Cinema has always loved sports. Boxing has attracted, generally successfully, names of the stature of Martin Scorsese (‘Wild bull’), Clint Eastwood (‘Million dollar Baby’), Michael Mann (‘Ali’) or Norman Jewison (‘Hurricane Carter’). We could continue with titles like ‘The Boxer’, ‘Cinderella Man’ or ‘The Fighter’. Sometimes, Sylvester Stallone knows it well, he can become the best way to embrace the desired stardom and abandon the cold taste of falling on the canvas.
But there are many more. Basketball (‘Space Jam’, ‘Champions’), athletics (‘Chariots of Fire’, ‘The Hero of Berlin’), soccer (‘Evasion or victory’, ‘I want to be like Beckham’), rugby (‘Invictus’), figure skating (‘I, Tonya’), ski (‘Eddie the Eagle’), motoring (‘Rush’, ‘Le Mans ’66’) or wrestling (‘The Wrestler’, ‘The Iron Clan’) are good examples of the great variety available to the viewer.
Tennis, an almost unexplored terrain
If you notice, one of those that is not on the list is tennis. And the discipline invented by Walter Clopton Wingfield in 1873 has not occupied as much space on the big screen as one might think. True, in ‘The Tenenbaums. A family of geniuses, Wes Anderson uses these garments as a visual resource with which to disguise his creatures. Or that one of the protagonists of ‘Strangers on a train’, by Hitchcock, practices this activity. Or that Vittorio De Sica used him in ‘The Garden of the Finzi Contini’, Oscar for best foreign language film in 1972, to talk about anti-Semitism and hatred. And there is a long list that goes from Jacques Tati (‘Mr. Hulot’s Holiday’) to Joachim Lafosse (‘Elève Libre’), passing through George Miller (‘The Witches of Eastwick’) and Noah Baumbach (‘A Brooklyn Story’ ‘).
Therefore, I invite you to embark on a journey to discover ten films in which tennis occupies a prominent place in the plot. I warn you about a pattern: all the spider-girls have participated in one of them.
