Normally at this time of year, young and old alike would be watching or playing summer sports. Things are very different in 2020, although golfers, bowlers, tennis and croquet players of all abilities are slowly returning to action. If you aren't quite ready to venture out to play, however, Cinema Paradiso can bring the best summer sports films to your own living room.
If you're wondering where the likes of cricket and baseball are, we have a batting movies special coming up later in the summer. You never know, we might even get round to cycling, rowing, swimming and surfing before the nights start to draw in and thoughts turn to winter pursuits once more. In the meantime, let's focus on sedate sports and think of Terence Morgan patiently awaiting the arrival of the Spanish Armada by playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe in the 1962 TV series, Sir Francis Drake. The same game inspires Sandy Dennis to host a bowling party for her bourgeois friends in Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park (1969).
But there's a more raucous comic bias put on crown green movies. A pair of siblings touring from Down Under spark Paul Kaye's ambition to bowl for England in Mel Smith's Blackball (2003) but an incident with a scorecard causes him to be banned for 15 years by Torquay bowls club rival James Cromwell and it's up to flashy American agent Vince Vaughn to get the maverick back in his groove.
Cock-a-Hoop
Surprisingly, we could recommend dozens of films featuring croquet, with a number of them being variations on the version that Lewis Carroll concocted with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen briefly lays down the rules to Mia Wasikowska in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), but Clyde Geronomi devotes an entire sequence to the one-sided game in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951). The studio would also include a croquet sequence in James Neilson's Summer Magic (1963), as Nancy Carey (Hayley Mills) tries to lure Charles Bryant (James Stacy) away from her sister, Julia (Deborah Walley) by showing off her mallet skills.
Film-makers have tended to use croquet to establish the social status of the players, with Fredric March's Russian army officer paying Tsarist minister's wife Greta Garbo a compliment while she concentrates on a shot in Clarence Brown's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1935). In order to give himself airs, Ryan O'Neal's roguish hero teaches the game to his son in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975). Indeed, there's more than a hint of imperial arrogance about the way that Andy Tennant has British governess Jodie Foster teach the game to Siamese ruler Chow Yun-Fat in Anna and the King (1999).
Croquet might have been seen as an elitist game in Golden Age Hollywood, but a number of important figures were keen players, including producers Samuel Goldwyn and Darryl F. Zanuck, as well as the competitive Howard Hawks. Fellow director George Cukor made croquet a focus of his celebraed garden parties, with Martin Ferreiro playing the host welcoming James Whale (Ian McKellen) to his home in Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters (1998). Peter Cook satitises the game's smart set association in his script for Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967), when the demonic George Spiggot (Cook) sends Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) to a grand country estate with dream girl Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron), only for her to be seduced on the croquet lawn by her harp teacher.
James Ivory often slipped croquet scenes into the refined literary adaptations he made with producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The sound of mallet on wood was essentially window dressing in A Room With a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). But a croquet ball actually sparks the plot in Savages (1972), as it rolls through the 1930s forest occupied by the Mud People and entices them to explore a large Westchester estate in a scenario that consciously seeks to reverse the action in Luis Buñuel's scathing anti-bourgeois satire, The Exterminating Angel (1962).
Although croquet was used to show folks in rude (ish) health in Dustin Hoffman's Quartet (2012) and Gore Verbinksi's A Cure For Wellness (2016), it has often been employed to lure the audience into a false sense of security before the unthinkable happens. In FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), for example, Harding (Georg H. Schnell) and his sister Annie (Ruth Landshoff) are enjoying a game when a letter arrives from Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) that they hope will reassure his anxious wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder). But the dark shadow has already started to creep towards them. Similarly, the first time that Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) claps eyes on the villainous Leonard (Martin Landau), he is playing solo croquet in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959), while Ray Milland's family relax over a teatime game on the lawn of their plush mansion before all hell breaks loose in George McCowan's creature feature, Frogs (1972).
A civilised game presages murder in Peter Ustinov's outing as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in Guy Hamilton's Evil Under the Sun (1982). The way that John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) wields an umbrella suggests that he might be handy with a mallet in Jeremiah S. Chechik's The Avengers (1998), although the croquet scene actually involves his boss, Father (Fiona Shaw), and the dastardly Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery). But nowhere does this addictive game suggest that the snooty types rattling the hoops are about to be taken down a peg or two than in Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1988), as mean girls Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) and Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) discuss new kid JD (Christian Slater) and the forthcoming prom while playing croquet with Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) in the garden of her Sherwood, Ohio home.
Anyone For Tennis?
The earliest summer sportsman in our survey is in Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991) as the king (Steven Waddington) plays tennis with his brother, Kent (Jerome Flynn). Seven centuries on, another lively game is contested by Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin) and Baron Karl von Leinsdorf (Jeremy Kemp) in Herbert Ross's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), which was filmed at the famous Queen's Club in West London.
Nicol Williamson and Robert Duvall take on the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in this revisionist adventure. But it doesn't take the occupants of 221B Baker's Street to realise that the best two tennis scenes in screen history are to be found in Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1952) and Robert Hamer's School For Scoundrels (1960). Having already treated his fellow residents at a seaside guest house to his table tennis skills, the gregarious Hulot (Tati) takes to the outdoor court to unleash the most hilarious service action ever seen. It proves hugely effective, however, and it would have been intriguing to see how Hulot might have got on against the raffish Raymond Delauney (Terry-Thomas), who tries every trick in the book to humiliate Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael) in front of the watching April Smith (Janette Scott) by making him serve into the sun and greeting each muffed shot with a cynically sympathetic call of 'Hard cheese'.
The rambling country club at which this match was filmed is now a hotel. A number of other films include scenes set at swish tennis clubs, including Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) and François Truffaut's The Woman Next Door (1981). Contrast the tense exchange between Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) and Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) in the former and the 'la-di-da' badinage in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) between Annie (the Oscar-winning Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Allen) after they meet for the first time at an indoor Manhattan sports club. The venue is a little more upmarket in John Landis's Trading Places (1983), as Todd (Robert Curtis Brown) and the other members of the Zeta Chi fraternity sing a barbershop quartet to their best gals, with a tennis match going on through the window behind them.
Tom Hanks and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson respectively have different problems laying racket to ball in Neal Israel's Bachelor Party (1984) and Michael Ritchie's Fletch (1985). While playing with girlfriend Debbie Thompson (Tawny Kitaen) and her parents on their private court, Rick Gassko (Hanks) keeps whacking the ball baseball-style into a neighbouring garden, while Gail Stanwyk (Wheeler-Nicholson) has struggles to hit anything lobbed her way by a serving machine, while she is being interrogated by undercover reporter Irwin Fletcher (Chevy Chase), who can't even make it through the country club car park without thumping a car's paintwork with his racket.
Thanks to the good folks at Industrial Light & Magic, the ball seems to have a mind of its own, as the devilish Jack Nicholson plays a game of doubles with Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon in George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987). But Cher (Alicia Silverstone), Dionne (Stacey Dash) and Amber (Elisa Donovan) make it clear to games teacher Millie Stoeger (Julie Brown) that they have no intention of hitting the balls being fizzed past their noses by a serving machine in Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling's inspired reworking of Jane Austen's Emma.
It's all about Love in three more comedies with pivotal tennis scenes. The commentators have no idea why tennis pro Richie Tenenbaum commits 72 unforced errors and removes his shoes and one sock during a match at Windswept Fields in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). But, then, they know nothing of Richie's attachment to adopted sister Margot (Gwyeneth Paltrow), who is seated in the friends and family box with new husband, Raleigh St Clair (Bill Murray).
The simmering animosity between Lucy Kelson (Sandra Bullock) and June Carver (Alicia Witt) makes things uncomfortable for boss George Wade (Hugh Grant) during the on-court showdown in Marc Lawrence's Two Weeks Notice (2002), while Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) and Helen Harris (Rose Byrne) are so driven by their rivalry to prove a better friend to bride-to-be Lillian Donovan (Maya Rudolph) that they thunder shots at each other in the wince-inducing tennis scene in Paul Feig's Bridesmaids (2011) - not that Byrne's snarky stepsons are in any way impressed!
It's not just the players who have it tough, as coaches Seann William Scott and Jay Chandrasekhar respectively discover in Gary Leiner's Gary the Tennis Coach (2009) and Chandrasekhar's Club Dread (2004), with the latter being joined in the élite tennis horror lounge by Juan Piquer Simón's Pieces (1982) and Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado's Rabies (2010).
Farley Granger and Ray Milland respectively play tennis professionals Guy Haines and Tony Wendice in the Alfred Hitchcock duo, Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M For Murder (1954). Down on his luck after slugging an opponent during a televised match, disgraced pro Vincent Van Patten is forced to coach bookie Martin Sheen's ambitious son in Lee H. Katzin's The Break (1995). Kevin Costner and Anthony Hopkins find themselves on either side of the net in Tony Scott's thriller, Revenge (1990), while English professor Mark Wahlberg needs college player Emory Cohen to help him out of a big bucks jam in Rupert Wyatt's modernised version of Fedor Dostoevsky's The Gambler (2014).
Centre Court appears in all its glory as the focus switches to SW17 in Richard Loncraine's Wimbledon (2004), as serial underachiever Paul Bettany gets a wild card to the All-England Club. But, while a chance meeting with rising women's star Kirsten Dunst prompts him to raise his game, her form suffers as she realises that there's more to life than winning. Drifting into coaching after his playing days end, Irish grafter Jonathan Rhys Meyers is grateful to find a wealthy student in Matthew Goode. No sooner has he committed to marry Goode's sister, Emily Mortimer, however, Rhys Meyers falls for his American fiancée, Scarlett Johansson, in Woody Allen's atypical stab at psychological suspense, Match Point (2005).
Tensions between Jeff Daniels and wife Laura Linney are evident from their tennis court interaction in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005), while Tati the dog can barely bring himself to watch as Russell Crowe and Didier Bourdon assume the guises of 1930s legends Fred Perry and René Lacoste for their epic tussle on a dusty clay court in Ridley Scott's adaptation of Peter Mayle's bestseller, A Good Year (2006). While out on his first pollen-collecting expedition in New York, Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) learns that there are worse things than getting stuck to a bouncy yellow 'flower' on downtown tennis court in Steve Hickner's DreamWorks animation, Bee Movie (2007).
From CGI to ATP, we end this section with a look at some of the films that have been made about the real stars of the tennis tour over the last four decades. Sadly, Julie Anderson's Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World (1994) is not currently available from Cinema Paradiso, but plans are afoot to make a biopic of the first African-American to win the Men's Singles title at Wimbledon. The film will be produced by Ashok Amritraj, who is an ex-pro himself, as are his brothers Anand and Vijay. Indeed, the latter cameo'd alongside Ilie Nastase, John Lloyd and John McEnroe in Anthony Harvey's Players (1979). McEnroe also guests alongside Adam Sandler in Steven Brill's Mr Deeds, a 2002 remake of Frank Capra's Oscar winner, Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
Jane Anderson clearly knows a good tennis topic when she sees one, as her 2001 documentary, When Billie Beat Bobby, has been followed by James Erskine's Battle of the Sexes (2013) and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Battle of the Sexes (2017) in recalling the grudge match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The rivals were splendidly played by Emma Stone and Steve Carell in the latter and Sverrir Gudnasson and Shia LaBoeuf do an equally solid job in portraying Björn Borg and John McEnroe in John Metz Pedersen's Borg vs McEnroe (2017), which recreates the epic 1980 final, which saw the Swede going for his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title.
Dismissed as 'Super Brat' by some for his on-court antics, McEnroe became one of the greats of the game and married into an A-list Hollywood family when he exchanged vows with Tatum O'Neal, who had become the youngest winner of a competitive Oscar for her performance opposite her father, Ryan, in Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973).
Arguments will always rumble about who is the greatest of all time, but Serena Williams has more than staked her claim. Profiled alongside her older sister in Maiken Baird's documentary, Venus and Serena (2012), Williams has also made the odd foray into acting. Having played Agent Ross in Leslie Small's Hair Show (2004), she cameo'd as herself in Chris Columbus's Pixels (2015) and Gary Ross's Ocean's 8 (2018). She's probably not ready, though, for the game of mime tennis staged in a quiet park by Michelangelo Antonioni in his Swinging London thriller, Blow-Up (1966). Watching photographer David Hemmings has to throw the invisible ball back after it's knocked over the wire fence. Come back Jack Lemmon! All is forgiven for using a tennis racket to strain spaghetti in Billy Wilder's Best Picture winner, The Apartment (1960).
A Good Walk Spoiled
Despite the contrasting settings of wild coastal links and manicured parkland courses, golf isn't a particularly cinematic sport. It's easy enough for actors to fake drives, chips and putts. But the ball gets lost in the clouds as it sails off the tee, while an 18-hole round lacks the immediacy and vicariousness of more confrontational contact sports. Nevertheless, the screen has still witnessed some marvellous golfing moments since the silent era, when Andrew P. Wilson helped get the ball rolling with his adaptation of PG Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert (1924). Typically, however, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy showed how the game shouldn't be played on a muddy course in James Parrott and Leo McCarey's Should Married Men Go Home? (1928), which can be found on the Laurel and Hardy: Love and Marriage collection.
Along with such fellow stars as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Oliver Hardy was a keen golfer. But the game's most iconic piece of screen slapstick was choreographed by WC Fields, who was so pleased with the impeccably timed routine that he performed it twice, as J. Effingham Bellweather in Monte Brice's short, The Golf Specialist (1930), and as Sam Bisbee in Erle C. Kenton's You're Telling Me (1934). The latter is available from Cinema Paradiso in a double bill with Clyde Bruckman's Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), while the former forms part of WC Fields: 6 Classic Shorts, which also contains Leslie Pearce's The Dentist (1932), which includes a couple of golfing gags of its own.
The same year saw Fred Astaire perform a buck and wing with a wooden driver to the tune of Irving Berlin's 'Since They Turned Loch Lomond Into Swing' in Mark Sandrich's Carefree (1938). In striving to impress Ginger Rogers with his moves, Astaire builds a routine around his stance at the tee before hitting five immaculate drives down the fairway without breaking sideways stride. Elsewhere in 1938, David Huxley (Cary Grant) meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) when she mistakes his ball for her own on the 18th hole in Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby. Two years later, a golf bag would feature in the opening scene of George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), as Tracy Lord (Hepburn) snaps a wooden club belonging to soon-to-be ex-husband CK Dexter Haven (Grant) before booting him out of her luxurious family home.
In fact, Hepburn was an accomplished golfer, having taken up the game as a child, and her skills came in handy when she was required to hit nine drives in a row during an argument with country club busybody Phyllis Povah in Cukor's Pat and Mike (1952). When making history by becoming the first performer to win an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner, Cate Blanchett didn't have to hit many balls in anger while having nine holes with Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). But the quippage was very much par for the Hepburn course.
Coming more up to date, Bill Murray's well-known love of the game extends to him narrating Jason Baffa's documentary, Loopers: The Caddy's Long Walk (2018). He even talked Sofia Coppola into letting him hit a single drive with Mount Fuji in the background in Lost in Translation (2003). Majestic though this silent sequence is, Murray's biggest contribution to screen golf is the quipping screenplay he wrote with his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, for Harold Ramis's directorial debut, Caddyshack (1980). Alongside such characters at the Bushwood Country Club as Ty 'Be the Ball' Webb (Chevy Chase), the obnoxious Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) and college-bound caddy Danny Noonan (Michael O'Keefe), the siblings pitched green keeper Carl Spackler (Murray), whose feud with a pesky gopher is the film's comic highlight.
Allan Arkush took the reins for Caddyshack II (1988). But Murray's absence was keenly felt, as both writer and performer, despite the best efforts of Chase and new club members Dan Aykroyd, Robert Stack, Randy Quaid and Jackie Mason. The latter was better known as a club comic and the cabaret circuit also spawned Jerry Lewis, whose fabled partnership with Dean Martin took them on to the golf course in Norman Taurog's The Caddy (1953). Lewis is very much a Marmite movie star, as is Adam Sandler, although he has yet to be adopted as a comic icon by the French. Sandler is on bullish form, however, in the title role of Dennis Dugan's Happy Gilmore (1996), as his failed ice hockey player discovers a talent for golf, only for his disregard for course etiquette to irk swaggering tour topper, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald).
Subtlety isn't the strong suit of a number of golf comedies. Christy Tummond makes some drastically skimpy changes to the dress code in order to lure patrons back to the Pennytree Club in Steve Procko's Golf Balls! (1999), while promising amateur Steve Tally finds himself getting a boob job after falling foul of a pair of malevolent plastic surgeons in Drew Ann Rosenberg's Hole in One (2009). Snootiness in the clubhouse also proves a problem for hip-hop star Big Boi, although he finds a way to make the bigots at the Carolina Pines Country Club show him a little respect in Don Michael Paul's Who's Your Caddy? (2007).
Few players take a more relaxed attitude to their game than Ron Livingston and Jon Favreau in Doug Liman's Swingers (1996), with the former being more bothered about having to play Goofy at Disneyland than the fact he has taken eight shots on the first hole. Dublin chipper owners Larry (Colm Meany) and Bimbo (Donal O'Kelly) seem equally unconcerned when they take to the fairways of the St Anne's Pitch & Putt, in Dollymount and almost hit another player with a wayward shot in Stephen Frears's take on Roddy Doyle's Barrytown bestseller, The Van (1996). The same sense of outrage is felt by the players whose backswing is the signal for Johnny Knoxville and his pals to let off airhorns in a classic jape from Jeff Tremaine's Jackass: The Movie (2002).
One chap gets so hacked off that he aims a couple of full-blooded shots into the tree in which the pranksters are hiding and it's also open season on the poor guy collecting balls in his buggy on the driving range used by Jason Bateman and Thomas Jane in Roger Kumble's The Sweetest Thing (2002). Balls also get pinged in all directions as frustrated players grow tired of Thomas Haden Church and Paul Giamatti holding them up in Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004). Unfortunately, Giamatti has taken too much of Church's incessant jibber-jabber to take this lying down.
Tempers also fray when four old college friends play a round for old time's sake in William Dear's The Foursome (2004). Despite being paired with novice Chris Gauthier, hustler Kevin Dillon plays up a storm. However, John Shaw and Paul Jarrett insist on a double or quits second round after losing a $2500 bet. The rate of play becomes the issue when best buds Paul Rudd and Jason Segel escort Rashida Jones and Sarah Burns for an afternoon's golfing in John Hamburg's I Love You, Man (2009). But the speed at which Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Larry Joe Campbell and Stephen Merchant are playing proves to be only part of the problem when they partake of some special brownies at an exclusive Cape Cod country club in Bobby and Peter Farrelly's Hall Pass (2011).
A bar in this film shares its name with the title of Robert Crouse's Enter the Dragon (1973), which sees John Saxon discover the perils of straying out of bounds when playing a round when he's confronted in the rough by three thugs intent on teaching him a lesson over an unpaid $175,000 gambling debt. There's even more macho posturing, as Charlie Sheen and his cohorts let rip in their golf buggies to a cover version of Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back in Town' in a madcap montage in Lewis Teague's Navy Seals (1990). One of the carts winds up in a lake and a similar destination awaits the buggy belonging to Frank (Jack Betts), the veteran golfer who suffers a heart attack after D-Fens (Michael Douglas) fires his pump-action shotgun in indignation after being admonished for taking a shortcut through the Altmore Country Club in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993).
While the old man dies in his silly little hat, the players at the Weddington Golf Centre responsible for smashing a window in the home of exasperated cop Alvin Strayer (Jeff Daniels) are grateful that he doesn't open fire in John Herzfeld's thriller, Two Days in the Valley (1996). The lawmen circling the Las Vegas National Golf Club make a much less discreet entry in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995). While Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is negotiating the terms of his new licence, Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) is playing a round with some cronies. The special agents spying on him run out of fuel and have to abandon their plane after making an ignominious landing on the fairway and Nicky offers a reward for anyone who can hit the aircraft with their next shot.
Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) discovers that cheats never prosper when playing against an agent of the calibre of James Bond (Sean Connery) in Guy Hamilton's Goldfinger (1964). Having lost a sizeable wager after 007 thwarts the efforts of sidekick Oddjob (Harold Sakata) to switch balls on the 17th, Goldfinger fumingly scribbles a cheque in the back of his car, while his henchman squeezes the offending Slazenger 7 ball so hard that it turns to dust.
In Peter Segal's Get Smart (2008), Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) barely notices that he's speeding across a driving range with golf balls denting his windscreen before he crashes through a concession stand. Showing suaver ineptitude, MI7's finest (Rowan Atkinson) proves not to know one end of a golf bat from another when he plays a round with Russian spy Artem Karlenko (Mark Ivanir) in Oliver Parker's Johnny English Reborn (2011). But the Brit has the sense to duck when he's shot at by the Killer Cleaner (Pik-Sen Lim), who has filled her golf bag with artillery.
Cinema Paradiso users can revel in bored millionaire Steve McQueen's bunker shot wager in Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). This was repeated with a small variation by Pierce Brosnan in John McTiernan's 1999 remake. Nothing, however, quite matches the bet made by Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner) in Ron Shelton's Tin Cup (1996) that he can complete the qualifying round for the US Open with only his 7-iron after he and caddy Romeo Posar (Cheech Marin) have snapped every other club in his bag. He makes it through, but Tin Cup's hubris prompts him to make a more reckless driving distance wager with tour pro David Simms (Don Johnson) and he promptly loses a tidy sum, as well as his car.
Having headlined one of the all-time great baseball movies in Barry Levinson's The Natural (1984), Robert Redford set out to direct a golf classic with The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), an adaptation of a Steven Pressfield novel that was set in Savannah, Georgia between the wars and focuses on how caddy Bagger Vance (Will Smith) appears out of nowhere to help shellshocked ex-pro Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon) regain his swing and win the heart of distressed heiress, Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron). For all the nostalgic gloss, however, the film was criticised by Spike Lee - along with Frank Darabont's The Green Mile (1999) - for its reliance on the stereotype of the mystical black man.
The history of golf hasn't often caught the imagination of film-makers, although both Rowdy Herrington's Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004) and Sidney Lanfield's Follow the Sun (1951) dwell on the human interest side of the stellar careers of Bobby Jones (Jim Caviezel) and Ben Hogan (Glenn Ford), who overcame debilitating adversity to make it to the top of the game either side of the Second World War.
Two more films go even further back in time. Produced for Disney, Bill Paxton's The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) celebrates the battle for the 1913 US Open between British champion Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane) and Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf), a 21 year-old amateur from Brookline, Massachusetts. But Jason Connery harks further back still in Tommy's Honour (2016) in order to recall the contribution made to Scottish golf by Old Tom Morris (Peter Mullan) and his dashing son, Tommy (Jack Lowden).
Eight stars of tomorrow gather at Pinehurst, North Carolina, along with 1500 other seven year-old hopefuls from 54 different countries, to compete for the World Championship of Junior golf in Josh Greenwood's documentary, The Short Game (2013), while the 13 women who stormed the all-male bastion in 1950 by setting up the Ladies Professional Golf Association are honoured in Charlene Fisk and Carrie Schrader's The Founders (2016).
Given the popularity of the game across the world, it's rather surprising that more golfing greats haven't been commemorated in documentary form. But maybe Jean-Paul Davidson set the bar too high in profiling the legendary Severiano Ballesteros in the poignantly inspirational, Seve The Movie (2014). The Spaniard was one of the stalwarts who helped tilt the balance towards Europe in the Ryder Cup. The 43rd biannual contest was due to have been staged at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin in September. Thanks to Cinema Paradiso, however, it's possible to reminisce about some of the recent tussles for golf's most fiercely contested prize in a dozen or so highlights packages.
What sports do you want us to cover next? Let us know through our social media channels and don't forget to try out the free trial offer if you still haven't!
