From Chaplin’s 1913 debut in Kid Auto Races at Venice to Asif Kapadia’s documentary on Formula One driver Ayrton Senna which opens this week, road racing has fascinated movie-makers. But few films are as heartening as Peter Yates’s truthful comedy of a small-town American teenager learning about life through amateur cycling. He worships a team of Italian professionals who then cheat like their compatriot Messala in Ben-Hur. He competes against college boys. He converts his petrolhead father to cycling. Above all he finds physical and spiritual liberation Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Hugh Hudson’s first film was a little-known documentary on the Argentinian driver Juan Fangio. His second, the most honoured sports film ever made, centres on two British sprinters preparing for the 1924 Olympics. The Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), educated at public school and Cambridge, brought in a professional trainer to help further his ambitions. The Scottish missionary Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) was a rugby international who ran for the glory of God. The manipulative, stirring movie made Vangelis’s synthesised score a soaring anthem to sport. Photograph: Rex Features
In the finest sports comedy, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play the patrician head of physical education at a Californian university and a streetwise New York sports promoter and gambler. He becomes her manager when he discovers she excels at golf and tennis (at both of which Hepburn was skilled) as well as shooting, archery, ice hockey, boxing and “a little baseball”. Tennis and golf are the dominant games, Hepburn plays against sports stars such as “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, Donald Budge and Gussie Moran, and sports psychology is central to the plot. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
A major activity of movie pioneers in the 1890s was filming prize fights, and there are more first-rate films about the “noble art” than any other sport. Boxing has become a metaphor for the dream of success, the inevitability of defeat, the struggle of life itself. Many actors have played boxers; Hilary Swank won an Oscar playing one. There have been impressive recent biographies such as Cinderella Man and The Fighter, but the greatest boxing film is Raging Bull, with Robert De Niro as the Italian-American middleweight Jake LaMotta, who himself played a bartender in The Hustler Photograph: Allstar Picture Library
The beautiful game has yet to produce a successful major feature, although the documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, in which two video artists use multiple cameras to follow Zinédine Zidane for the whole of the Real Madrid v Villareal match in April 2005, is a fascinating experiment. What remains the most enjoyable football film is this prewar thriller starring Leslie Banks as a Scotland Yard inspector investigating a murder at Highbury. The Gunners’ manager George Allison and his great 1930s team play themselves Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
From suffragette Emily Davison throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby, through the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, to John Hurt as cancer-stricken Bob Champion winning the 1981 National on the crippled Aldaniti, horse racing has provided drama, humour and inspiration to movie audiences. The finest racing picture is Seabiscuit, the rousing populist epic of the horse rescued from the knacker’s yard to become a winner, under an optimistic owner (Jeff Bridges), a gifted trainer (Chris Cooper) and a literate jockey (Tobey Maguire), and provide hope to a depressed America in the 1930s Photograph: Rex Features
Lagaan, a likable 2001 Bollywood picture, centred on a cricket match in Victorian India. This year, two revealing documentaries have dealt with cricket and society, though we’ll have to wait for Oprah Winfrey’s film of Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s novel about cricket in New York, to see a great cricket movie. But Hitchcock has given us an oblique masterpiece on the subject. The Lady Vanishes is dominated by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as two middle-class Englishmen so obsessed with the game they’re oblivious to the storm clouds of war gathering around them on the continent Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
“Whoever wants to know the heart of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game,” wrote Jacques Barzun 50 years ago in God’s Country and Mine, and despite its commercialism baseball remains the embodiment of the American spirit. Field of Dreams is a magical, life-enhancing fable in the manner of It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Kevin Costner in Gary Cooper mode as a stumbling product of 1960s idealism who is commanded by a God-like voice to build a baseball diamond on his mortgaged Iowa farm to revive the dreams and redeem the lives of his fellow Americans. Pitch perfect Photograph: Rex Features
Director Robert Rossen worked as a boxer, wrote Body and Soul, one of the best boxing movies, and was morally torpedoed by the witch-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities. Paul Newman has played boxers and an ice-hockey manager but had his greatest role as “Fast Eddie” Felson, a poolroom hustler who learns about loyalty and betrayal when confronting the cool green-baize champion Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) and a Mephistophelean gambler (George C Scott). A masterpiece set in a windowless, smoke-filled subterranean world unacquainted with the idea of sport as a healthy pastime Photograph: Allstar
In Invictus (2008), Clint Eastwood tells the story of how Nelson Mandela cannily used the white-dominated game of rugby union and its Afrikaner captain François Pienaar to unite a dangerously divided South Africa in the mid-1990s. But the supreme film of “the handling code”, as we used to call it, was adapted by painter, writer and one-time Leeds professional David Storey from his own first novel. A key work of the British new wave, it captures a whole subculture and made a star out of Richard Harris as the hulking, inarticulate Yorkshire miner who becomes a top rugby league player Photograph: George Konig /Rex Features
