The release of the recent Ali bio-film, starring Will Smith as our iconic Muhammad, prompts the question: why so many boxing films? Along with the clinkers and stinkers that mindlessly Hollywoodise the fight game, at least a diamond dozen hold their own against the great films of all time. What magnet draws such a cluster of top directors: John Huston, Martin Scorcese, Robert Wise, King Vidor . . . or stars such as Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman . . . ? Or the invisible authors without whom there’d be no characters to play, no script to direct, the writers – Vincent Lawrence, Ernest Lehman, Paul Schrader, Rod Serling and this one. Boxing historian Mike Silver tells me almost twice as many boxing films have been made as all the other sports combined.
The answer may be found in novelist–boxing maven Joyce Carol Oates’s observation that the prizefight is so full of agon that you don’t play it as you play basketball or baseball or soccer. You do boxing. You endure boxing. You survive boxing. No other physical contest, not tennis or fencing, puts such awesome pressure on the individual. If Andy Roddick loses a gruelling five-set match in the Open, there’ll be another Grand Slam. If a top jockey is nosed out in the Derby, he’ll be back for the Preakness. But for the boxer there are one-stop nights of do or die. Go out a winner or loser for the rest of your life. The high-wire drama is made for the screen.
Calling to mind my favourites, I realised how many focus on the agonies, the dark side of the ring, rather than on the sweet smell of fistic success. The prizefighter is the most unprotected and the most exploited of all professional athletes. Out of that gritty reality came classics like The Set-Up, based on a unique book-length poem by Joseph Moncure March, a gifted alcoholic, with like-it-is direction from Robert Wise and a truth-oozing performance by Robert Ryan as the washed-up pug fighting that one last fight in a seedy arena called Dreamland in a seedy tank town called Paradise.
Another classic, Body and Soul, has John Garfield getting it right as a young Jewish boxer who fights his way to the top and then finds in his gang-ridden sport that that was the easy part. Everything about this work is Oscar-time: the performances, including ex-fighter Canada Lee as a grievously damaged contender, Robert Rossen’s direction, a strong screenplay from Abe Polonsky and superb photography by James Wong Howe. A little genius, who actually boxed himself at the Hollywood Legion, Jimmy used roller skates to move his camera around the ring in a way boxing had never been photographed before. My late friend Bob Parrish, a jewel of a man, was the film editor. My dark-film list includes Champion, Ring Lardner’s acidic portrait of a champ in the ring but a bum in his heart, with a searing performance by Kirk Douglas. Who can forget his punching out his crippled brother? Carl Foreman’s on-target screenplay is targetly directed by Mark Robson.
If ever there’s a Festival of Boxing Films, Mark Robson would be remembered for also directing The Harder They Fall, based on my novel, often described as the strongest attack on boxing corruption ever made. It’s Bogie’s last picture, and as a cynical press agent who helps the crooked manager (Rod Steiger) build a hapless giant to a title fight with a parade of fixed fights, his ambivalence and growing guilt are perfectly calibrated.
Like a sequel to Harder, Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight replaces my battered and bilked ‘Toro Molina’ with ‘Mountain Rivera’, who leaves the ring broke and brain damaged to face even grimmer humiliation as a pro wrestler. Anthony Quinn breaks your heart as the ruined fighter. I was so moved by the film that I had to forgive Rod for encroaching on my terrain.
Another winner about losers, Fat City, the dead-on Leonard Gardner novel with a Gardner screenplay, is faithfully brought to the screen by John Huston. I saw this film in Dublin when John invited Ali and his team to a screening while the self-anointed ‘Greatest’ was training to fight Blue Lewis there. It rang so true that Ali cried out, ‘That’s it! That’s for real!’ If you want to know what it is like to ride a bus into a strange town alone, get beat up for 50 bucks, piss blood and hitchhike home to a wife who may or may not be talking to you, Gardner’s and Huston’s Fat City is your meat.
Space limits fuller programme notes on my virtual Fight Film Festival: Martin Scorcese’s and Paul Schrader’s mean, nasty, but brilliant film-bio of old champ Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull; another film-bio, of knockabout champ Rocky Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, rates four stars for The Set-Up’s director, Robert Wise, and four more for its star, Paul Newman, in an unlikely role as the mobbed-up, likeable Rocky. My title for this one is ‘Somebody Down Here Likes Me Too’.
Then there’s Rocky, of course, the Sylvester Stallone operetta, wherein the underdog cult hero, Rocky Balboa, fights a winning-in-losing battle against the Ali-clone, ‘Apollo Creed’. The fight scenes are ridiculously over the top, and if you train as Rocky does, by punching sides of frozen beef, you’ll break your hands – but fistic truths don’t apply to this one. The sometimes silly Sylvester touches a nerve. He’s every nebbish’s dream of glory. No wonder it copped an Oscar and box office gold.
I liked The Boxer, the Irish entry connecting boxing with the political tensions of the IRA. Irish director Jim Sheridan and the British actor Daniel Day-Lewis deserve a bow for this one. A feminist first, unknown Karyn Kosama’s Girlfight, starring unknown Michelle Rodriquez, finds a new way to tell an old story: how the violence of personal anger finds a positive release in boxing discipline.
There’s some nice lighter stuff, too, of course, the ageless fantasy Here Comes Mr Jordan, the witty send-up of boxing’s ubiquitous rogues, The Great White Hype . . .
The beat goes on. Ali, the heralded $100 million Michael Mann production, was hardly an improvement on the old, low-budget The Greatest. Sandra Schulberg has just produced Undisputed, starring Wesley Snipes in a role described as Mike Tysonish. Up there with the best I’ve seen is the lean, mean Million Dollar Baby. Every good film, we writers know, starts with the writing, and here we have the taut, knowledgeable prose of F.X. Toole (Rope Burns) adapted for film by an Emmy-winning but first-time screenplay writer, Peter Haggis, and then placed in the versatile hands of Clint Eastwood, who shows a respect for Haggis’s and Toole’s words that every writer dreams about but never really expects to find. ‘I always believe in keeping the writer involved,’ Eastwood said. ‘Writing is always the foundation. It’s best when one writer writes it. My instinct is to trust the writer as the source of what I build on.’ Thanks to Eastwood’s creative instincts, we have a film we can now rank with the other tough ones, like The Set-Up and Fat City. Still in the works is Save Me, Joe Louis (working title) on the impact of Louis on civil rights, his see-saw relationship with Max Schmeling and his tragic downward spiral, from this corner and Spike Lee, with input from boxing historian and ‘character’ Bert Randolph Sugar.
Why are boxing movies so deeply embedded in our culture? Bill Heinz, author of the impeccable novel The Professional, says, ‘Boxing is the one totally honest art form. It’s the most fundamental form of competition and the most completely expressive of the arts.’ Or as irrepressible Mr Sugar sums it, ‘Filmmakers will always be attracted to the fight game . . . the silver screen and the sweet science is a match-up made in entertainment heaven.’
[2001]