Cage fighting summons up images of the most brutal hand-to-hand combat. Two fighters, an octagon cage, punches, kicks, submission holds, and the trademark "ground and pound" when an opponent drops to the floor and his rival goes in to finish him off. Not very tasteful, is it?
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.
Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that implausible decade of wooden rackets, big hair and (ahem) unequal pay. The story is basically true: female champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) led a protest walk-out from a tournament circuit which offered much greater rewards to male players, set up a breakaway women’s tour, only to face a phallocratic broadside from left field when fiftysomething former pro Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) started challenging the top women to a gender-themed play-off.
Riggs had a clown's genius for garish marketing and happily cast himself as male chauvinist pig in order to boost ticket sales. His showdown with King in a Texan jumbo-dome became a famous event which, in retrospect, looks like a sideshow with a slight absence of oomph. So to beef up the script Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) tells the parallel story of King’s discovery of her lesbianism and clandestine affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels as the tour hairdresser.
Thus King is fighting a public battle but, because she’s married, she’s also involved in a private one. She's not the only one with marital troubles. Riggs is a compulsive hustler who sacrifices his own family life, and a comfortable marriage to his heiress wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue, who gets a tender speech in which she gives him the boot). In this telling what matters to Riggs is the buzz of chasing preposterous bets on court, taking on all-comers while tethered to dogs or goats or wearing flippers.
It’s a role which Carell inhabits with relentless gusto (although his racket play is atrocious). As King, the ever-adorable Emma Stone wears the wire-rimmed glasses and apes the loping walk, and convinces as a steely feminist with a vulnerable core. Her swing’s not bad either (though the big match is CGI’d to the hilt). Riseborough is lovely as a free spirit whose gaydar, in an intimately soft-focus salon scene, tells her Billie Jean is there for the taking.
The facts of the Billie Jean story have been fairly outrageously origamied out of shape, events dragged around, people placed where they weren’t. King’s Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) comes off very badly as a hatchet-faced queer-basher. This being a feelgood fist-pumping version of a complicated narrative, the ugly aftermath of King's love affair doesn’t make it into the what-happened-next blurbs. Instead Marilyn hastens to Billie Jean’s changing room before the big game to fix her hair, the way these things happen only in the movies.
If you accept that you’re being sold a simplified snapshot, Battle of the Sexes is a lot of fun. It has two directors – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who made Little Miss Sunshine) – perhaps to prove that, somewhere on this project, the sexes really can collaborate as equals. Of course it's a necessarily rigged story from which no man emerges with much credit. It's hard to give two hoots for Riggs's private anguish. Billie Jean's walk-on husband Larry King (Austin Stowell) is a lantern-jawed dope. Tennis impresario Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) may as well horns and a curly tail. Even foppish tennis couturier Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming, not quite the full ticket as an English toff) spouts feeble bullet-pointed bromides - “some day we will be free to be who we are” etc.
There’s an awful image of fellow pro Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales, terrific) talking to camera with a tall patronising commentator clamping his hand round the back of her neck as if she’s his chattel. And spot the briefest cameo for that famous Athena poster of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt to reveal nothing underneath. The bare-faced cheek of male chauvinism needed a damn good slap. This fantasy history administers it lightly, with wit and grace.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Battle of the Sexes
A spate of tennis-themed films gets off to a vivid if incomplete start with Borg/McEnroe, which recreates the run-up to the Wimbledon Men's Final in 1980 with often-thrilling clarity and (as much as is possible for those who will of course recall the outcome) suspense.
There are great sportsmen, and on top of those there’s a handful of phenomena. Sachin Tendulkar is one of the latter, a cricketer of seemingly limitless gifts who’s ranked among such deities as Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Or even Don Bradman, who pops up in an archive clip in this weighty biopic saying that this bloke Tendulkar bats like he used to.
We’ve recently seen how Formula One heroes Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda and James Hunt can become box office gold, in the form of Senna and Rush.
An Australian who emigrated to New Zealand in 1965, Roger Donaldson cut his teeth in documentaries and TV before launching into a career in feature films. His first feature, Sleeping Dogs (1976), on the unlikely theme of a New Zealand plunged into totalitarianism, immediately attracted attention, and after he made Smash Palace (1982) Hollywood came calling.
Of all the major sports, boxing has much the most distinguished filmography. Of course that’s to the Homeric nature of the contest. With the honourable exception of Raging Bull, the best fight films are at least semi-fictionalised, from Rocky to The Fighter.
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.
On the other hand, 1980s racer Tommy Byrne was a working-class chancer from Dundalk who was permanently skint and got nicked for stealing. Yet the evidence suggests he was one of the fastest natural drivers who ever sat in a racing car, and who even gave Ayrton Senna a run for his money when both of them drove for the Van Diemen team at the start of the Eighties. But despite his gifts, he never quite attained the highest echelon of motorsport.
Byrne's reputation as a star-crossed genius who wasted his extravagant natural talent through his reckless dalliances with drugs, booze and women was enshrined in legend in his book Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw (2008, pictured right). Now here's Seán Ó Cualáin's documentary, which puts vivid flesh on the story's bones with a plentiful stash of archive footage, a colourful bunch of talking heads, and plenty of opinionated input from Byrne himself, who's now 58, lives in Florida, and in the racing season teaches advanced driving courses at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.
In fact you might say it didn't turn out too badly for Byrne, who evidently enjoys a comfortable lifestyle in the States and has managed to leave his debauched excesses behind him (as fellow Irishman and F1 veteran John Watson puts it, "If there was a gold medal for shagging, he'd have won it time and time again"). He hit rock bottom when he ended up driving for some sort of gangster in Mexico, who lived a Scarface-style life of drugs and hookers, and gave Byrne an electrifying wake-up call by firing a pistol at him. He was found drowned in his swimming pool not long afterwards.
What has made Byrne's story so tantalising, apart from his garish exploits and refreshing tactlessness, is the way he hurtled meteorically from quaint local banger races in Ireland to the fringes of F1, but couldn't quite clinch the deal. In 1982, having sensationally blitzed his way to winning the Formula 3 championship (after only getting the drive because the temperamental Senna had taken a sabbatical), he drove in a couple of Grands Prix for the obscure F1 team, Theodore Racing.
More significant was his test session with McLaren at Silverstone in October '82 (pictured above), in which Byrne set faster lap times than John Watson or Niki Lauda in a Formula One car he'd never driven before, yet bewilderingly was never offered a drive with the team. Evidently team boss Ron Dennis had taken against Byrne's ducking, diving cockiness, and several interviewees here stress that in the exclusive, corporate and intensely political world of F1, a loose cannon like Byrne was always going to struggle to fit in. As team owner turned pundit Eddie Jordan puts it, "you didn't get stability with Tommy Byrne. You got chaos."
Byrne himself launches tirades against the pretensions and snobbishness of F1, with a bit of class warfare for good measure: "People treat you different when you're broke than when you're rich... they can smell it." It's hard to tell how serious he's being when he says "it hasn't been a terrible life. I just lost out on $100m, that's all." Perhaps he might console himself with the thought that while his rival Ayrton Senna went all the way to the top, it's only Byrne who's still here to talk about it.
With the Bush Theatre’s main building undergoing renovations, this company’s shows are being staged in a selection of temporary spaces in West London. So, on this dark and freezing evening, I make my way to The Tabernacle, a Grade II-listed building in Powis Square, Notting Hill. It was once a church and is now a community centre.
It’s a little over two years since I was approached to adapt The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson for Manchester Royal Exchange. I was living in Liverpool at the time and had recently seen That Day We Sang by Victoria Wood at the Exchange. It was terrific, wonderfully directed by Sarah Frankcom. I had never seen a musical in the round before, it was so dynamic. There’s nowhere to hide in the round, you can’t get away with anything, you’re totally exposed, and I remember thinking how great it would be to write for such a space.