boblipton · 7/10 · 24 January 2020]

James Hayter is in charge of the local football club, and it's a team in the First Division. It's also in last place, and about to be dropped to the Second Division. Ignoring his faltering printing business, he looks around for talent, and in walks Glyn Houston, who wants to marry Sheila Shand Gibbs, the least competent member of his staff. Houston is a leading player on a poorly funded team, so Hayter buys his contract, blesses the union, and thinks his troubles are over. They're not. The people in charge of the other team let slip that Hayter recruited Houston, and a scandal erupts.

Maurice Elvey's movie is centered on the economic paradoxes of football in the era. The players are nominally amateur, so while his contract is worth £20,000, he takes home £14 a week for working in Hayter's printing business, which also makes a lot of money off the contract for programs.

Diana Dors is second-billed as a mercenary young woman, and Thora Hird has a sizable role as the effective manager of the shop. There's a bit of HOBSON'S CHOICE in the story, and some favorite actors, like John Laurie and Frank Pettingell to liven the confusion.

Any film with Diana Dors is a definite must-see!

[JohnHowardReid · 6/10 · 26 December 2015]

Any movie with Diana Dors is a definite must-see, though this one – despite its great cast – just scrapes into that category. Alas, despite her prominence in the billing (in my Press Sheet, she is billed second to James Hayter), the super-lovely Diana has only a small and quite unimportant role. On the other hand, Hayter is on-screen for a good slice of the movie's eighty minutes. Despite his top billing, he seems afraid that audiences will not be thrilled by his presence, so to make sure of our constant attention, he overacts atrociously. Alas, we soon wish him back when Thora Hird and Jack Lambert get together with some of the most fatuous dialogue we've ever heard in a Britsh film. The direction, by the once-great Maurice Elvey (just a bum, I always thought, as I escorted him up the steps of the London Film School – this was before some of his great achievements in silents and early talkies were re-discovered) can at best be described as uninspired, and even the photography is dull.

Pretty good, from a Yank perspective.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 24 March 2023]

Once I got into the mode of understanding what was going on, and who was who, the basic idea of the story began to make sense, even 70 years later than this was made and across the pond. Sports scandals still occur, much more scandalous than this, but the shock is still the same in the public eye. This involves a British football team and the efforts to steal the star of a rival team. Behind the scenes, employees of a factory (owned by Geoffrey Toone and managed by Thora Hird), there's lots more than just the sport at the forefront, with scheming Diana Dors making an impact as the femme fatale, and Toone and Hird even more memorable in major supporting parts, their own stories giving them plenty of good material to work with. James Hayter, John Laurie and Jack Lambert also give good performances. The film is memorable on many different levels, particularly as a document of the British working class and the passions of their time away from the daily grind of their exhausting work lives. A mixture of comedy and drama aides this in being a very interesting piece of slice of life.