Motion pictures

What have Alan Sillitoe, novelist and gritty chronicler of working-class life, who died at the weekend, and Michael Mann, big-screen film-maker and gritty chronicler of Americana on the edge, got in common? Each have been responsible for a great movie about running. Sillitoe’s short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ (1959) was made into a pioneering piece of British new-wave cinema three years later by Tony Richardson, and Michael Mann’s made-for-TV Jericho Mile is still a fantastic piece of sporting drama.