“This Sporting Life” sets up as a formulaic hardscrabble “rise and fall of a sports hero” drama, the tale of a miner who gets his first taste of success and the “good life” of the English upper classes via stardom on the rugby pitch or “patch,” as ruggers say in Jolly Olde.

But Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film, based on a David Storey novel, endures because it breaks that formula is ways never seen before and seldom seen since. A classic of the “Kitchen Sink Realism”corner of the cinematic British New Wave of the early ’60s, it embraces tropes and defies expectations at every turn.

The matches are brutish, muddy and bloody, filmed in close-ups and hand-held shots capturing the organized chaos and barely-contained violence of the sport in those days.

The world they’re played in just as brutal, hanging on the ingrained class divisions that dabbling in socialism and the coming “Swingin’ 60s'” would never quitely vanquish.

And the focus, the star of the story is another classic “angry young man” of the British cinema of the day, a brooding, broad-shouldered goon who wonders where “happiness” fits into all of this.

Richard Harris had perhaps his best role and gave his finest performance in this grinding downbeat drama about a bloke from the pits who doesn’t “enjoy being kicked about on a football field for other people’s amusement.” He only enjoys “being paid for it.”

Frank Machin takes it all too personally — the slights on the field, the snobbery off of it. Signing a fat contract and changing his life is meaningless without someone to share it with.

It’s a pity the person he’d love to drag along on this ride is his widowed landlady. Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), mother of two young children, takes him in and lives off the rent he pays. She isn’t grateful for this or attracted to him. Her rebuffs should tell him that. The way she keeps her late husband’s boots polished next to the coal-burning heater in her dumpy flat tells him and us why.

“This Sporting Life” is about Frank’s rise, his stick-it-in-the-face-of-the-posh attitudes that keep him unspoiled, aka “loutish” and “gauche.” And it’s about his grim pursuit of “Mrs. Hammond,” an uncompromising man who has broken through a class barrier and who desperately wants to drag an unwilling woman through it with him.

It’s bracing to watch any “sporting” film of the era, or before, on either side of the pond, and then take in Anderson’s debut feature film. “This Sporting Life” is “the shock of the ‘new'” incarnate. Like the icons of the French New Wave who preceded him, he’d started his working life as a journalist and film critic, taking his shot by making short films, working his way into British TV before making a gigantic splash with this socially-conscious story set against a rugby backdrop.

The sets are working-class/lived-in — dumpy post-war flats, ancient pubs, the mansion and pricey restaurant where Machin encounters his “betters,” chief among them, the team’s vulpine “owner” (Qlan Badel). The games are in-your-face and yet sprawling and utterly credible, unlike Hollywood’s sports movies of the day.

Cinematographer Denys Coop’s black-and-white set-ups are unfussy and realistic, with the odd beautiful composition filled with contrasts and pictorial symmetry.

Harris brings the chip he kept on his shoulder for his best performances, and his very life makes the credibility of an arrogant, brooding, drunken brawler with a soulful streak and impulse control issues credible. The irony of this infamous boozer, nose-buster, lover and singer (he sings in the film, “Here in My Heart,” and late made “MacArthur Park” famous) living long enough to be the first Dumbledore at Hogwarts still boggles the mind.

Anyone not around at the beginning of her career might remember Roberts’ deliciously villainous turn in “Foul Play” or her standing-out the first big budget version of “Murder on the Orient Express” in the ’70s. In her Oscar-nominated turn in “This Sporting Life,” she is fiercely guarded and immovably unlikeable, a damaged woman pursued by a man who will never be the kind and “worried” husband she lost.

Margaret Hammond will rarely be grateful and never really warm to this younger man/suitor, and not just because of his temper, his table manners and his womanizing.

Roberts, who died at 53, has the distinction of appearing in a number of pictures now regarded as classics — “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “O Lucky Man!,” “Our Man in Havana” and “Wild Rovers” among them.

Anderson would make his mark in the ’60s (“If…”) and early ’70s (“O Lucky Man!”) and deliver a final grace note in the late ’80s (“Whales of August”), spending his post-“Lucky Man” career acting, narrating documentaries and making lesser known films for British TV and theatrical release.

Coop, who did yeoman’s work on many a film (“Guns of Navarone”) would go on to light and shoot the gorgeous Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies.

But once upon a time, long before, these future legends joined hands and lent their talents to a watershed film, one that still packs a punch and makes you think over 60 years later.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault

Cast: Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel, William Hartnell, Colin Blakely, Vanda Godsell and Jack Watson

Credits: Directed by Lindsay Anderson, scripted by David Storey, adapted from his novel. An Independent Artists film on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube et al

Running time: 2:14