Michael Ffolkes’s Punch illustrations for This Sporting Life and other 1960s British classics

Michael Ffolkes, or just lower-case ‘ffolkes’, was the pseudonym adopted by artist Brian Davis (1925 to 1988). He selected it from the pages of Burke’s Peerage for its aristocratic mien, and that chosen name graced a large number of drawings (the artist’s preferred term over cartoons) for a wide variety of publications, from Private Eye to Playboy, the Daily Telegraph to Reader’s Digest, the New Yorker to Esquire, across several decades from the late-1940s onwards. His obituarist in The Times described his arrival “on the cartoon scene as part of that post-war glut of aspiring humorous artists” but added that ffolkes was “one of that rare breed whose drawings are aesthetically attractive with a claim to be works of art in themselves”.

He leant his considerable talents to many subjects, satirical, surreal and sometimes salacious, but one of his most intriguing assignments was to provide illustrations for film reviews in Punch magazine from 1961. Punch was a defining publication of the Victorian era, which continued, a little battered and beleaguered, into the mid-20th century, when it was keen to reinvent itself and stay relevant for the modern reader. Having the brightest and best on its staff roster was part of that, hence the decision to bring ffolkes into the magazine’s engagement with the world of cinema. This resulted in numerous deft caricatures of key films of the 1960s, including this striking image created to accompany the review of Lindsay Anderson’s British New Wave drama This Sporting Life (1963), preserved, alongside a selection of other ffolkes drawings, in the BFI National Archive.

The artist’s process was to attend the new film releases each week, “to set down impressions full-face from ‘life’ on the screen”, as his Daily Telegraph obituarist put it, and this led to the kind of “vigour and animated” caricatures we can see here. ffolkes’s skills of observation and penmanship combined to generate an effective encapsulation of the film’s core drama, centred on the antagonism between Richard Harris’s Rugby League rising star Frank Machin and his landlady and erstwhile lover Mrs Hammond, played with dark wounded intensity by Rachel Roberts.

The silhouettes of their pouting lips may echo each other, but everything else in the composition suggests a state of unrequited and adversarial love. Roberts in her widow’s weeds is turned away from the advances of her burly mud-splattered lodger, fixedly staring ahead while engaged in devoutly polishing her dead husband’s boots. The whole scenario takes place in a subtly sketched graveyard.

In a few deft strokes, ffolkes communicated something of the essence of novelist and screenwriter David Storey’s painful tale of an emotional and communicatory gulf between two unhappy people, so powerfully portrayed by Harris and Roberts. The drawing presents us with a whole film in miniature.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.