ASK Tony Earnshaw, film critic, festival programmer and author of Made In Yorkshire, to name his favourite Yorkshire film and unhesitatingly he picks This Sporting Life.

“It sounds a bit clichéd to say this, but it’s one of the few films I’ve ever seen where you can witness the birth of a star,” he says.

That star was Richard Harris, cast in the role of Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson’s volcanic northern drama from the Sixties’ fag end of the British “New Wave” of cinema.

Filmed in Wakefield, Leeds and Halifax and at Bolton Abbey in the West Riding between March and June 1962 for release in January 1963, David Storey’s screen adaptation of his novel depicts Machin lodging with Mrs. Hammond, a widow. His competitive nature and powerful physique lead him to join the local rugby league team, but with sporting success comes a new sense of insecurity that turns Frank harsher and cruder than he already is. His inability to articulate his sensitive side, especially to Rachel Roberts’s Mrs Hammond, only serves to alienate people further.

Anderson’s unflinching, black-and-white portrait at the lives of the working class in bleak northern England has been released by Network in a digitally restored format with several special features, such as the original theatrical trailer, an image gallery and a commemorative booklet by film historian David Rolinson.

Earnshaw is delighted at this transfer to DVD. “Harris was a god to me, and though he may have been making rubbish films by the end of his career, whatever a movie stars needs, whether its charisma, luminosity or star quality, he had it, he really did,” he says.

“I never met him but I miss him. I miss his power and you can’t get many better performances than Harris gave as Frank. Frank is an empty vessel in the film, an angry, violent, animal-like, bitter, loveless machine, and he’s looking for an antidote to all the problems in his life.

“The film looks tremendous, it’s beautifully written and hits you like you’ve been punched solar plexus. Harris had that watch-spring menace.

“Someone once said to me, ‘why are you attracted to Richard Harris’s kind of personality?’, and I said it’s because I’m not like that, but I’d like to be…”