Glory Alley

I've stated two different general thoughts on MGM over the years. One is that, as probably the most prestigious Hollywood studio, they brought a lot of gloss to movies that would have benefitied from having no gloss. The other is that, once the Freed Unit musicals really got going, it was the other stuff made that's really a lot more interesting. Both of those thought came to mind as I was watching Glory Alley.

The movie is ostensibly set in New Orleans, although it's the MGM backlot's version of New Orleans, which has all the connotations you can think of. Working for one of the newspapers, although about to retire, is columnist Gabe Jordan (John McIntire), who tells his editor that he's never told the full story of boxer Socks Barbararossa (Ralph Meeker). So, as you can guess, we're about to get a flashback that tells us... the rest of the story. Wait, this isn't Paul Harvey, either the radio man or the character actor.

Some time in the past, before the Korean War (the movie was released in June 1952), Socks is about to fight a title bout. But as he's in the ring, he looks up at the very bright ring lights, and realizes... he can't go ahead with the fight! So he just gets out of the ring right then and there and goes to his dressing room in the basement to hide from everyone. Not quite everyone; there's his manager Peppi (Gilbert Roland), trainer of sorts Shadow (Louis Armstrong), girlfriend Angela (Leslie Caron), and Angela's blind father The Judge (Kurt Kasznar). Now, since Leslie Caron had a French accent, she and her dad are portrayed as having fled France when the Nazis occupied it, with Dad hoping to get the family assets back and Angela training to become a nurse to get the money for Dad to have an operation. Except that that last bit is only what Dad thinks; Angela in fact dances in one of the dive nightclubs which brings in rather more money. Anyhow, why did Socks just up and leave the ring? The full reason isn't explained until the end of the movie, but Socks looks at himself in the mirror and sees some of the toll boxing has already taken from him.

Peppi buys a bar of his own while Socks lets himself go, drinking heavily to the point that he's going to have to accept a pity job at Peppi's place. Peppi holds the contract of one other fighter, "Newsboy", which he gives to Socks. Socks intends to raffle off the contract to get some money and to get out of the boxing game for good, but he and Newsboy both get drafted to serve over in Korea. Then, in a truly nutty twist, Socks is able to show some real bravery and win the Congressional Medal of Honor, except that's an award he doesn't really want although he can't really sell it legally to make money.

Socks returns from Korea, and eventually tells Angela the real reason why he left the ring just as he was about to fight for the title, and... everyone lives happily ever after? Yes, basically that's what happens, and the "official" reason Socks gives for running away from that previous title fight is one that makes no sense.

In fact, the movie as a whole doesn't make much sense, seeing as how it veers wildly from one genre to the next. The characterizations are also all wrong. Ralph Meeker is asked to play something much too gentlemanly for a boxer who came up from poverty. Leslie Caron was most likely cast here because it was just after An American in Paris made her big. With her French accent, the studio had to make her character French, necessitating that back story. The melodrama with Dad's operation is an odd thing to shoehorn in here. Even worse is how the movie suddenly switches to the Korean War, looking like a cheap B movie at the same time it's doing this.

So Glory Alley goes wrong in so many ways, and yet that's something that actually makes the movie interesting, to watch how it goes so badly wrong. Not good, mind you, but interesting nevertheless.

Maybe boxing biopics should all be named after the boxer being profiled

TCM runs some more recent films during 31 Days of Oscar, which usually gives me the chance to record that more recent stuff that I haven't seen because I don't go to the local sixtyplex that often. Another such movie that I recorded during the 2025 edition of 31 Days of Oscar was The Fighter.

The movie opens up in 1993 in Lowell, MA (the movie was filmed on location there), one of those old mill towns that is in seemingly terminal decline. A camera crew is following Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who claims to be training for a return to the ring and who is also training his half-brother, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). The reason Dicky's career is in decline is that he turned to crack cocaine. That addiction has also led to a divorce and Dicky not having custody of his child. It's Micky's time to shine, and in addition to being trained by his brother his career is being managed by his mother Alice (Melissa Leo). Mom has decided ideas about the importance of family and how to manage her sons' careers, and woe betide anybody who gets in the way.

Micky, after losing a hastily-arranged fight where he's asked to go up against somebody multiple weight classes above him, isn't certain what he wants to do with his career, so he goes to one of the local bars where he meets waitress Charlene (Amy Adams) and starts a relationship that going to be difficult because she sees what a bad influence his brother and mother are having on him. Meanwhile, Micky has come to the notice of some more legitimate, or at least experienced, boxing types, who are willing to pay Micky to have him train year round. This would necessitate his going to Las Vegas, and no longer having family as his trainer or manager, so you can imagine how that's going to go over with Mom.

Dicky offers to match whatever the other promoters are willing to pay Mickey. But because he has no good way to do so, he turns to illegal means, which get him in all sorts of trouble with the law, even more so when he resists arrest and fights back. And because Dicky has a long arrest record already, he gets sent straight to prison for a substantial term. Micky gets his hand broken in Dicky's arrest. After a period of soul-searching, and while Dicky is still in prison, Micky decides he's going to start training again when his hand heals well enough to fight.

Micky does indeed start training, and with the help of Charlene, gets new management who insist that Mom and brother are not involved. Brother is easy enough since he's in prison, although Mom is going to be a bit more of a problem. Micky's career gets good enough to go up against a serious jump in quality. But of course, Dicky is eventually released from prison having served his sentence, and expects that he's going to be able to return to working with the brother he loves. The Fighter being based on a true story, the movie leads up to Micky's getting a title fight for one of the lesser governing bodies' titles against a British competitor in the UK.

A lot of reviewers made the point about The Fighter, and I think I'd have to agree, that the plot of the movie is one that doesn't really break much new ground, as a lot of the tropes in terms of things you have to deal with to make it to the top show up here, in part because they show up in a lot of people's lives. Or, at least, the lives of those people whose life stories are interesting enough to make a movie about. Oppenheimer had all that difficulty with the government after the war; Glenn Seaborg discovered plutonium and a bunch of heavier elements, but he didn't have an exciting personal life that would make a good movie. The point here is that for a boxing movie like The Fighter to rise above the fray it needs good acting performances. And The Fighter has that from all of its supporting actors especially, even if Mark Wahlberg isn't the greatest actor out there. The location shooting is a big plus as well. Boxing fans also point out that the fights were deliberately filmed using the same technique that HBO (which aired the originals) used and consider this a big plus. I'm not a boxing fan but the fight scenes are definitely different cinematically.

As I implied above, watch The Fighter for the stars' performances, and you'll get a very fine movie in the process.

World in My Corner

TCM did a tribute to actress Barbara Rush after she died last year, which included a movie I'd never heard of, World in My Corner. It sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it to do a post on it.

Barbara Rush is the female lead, but the real star here is Audie Murphy. He plays Tommy Shea, a would-be boxer who isn't very successful. As the movie opens, he's fighting in a bout where boxing "owner" Harry Cram (Howard St. John) is in attendance, but loses. However, he seems to impress at least one person in the crowd, Dave Bernstein (John McIntire), who works out on Long Island for wealthy ball-bearing manufacturer Mallinson (Jeff Morrow). Dave gives Tommy a business card with Mallinson's address and tells Tommy to come see him if he's interested in a better class of training.

Tommy isn't really interested, at least not until he loses his blue-collar job over in Jersey City, which is definitely the wrong side of the river. So on a lark, he heads over to Long Island, only to find Dave isn't currently. So he talks with the guy who is training at the makeshift gym, and is rather dismissive, not realizing that he's talking to Mr. Mallinson himself. Mallinson is so impressed that he offers Tommy a job on the estate while Dave can train him up to be a real professional boxer.

And then Tommy sees Mallinson's daughter Dorothy (that's Barbara Rush). She's so beautiful that Tommy immediately falls for her, except that there's no way he can possibly be in her league because of the class difference. And besides, Dad certainly wouldn't appreciate it. But then, this is a Hollywood movie, so you know things aren't going to go as expected, or at least you expect things aren't going to go the way real life would expect. In this case, that means that Dorothy wants to become a writer, but she's constantly thwarted by her father who wants to run her life and, one can guess, marry her off to someone suitably of her social class. So it goes without saying that Dorothy is going to fall in love with him.

Tommy finally makes it to the top of a card, and Cram shows up again, together with Tommy's old manager Ray (Tommy Rall). And, in the audience unbeknownst to Tommy, is Dorothy: she took the ticket Tommy gave for her father. Tommy wins the fight, and Ray informs Tommy and Dave that Cram wants to horn in on the racket and "arrange" better fights for Tommy, in exchange for his share of the purse. Tommy isn't so sure because of Cram's bad reputation and suspected Mob ties.

The dilemma for Tommy is that the money made fighting for Cram could be good enough to be able to marry Dorothy. But it would be in exchange for selling his soul. Matters come to a head when Cram wants Tommy to throw a match against someone else he's promoting.

World in My Corner is another of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground. Murphy does the best he can, although he was always an actor who was generally competent without the sort of performance that could earn an actor awards nominations. Barbara Rush is in the same boat, and the rest of the cast is the sort of character actors who aren't bad, but not normally given to bigger roles, especially not in anything with the pretense of being an A movie.

What's Up, Kid Natural; or, For Kid Natural's Sake

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I only recently got around to watching is one that brought back together the leads from one of the brighter comedies of the earlier 1970s. The movie in question is The Main Event. It's got another airing on TCM, tomorrow (May 18) at 7:45 AM.

Barbra Streisand stars as Hillary Kramer. Although the movie was released in 1979, Kramer seems more in keeping with with yuppie business types you'd see in 1980s movies. Hillary is the owner of a perfume company and has a great nose for what makes a good perfume to the point that she's become quite successful and lives a high-flying life full-up on business appointments as well as things like an aerobics class in what seems like a studio right next to her office.

One day, Hillary gets a call from her lawyer, David (Paul Sand), who also happens to be her ex-husband. He says it's important, although he keeps getting pushed off by Hillary since she's got so much business to transact. But his news is indeed important. It seems as though, unbeknownst to Hillary, her accountant has been embezzling money and has now absconded with that money to South America to evade extradition. Hillary, despite being successful at making perfume, doesn't seem so good at accountancy, and doesn't understand until David puts together piles of assets and liabilities, with the liability pile outweighing the assets.

Hillary is going to be forced to sell the company, and for some odd reason considering her great nose, she's also forced into signing a non-compete clause that not only means the end of her employment with the company she owned, but also keeps her out of the perfume business for two years. The only "asset" she has, if you will, involves a contract owning the rights to a boxer. But that contract was more for the purpose of being a tax write-off. Said boxer hasn't fought in years.

Hillary goes to the gym to find the boxer in question, Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal). Eddie has seen the money from Hillary as a way to make a modest living, and has even been able to use it to open a driving school. But his part of the contract requires fighting at least twice a year, and he hasn't done that since getting disqualified from the Pan Am Games for getting in a scuffle outside the ring with opponent Hector Mantilla. Hillary needs the money that Kid Natural would bring in from fighting, so she calls in the contract. Either fight, or she'll be able to take over the driving school.

Not that Kid Natural is the greatest of fighters; worse is that with nothing else to do, and needing to keep an eye on her contract, Hillary decides to take a rather more active role in managing Kid. It's the sort of relationship that's going to have the two at each other's throats, at least until it suddenly doesn't, which you know is going to happen in this sort of a movie since it's not a drama. Eventually, promoter Gough (James Gregory) is able to complete negotiations for the big fight everybody's been waiting for: the fight between Kid Natural and Mantilla that never happened at the Pan Am Games.

As you can see from the title of this post, I compared The Main Event to For Pete's Sake, one of Streisand's comedies from a few years earlier. That's not the one that co-starred Ryan O'Neal; instead, I found myself thinking of some genre similarities between the two movies. The Main Event really gave me vibes of the sort of thing that Hollywood could have churned out in the years before World War II as a fun little B movie, either from the rom-com angle or the boxing angle.

Fast forward almost 40 years however, and The Main Event comes up as something that doesn't quite sparkle the way those old B movies do. A large part of it is that it's material that works better as a B movie and not designed for someone like Streisand who was by this time a huge star. More specifically regarding Streisand, a little bit of her goes a long way, and there's a lot of Streisand here. Not that The Main Event is a bad movie; it's more that it would have worked better conceived as something smaller.

MGM makes a boxing movie

The next movie that I had on my DVR that's coming up soon on TCM is Tennessee Champ. That next airing is tomorrow, March 6, at 2:45 PM, so as always I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

The nominal lead here, at least in terms of the actor getting the highest billing), is not the "Tennessee Champ" character, but a man named Willy Wurble (Keenan Wynn). As the movie opens up, he's in Vidalia, TN, playing fairly high-stakes poker. But just as he's about to win a big hand, violence breaks out, and Willy is forced to beat a hasty retreat in a rowboat across the river. He comes across another person affected by the violence, a man swimming in the river trying to get away named Daniel Norson (Dewey Martin). Daniel got in a fight with a man names Sixty Jubel and knocked the guy out, with Sixty hitting his head and dying in the fall, as Daniel tells Willy in the boat after Willy saves Daniel.

Willy's real job is as a boxing promoter, of a washed-up boxer named Happy (Earl Holliman). Happy is supposed to have a fight soon, but there's an issue with Happy's opponent. Willy gets an idea when Daniel runs into Willy and Happy in town the next day, which is to stage a fight between Happy and Daniel, even though Daniel knows nothing about Marquess of Queensbury-style boxing by the rules. Not even that Daniel knows much about fighting in general, to be honest. He's the son of a preacher man, and filled with the spirit of the God that pervades revival Christianity, which raises the question of how Daniel even got into that fight with Sixty in the first place.

But with the prospect of money coming in, Willy calls up his wife Sarah (Shelley Winters) and gets her to go on the road with him. This especially after Daniel knocks out Happy despite the staging supposed to be Happy letting the inexperienced Daniel hang around for several rounds before beating him. Sarah, meanwhile, realizes that Willy is back to his old ways of being dishonest with his boxers by not giving them a fair percentage of the take. Daniel, having won, gets christened the "Tennessee Champ", and vows to win enough money to be able to build a church of his own, since his real aim in life is to bring the spirit of the Lord that he feels to everybody else.

Not everyone is happy with this. Certainly not Willy, who sees his opportunity at a big payday about to go by the wayside. And not some of the other managers, who expect the fights to be more or less fixed. Daniel finds out that the fight game is fixed, and leaves, since he can't be dishonest. But there's still the question of getting the money to build a church. That, and Daniel's perceived need to atone for what happened to Sixty....

I mentioned MGM in the title of my post because Tennessee Champ is another of those movies where MGM could bring a lot of gloss to a subject, even when bringing that sort of gloss is exactly what this sort of movie doesn't need. Indeed, the whole religion angle turns the material into something that feels rather hokey. Plus, once again there's the question hanging over the story of how everything is going to be resolved in a way that satisfies the Production Code while also having a happy ending.

I do have to say, however, that Tennessee Champ isn't as bad as some of my comments above might lead you to believe. It's more something that could have been a lot better than it turns out being.

Winner Take All

I recently recorded a couple of early James Cagney movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was Winner Take All. I've got enough movies "recorded" to my cloud DVR that it took a while to get around to watching it, and as always, the reviews are getting scheduled a good deal in advance now that I'm more able to watch a whole bunch of movies.

Cagney plays Jimmy Kane, a New York boxer who is loved by the fans. Or a former boxer, as the announcer at the current fight tells the crowd that Kane is going west for a cure, presumably for his heart but just as much because he's been spending too much time with women and illicit booze. So Jimmy goes to a ranch out in New Mexico.

Now, there wouldn't be much of a movie if that were all that happens, so of course Jimmy meets someone of note at the ranch. That someone is Peggy (Marian Nixon), who had worked in Texas Guinan's joint, which is where she briefly met Jimmy. Peggy is in New Mexico with her son Dickie (Dickie Moore), who is really the one who needs to be out there for his health. As you can guess, Jimmy and Peggy become good friends. But Peggy is having trouble paying the bills, leading Jimmy to take up boxing across the border in Mexico to raise the money to pay Peggy's bills.

Jimmy is able to return to New York, and meets Joan (Virginia Bruce), a woman who is of a much higher social class than Peggy could ever hope to be. Jimmy is too darn stupid to realize that Peggy is the right one for him, and decides that he's going to impress Joan by taking elocution and etiquette lessons, as well as getting plastic surgery to get his face fixed, not that this is what Joan wants. She's just slumming and now that Jimmy has a normal nose again, she doesn't like it.

And yet Jimmy is still too stupid to realize that Joan is trouble and should be avoided. He starts fighting again, but does so in a way to try to protect his nose, which isn't what the fans want at all. Jimmy's trainer Pop (Guy Kibbee) brings Peggy back from New Mexico, but even this isn't enough to get Jimmy to see the error of his ways. How is Jimmy going to learn his lesson so that we can all get to the requisite happy ending? For that you're just going to have to watch.

James Cagney had already made The Public Enemy before making Winner Take All, so he was already a star and it's a bit of a surprise that Warner Bros. would put him in a movie with as slight a story as this. I'd assume that the audiences were looking to see Cagney in this sort of role. It's not terrible, but there's a reason Winner Take All is decidedly lesser Cagney. You could do worse, and it's only 67 minutes so it's not like it's a hugh time investment, but you could do a lot better too.

The Manly Art in Six Acts

One of those movies that I had never heard of until it finally showed up on TCM a few months back is a boxing movie called The All-American Boy. It sounded like it could be interesting, so I decided to give it a chance. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it before.

Jon Voight plays the titular "All-American boy", a young man named Vic Bealer who at the start of the movie is walking down a road in the middle of nowhere. It turns out that he's heading back to his home town for a funeral, and that he left town because he wanted to make it in a bigger city, possibly as a boxer because that's the one thing he's really got ability in.

After the funeral, he goes to the local gym, but nobody at the boxing gym in town remembers him for whatever reason. But Arty Bale (Ned Glass) sees Vic and gives him a chance, even giving him a place to sleep at his house. There's talk that perhaps Vic could train for the Olympics, but this doesn't fit for me since IOC and USOC head Avery Brundage would have had a conniption fit over anything at all resembling non-amateurism and everything here looks more like professional boxing than the amateur game.

Along the way, Vic gets two girlfriends, although he's unable to hold on to either, largely because he's one of those erly 1970s characters who simply can't figure out a way to fit in with the broader society. The first is Janelle, and after Vic knocks her up she heads off to the big city to try to make a name for herself. Later, Vic starts a relaionship with young Drenna (Anne Archer, who was impossibly young at the time), although that one doesn't succeed either.

After struggling a lot and burning a lot of bridges, Vic finally gets another chance, this time with the whole town preparing for one of those big small-town sendoffs reminiscent of an earlier era in moviemaking. Will Vic be able to make it?

As I said, there's a reason I'd never heard of this movie. Well, maybe a bunch of reasons. Part of the problem is that it's more of a character study than a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot, and Jon Voight isn't given enough of a character to work with here. The movie was also recognized as a mess by the studio. Supposedly it was filmed in the wake of Voight's star-making turn in Midnight Cowboy, but shelved for two years because the director couldn't make anything coherent out of it. Then, with the success of Deliverance, the studio gave the movie another chance, but it was a box-office and critical failure.

Like Jon Voight's character, The All-American Boy doesn't quite fit in to any place or time, with an oddly dated soundtrack but no real references to the exact time period. Jon Voight may be lovely to look at if that's your thing, but that does not a movie make.

Jimmy Dolan's life

It's been over ten years since I recommended the pretty darn good John Garfield movie They Made Me a Criminal. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow (May 2) at 11:15 AM. But I mention that more because the movie is a remake of another movie that I recently watched, The Life of Jimmy Dolan.

Obviously, having seen the remake, I pretty much knew the story, although there are some minor changes to the details since this one was made before the code really started cracking down. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars as Jimmy Dolan, a boxer who at the start of the movie is winning the light heavyweight championship of the world. Dolan has built a carefully crafted image of an erudite (at least for a boxer) man who loves his mother and lives as good and clean a life as you could expect from a boxer. Of course, none of that's true, as Jimmy goes up to see his floozie of a girlfriend and drink even though it's the Prohibition era.

Somehow, in addition to Jimmy's manager Doc (Lyle Talbot) and Doc's girlfriend Budgie showing up, a reporter shows up as well. That's the big problem, because while Doc will keep Jimmy's hypocrisy a secret, the reporter won't do so. In the heated discussion, Jimmy punches the reporter, who falls backward and hits his head, killing him immediately. Poor Jimmy, up for manslaughter if not worse.

Oh, and there's goin gto be worse. Jimmy is drunk and passes out, so Doc takes Jimmy's watch and girlfriend, and drives off. The police chase, and Doc crashes, killing him and the girlfriend, and burning them beyond recognition. The only issue is that watch, which doesn't get burned beyond recognition. This enables the authorities to make an identification, not having proper dental records, and declare that Jimmy died in the crash. And there's no good way he can come out and say that he's not really dead, because then he'll get arrested for killing the reporter.

Having been screwed over by his manager and his attorney, Jimmy becomes a tramp, heading west to parts unknown where his face won't be recognized and in theory he could get honest work, at least if there weren't a depression going on to go along with Prohibition. Eventually, having run out of money, Jimmy collapses at a small farm somewhere out west.

That farm is run by two women, Peggy (Loretta Young) and her aunt (Aline MacMahon). Peggy's aunt is a widow, having been married to a doctor who was doing charity work by taking custody of orphans who had some sort of paralytic disease (I don't think the disease is mentioned although I'd guess polio), fostering them and trying to show there are ways to nurse these children back to health. The doctor's death, however, means there's not much money left for the two women, and having another mouth to feed -- and and adult male at that -- is going to be an issue.

But at least Jimmy is able to do some of the work. And he might just be able to help the women out with their financial difficulties. A barnstorming boxer blows into town, running the scheme that dumb local schlubs put up entry fees and then get a substantial sum of money for each round they can complete against the heavyweight. Most of the amateurs aren't going to get through even one round, but of course Jimmy is a ringer, and surprisingly one that the barnstormer's manager doesn't recognize.

Still, Jimmy knows that if he goes into the ring there are bound to be people who do recognize him, especially Phlaxer (Guy Kibbee), a detective from back in New York who has been on the case because he knows there was something fishy about that car crash and is convinced it wasn't Jimmy who died in the crash.

The Life of Jimmy Dolan isn't a bad little early 1930s programmer, but I have to admit that I don't think it's quite as good as They Made Me a Criminal. I woud argue that this comes down to the casting for the lead role. As I mentioned back in 2012, John Garfield was exceedingly well cast for a role that requires some moral darkness. Fairbanks, on the other hand, was better suited to light romantic comedies, and comes across as a bit of a phony in the scenes where he's supposed to show his anger. I think the Dead End Kids in the latter film also work better than the too cute for their own good ragamuffins we have here.

Even so, The Life of Jimmy Dolan is definitely worth a watch, and you can see why Warner Bros. would want to trot this property out again for Garfield.

Gentleman Jim

Errol Flynn was Star of the Month last year if memory serves; I recorded several of his movies to watch later. Among them was Gentleman Jim, which is back on TCM tomorrow (Feb. 9) at 6:00 AM.

The Jim in question is James J. Corbett, a name you might recognize as one of the early heavyweight boxing champions of the world. In many ways he was the first modern heavyweight champion, as this was the time the Marquess of Queensbury was codifying new rules to make the sport less unsafe. Also, Corbett was one of the first boxers to train the way modern boxers do. As you can probably surmise, Flynn is playing Corbett, since it's tough to imagine Flynn not being in a starring role at this stage of his career.

The movie opens up in San Francisco circa 1887, which was before Corbett's boxing career. In fact, with no standardized boxing rules and bare-knuckles boxing being the thing, the sport was illegal in a lot of places in much the same way that it took a long time for certain jurisdictions to legalized mixed martial arts. San Francisco was one of the places, at least according to the movie, an Corbett, who works as a bank teller when that was considered a moderately good job for people who want to move up in the world, goes to an illegal fight together with his best friend Walter Lowrie (Jack Carson). The fight gets raided by the police and a bunch of the spectators arrested; this even includes a judge. Corbett's quick thinking when everybody's in custody together gets them off as the judge plans to institute amateur boxing at the Olympic Club.

The judge is also on the board of the bank, so Corbett thinks he's going to get fired, but no. Indeed, the judge and another Olympic Club member help Corbett get a membership too. Buck Ware's daughter Virginia (Alexis Smith) comes to the bank to get some silver currency for Dad's poker game, which Corbett takes over to the bank. There, he sees the gym and gives an impromptu training session to some of the would-be boxers. It's also the start of a love Corbett has for Ware that takes a long time to be requited, but since Flynn and Smith are the two leads, you can expect them to wind up together at the end of a movie like this.

Corbett's boxing skill takes him places, as does his drinking. He and Walter wake up one morning in Salt Lake City seemingly not remembering how they got there. Corbett meets boxing manager Delaney (William Frawley), who gets Jim a fight in order for Jim to be able to pay his way back to San Francisco. Corbett wins, and this among other fights turns him from a banker to a professional boxer.

Corbett rises through the ranks, and when the more-or-less recognized champion of the world at the time, John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond) shows up in America, you know that Corbett is going to fight Sullivan. (Of course, this happened in real life.) But negotiations between the camps were difficult then as now, perhaps even more so then since the challenger had to come up with financial banking. It's not as if they could expect a windfall from pay-per view as that simply didn't exist in the early 1890s.

I have no idea how much of Gentleman Jim is based on the truth. Supposedly, it's based on a serialized autobiagrphy Corbett wrote at the height of his fame in the 1890s, although who knows how much of that is true, either. (I haven't read the autobiography.) It's definitely got all of the hallmarks of a studio-era biopic, with as much if not more emphasis on a good dramatic story than on the unvarnished truth.

But Gentleman Jim also has all the character actors Warner Bros. could bring to a movie like this, and that only serves to add to the entertainment value. It also calls for the sort of bravado and charisma that Errol Flynn was quite adept at displaying; I can't imagine anybody else in Hollywood at the time taking on the role.

So despite any issues with accuracy, Gentleman Jim is a fine example of early-1940s Hollywood entertainment.

Requiem for a Heavyweight

I saw that the Anthony Quinn movie The Shoes of the Fisherman was on TCM recently. I have that movie on my DVR already, and was thinking of watching it to do a review here but decided to hold off because I had just the day before I noticed it watched Requiem for a Heavyweight. So now you get the blog post on that Anthony Quinn movie.

Quinn plays the heavyweight, a man named Mountain Rivera. Mountain is a boxer at the end of his career (Quinn was 46 at the time he made the movie), getting the crap beat out of him by Cassius Clay. In fact, he's beat up so bad that he's got a retina dangerously close to being detached. The doctor won't allow him to fight any more, and if he can't get a license to fight in New York, he won't be able to fight anywhere.

This is terrifying for Mountain, since he doesn't know anything other than boxing, having done it for 17 years and gotten to as high as #5 in the rankings. Mountain's one best friend is his trainer, Army (Mickey Rooney). But Mountain thinks that his real best friend is his manager, Maish Rennick (Jackie Gleason). How wrong he is.

We quickly learn that Maish is running away from a couple of professional gamblers whom he had told that there was no way Mountain could survive more than four rounds with Cassius Clay. They bet on the fight lasting four rounds or fewer, while Mountain, not having been told any of this, fought until the bitter end and lasted into the seventh round. The gamblers would like their money back, thank you very much. And Maish isn't much of a friend to Mountain if he's willing to do this to Mountain.

Army tries to get Mountain some work post-boxing, and takes Mountain to the state Department of Labor, where he gets Grace Miller (Julie Harris) as a case worker. She doesn't really know how to help somebody like Mountain, but she feels an animal attraction toward him -- at least, that's the only explanation I could think of, since there's no other logical reason for her to go above and beyond the call of duty to try to help Mountain. She's got a couple of friends who run a summer camp, and might be able to use Mountain as one of the phys ed instructors.

Maish wouldn't be having any of that if he finds out. He knows a wrestling promoter who could get Mountain a truly degrading job doing fixed wrestling matches where Mountain dresses up as an Indian while his opponent dresses up as a cowboy and they alternate which one wins on any given night. Mountain doesn't want to do this, but Maish is his best friend, or so he thinks.

Requiem for a Heavyweight is one of those grown-up dramas that, despite being about a boxer, really isn't about the action. It's much more an intelligent movie that actually requires some thinking and engagement on the part of the viewer, and is dependent on the performances of the actors as much as it is on the plot. Thankfully, we get a series of fine performances here from all four of the main players.

The production design also captures the thoroughly inglamorous world behind professional boxing as, after fighting for 17 years, Mountain has almost nothing to show for it. He's living in one of those fading apartment hotels, going to cheap bars for his drinks and meals. No pretty women hangers-on for Mountain.

If you want an intelligent movie, then Requiem for a Heavyweight is one that I can highly recommend.

When We Were Kings

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the documentary When We Were Kings. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:00 AM on SHOxBET, as well as a couple more times during the week, so I watched it to do a review on here.

Boxer Muhammad Ali was one of the most famous sporting figures of the second half of the 20th century. Born Cassius Clay, he won an Olympic gold medal, beat Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship, went to prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam after losing his title, and came back ultimately to win the title. One of those title fights was a 1974 bout in Kinshasa, Zaïre (formerly the Belgian Congo and today known as the D.R. Congo or Congo, Kinshasa to distinguish it from the other Congo), and that bout is the basis for the documentary.

The fight itself isn't quite the focus; instead it's more about two other things. One is the preparation for the fight, which takes up probably two-thirds of the film; the other is the cultural milieu in which the fight was announced. Ali had become a cultural icon as the charismatic but non-militant Black Muslim who could pretty much charm everybody, and used those gifts to display a social conscience. So going back to the spiritual homeland was a big deal.

Indeed, the preparations surrounding the fight were not just to have a fight, but to have a concert celebrating black music with some of the biggest names in both America (James Brown and the Spinners) and Africa (Miriam Makeba). Ultimately, the concert and the fight were both held, but six weeks apart because Foreman suffered a cut over his eye in training.

Frankly, the whole part of the movie looking at the preparations for the fight were to me the most interesting, being a fascinating look at the logistical difficulties in pulling off an event like this. Promoter Don King had gotten contracts from both Ali and Foreman to fight each other if King could get $10 million in backing so that each boxer could get $5 million. The biggest reason the fight was held in Kinshasa is that Zaïre's then-dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, put up the money as part of a PR blitz to get good publicity for his country. Ali and Foreman, from the archival footage we see, concern themselves more with boxing than with Zaïrean politics, although Ali always looked at the broader picture of the advancement of black people. Contrast that with today, where there's increasing pressure to do sport only with right-thinking political polities and blacklist the rest.

Interspersed among the archival clips of the boxers' preparation are interviews with three figures: writers George Plimpton and Norman Mailer, and movie director Spike Lee. The writers talk more about the actual fight itself while Lee is there to give insights into the broader cultural context. Also intersperesed are clips from the musicians who performed at the concert. Finally, we get to the fight itself, although I'd tend to mention this part less mostly because I'm not the biggest fan of boxing. For those who are fans, there's a good bit of strategic commentary from Plimpton and Mailer. I don't know how accurate it is, not being a fan of the sport.

When We Were Kings won the Oscar for Best Documentary and received overwhelmingly glowing reviews, but I couldn't help but see a few weaknesses. Surprisingly, the music was one. Not that it's bad; in fact, a documentary about trying to put together this concert would be interesting depending on how much archival footage of the principals there is. But in this movie, it feels like it's padding the main story; the movie is already short enough as it is running about 80 minutes before the credits roll.

There's also the lack of present-day interviews. Ali had already been diagnosed with his Parkinsons-like disease, I think, so I don't believe he would have been able to do interviews. But Don King and Foreman certainly were. Indeed, as either Mailer or Plimpton noted, Foreman completely remade his image from what he had in 1974 and became one of the most affable figures in boxing. His perspective on the fight would have been fascinating; instead, the movie is often presented as though Foreman is an afterthought and it should be called When Ali Was King.

Still, there's a whole lot that's interesting in When We Were Kings, and it's more than worth a watch.

Boxing Finds Andy Hardy

TCM did a programming tribute to Mickey Rooney on the centenary of his birth last September. One of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before which they ran is Killer McCoy. So I DVRed it and watched it to do a post on here.

Rooney plays Tommy McCoy, a young man who makes money for his family selling newspapers, because it's not as if his parents are bringing in any money. Mom (Gloria Holden) is a housewife, while father Brian (James Dunn) is a former vaudeville star waiting for a comeback that's never going to come. Dad deals with this by drinking and wasting whatever money the family does get. But the local church hosts a boxing night with entertainment, that entertainment being Brian and Tommy doing a dance number.

Not long before, Tommy had gotten in a scrap with another newspaper seller who he thought was honing in on his territory, Tommy ignoring licensing laws. That other guy shows up at the fights, and Tommy challenges him to a fight, which he wins. That gets the notice of lightweight prizefighter Johnny Martin (Mickey Knox), who barnstorms the country and invites Tommy and Brian to be part of the performance.

Eventually Mom dies, with Dad missing out because he's too busy getting drunk at all the bars on the road. Johnny also loses a fight, and announces his retirement to start up a ranch with his wife, leaving Tommy to try to start a career in boxing. Tommy has some success in the ring, but Dad is taking all the purses and gambling on the horses with numbers runner Jim Caighn (Brian Donlevy), even eventually selling Tommy's contract to Jim.

Tommy has a big fight lined up, but the opponent has to back out injured, so who gets brought in to replace the guy by Johnny Martin, who's gone broke and needs the money despite being badly out of shape. Tommy wins the fight, but it comes at the cost of killing Johnny with a punch, giving Tommy the nickname "Killer McCoy".

Tommy tries to quit the ring, but needs the money and so goes back to Caighn, who still has Tommy's contract. Caighn offers Tommy a secluded training sight at the house of a Mr. Carrson, and while training there, who should show up but Carrson's daughter Sheila (Ann Blyth)? She's being educated at a private school and didn't know anything about Tommy's presence, so she's miffed, but once things get ironed out, the two fall quickly in love. Very much complicating matters is the fact that Sheila shows Tommy a picture of her father, who is... Jim Caighn, not that you couldn't have figured that one out.

Meanwhile, back in the ring, Tommy has a killer right hand, but Caighn has come up with the idea that he should avoid using it to get rich bettors to think that Tommy is just a palooka, with Caighn making a killing off of them. Caighn also finds out his daughter is seeing Tommy, and is none too pleased with it because he doesn't want his daughter to know the truth about him. (It turns out she already does, but has never let on to Dad that she does.) One of the bettors finds out about Caighn's deception, and kidnaps Brian and Sheila to force Tommy to throw the fight.

The story in Killer McCoy is not particularly special; in fact the movie is a remake of The Crowd Roars which I have not yet seen. Despite the silly ending, Killer McCoy is worth a watch thanks to the fine performances of Mickey Rooney and Brian Donlevy. As for Dunn, people will probably come to diametrically opposed views on him. He's such a jerk that some people are probably going to hate him, while other people will probably have some sympathy for the fact that his life has been empty for years and has nothing to live for other than his son's success.

The boxing scenes are also well-photographed, although as someone who's not a fan of boxing I don't know just how inaccurate they are. The dance number at the beginning, to "Suwanee River", was directed by a very young Stanley Donen, and a young Shelley Winters has a bit part.

Killer McCoy received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

You like me! You really like me!

Another movie that I finally got around to watching after having it on my DVR for a couple of months is the movie that made Paul Newman a star, Somebody Up There Likes Me

After an absolutely terrible opening song by Perry Como, we're introduced to Rocco Barbella (Paul Newman). He's a street criminal in the slums of New York just not long before World War II, comming petty robberies with a gang of friends including Romolo (Sal Mineo), and generally causing all sorts of heartache for his mom (Eileen Heckart). His Dad (Harold J. Stone) doesn't seem to care much for him.

Eventually, Rocco's crimes get him put into the reformatory, where he punches his way out of any problem he has. Then after being released, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II. Rocco, despite his criminal record, is drafted, but the military life just isn't for him, so he punches a commanding officer and goes AWOL!

He winds up at a gym, where in order to make a quick $10, decides to become a sparring partner. He's good at it, and it gets him fights under the tutelage of manager/trainer Irving Cohen (Everett Sloane) where he can make more. But, unfortunately, the military eventually finds him, and since he deserted, he gets a year in Fort Leavenworth. There, he really learns how to fight, and when he gets out, he becomes a true professional boxer, taking the name Rocky Graziano so nobody will learn of his past.

He also meets Norma (Pier Angeli), who would become his wife, although she doesn't exactly like being married to a boxer, especially because the scars and bandages frighten their daughter. He rises up the middleweight ranks, and eventually gets his first title fight, which he loses, getting knocked out.

Rocky is going to get a rematch, with a warm-up fight in between. But on the eve of that warm-up bout, his past comes back to haunt him, forcing him to fake an injury and back out, costing him his New York boxing license and moving the title fight rematch to Chicago. Now, since Rocky Graziano is a real person, we know how the story is going to end, but there are still some twists and turns along the way.

There's some quite good stuff in Somebody Up There Likes Me, but also some not-so-good stuff. Paul Newman, of course, is one of the good things, delivering a fine performance that deservedly made him a star. The cinematography of the second title fight is also excellent, reminiscent of Raging Bull two dozen years later and cementing in my mind that the latter movie doesn't quite deserve its reputation as one of the greatest movies of all time.

As for the bad, I already mentioned the Perry Como song. There's also the formulaic script and writing that requires people to be too shrill at times. There's also a climactic emotional scene between father and son that really reminded me of the one in another early Newman film, The Rack, both scenes were overwrought.

Somebody Up There Likes Me did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. For some reason, the TCM Shop has it on backorder, although the last time I checked the DVD was available at Amazon. I believe .you can also watch it on Prime Video if you do the streaming thing.

Cain and Mabel

Another of the movies that I recently watched was Cain and Mabel, which is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The first thing I noticed was that the opening credits only mentioned the two lead actors, Marion Davies and Clark Gable, and not any of the other actors, which made for a fun game trying to recognize the various cast members until their names are listed in the closing credits for anybody who didn't bother to look them up. Davies plays Mabel and shows up first.

Mabel O'Dare is a waitress at a busy breakfast café in New York, where she meets Reilly (an unmistakeable Roscoe Karns). Reilly is a newspaperman, except that he's gotten fired from pretty much every paper in the city, and with a depression still on, he's out of a job and doesn't really have the money to be in a café like this. When Mabel is asked to return an order of eggs from a different customer, she gives them to Reilly, something which ultimately gets her fired. Reilly decides he's going to become a PR man and get Mabel a job on Broadway.

Jake Sherman (Walter Catlett) is producing a new play on Broadway, and when the lead actress quits, Reilly badgers Sherman into letting Mabel have an audition, even though she really can't sing or dance particularly well. Somehow, it works, and she gets the lead, although she's going to have to practice a lot with the male lead Ronny (David Carlyle). They get a hotel suite for this, which is where Clark Gable comes in.

He plays Larry Cain, a heavyweight boxer who is in New York to prepare for his world championship fight. He's got a cushy hotel suite, except that it happens to be exactly one floor under Mabel's, and her constant dancing is keeping him up until all hours of the night. So he confronts Mabel, and the two immediately hate each other.

But you know it's not going to end there. Mabel's show goes on, but it's not particularly successful thanks to her not having any star power. Cain eventually becomes champion, but he has no charisma such that his fights are sparsely attended and he doesn't make much money. Reilly, being a PR man, has the brilliant idea of putting these two together in a romantic relationship (or at least the semblance of one) for the papers, as this will give both of them a positive boost in popularity. Of course, he doesn't realize that the two have already met (although they know each other only on sight) and hate each other. So when they finally realize who they're being set up with, they're not happy.

Once again, however, you know it's not going to end there. The two are going to find out that the other isn't really what they seem -- it wasn't Mabel's idea to become a Broadway actress and Cain would really rather open up a service station. And when they find that out, they're going to fall in love with each other. But that threatens to end their public careers, which everybody in their entourages can't have, so they try to put a spanner into the works.

Cain and Mabel is a pleasant enough romantic comedy, but for the most part one where you know exactly where it's going. Everybody does a good enough job with their roles; among the recognizable faces I haven't mentioned before are Allen Jenkins as one of Cain's trainers, and Ruth Donnelly as Mabel's aunt. The one big problem was the presence of a couple of musical numbers that really brought the movie to a screeching halt.

Still, Marion Davies always deserves more positive attention, and apart from the musical numbers Cain and Mabel is a definitely worthwhile watch.

Raging Bull

During TCM's 100th anniversary salute to United Artists back in September, one of the movies the ran was Raging Bull. Not having done a post on it here before, I decided to DVR it so that I could do that post.

Robert De Niro stars as Jake La Motta, who at the beginning of the movie is a forty-something former world middleweight boxing champion who is now rather older and fatter, and doing a stage show in New York. Flash back to the beginning of La Motta's career....

Jake is toiling away in the lower rungs of boxing, not particularly getting anywhere. But Jake's brother Joey (Joe Pesci in the role that made him a star) has an acquaintance in the Mafia, Salvy (Frank Vincent), and tries to get Salvy to arrange some bigger fights for Jake. This happen, and eventually Jake is able to fight for the world championship (of course, World War II was going on at the time so how much of a world championship it was is debatable), as well as the first two in a series of matches with Sugar Ray Robinson, widely considered one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters of all time.

Along the way, Jake meets the lovely Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) and marries her, although it's a troubled marriage. Jake is both insanely jealous, and has a tendency to violence outside the ring as well as inside. At one point, things get so bad that Jake accuses Vickie of having had sex wth Joey (who has a wife and kids of his own).

Jake continues to box, and in the late 1940s gets another shot at the world championship, before ultimately ending his career with another bad loss against Robinson. His career now over, he doesn't quite know what to do with himself, opening a nightclub down in Miami and trading off his fame. But his impulsive behavior is going to catch up with him in multiple ways....

Raging Bull is one of those movies that winds up on all the lists of "greatest movies of all time", but that I find myself wondering whether it quite belongs there. This is not to say that I disliked the movie, or that it's at all bad. In fact, all of the performances are quite good. It's more that the movie is praised so highly that it's easy to go into it with expectations that are too high.

The other thing to note about Raging Bull is the black-and-white cinematography (with the exception of La Motta's home movies, which are in color). It's excellent and gives the movie a distinctive look that I don't think it would have had if director Martin Scorsese had made the movie in color. There's a grittiness instead of the antiseptic vibrancy of too many color movies about the more recent past. The cinematography also extends to the fight sequences, which are quite stylish, if to my eye unrealistic.

Watch Raging Bull for yourself, and you may well have the common opinion that I didn't that it's one of the greatest movies of all time.

70 years before the Japanese horror movie

Yesterday I decided to watch Alfred Hitchcock's The Ring off the cheap Mill Creek box set I got some time back.

Carl Brisson plays "One-Round" Jack Sander, a boxer who gets his nickname because he works at the carnival taking on all comers, one round at a time. Basically, you pay your entry fee, and if you can last a full round with him, you get a cash prize. (This is the same thing that was a major plot point in the John Garfield film They Made Me a Criminal a dozen years later.) Jack is in love with The Girl, Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), who handles the tickets for the attraction.

One day, a man comes to the attraction, buys a ticket, and beats the crap out of Jack! It turns out that the man is Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), a rising professional boxer who could have a shot at the title. So of course Bob was going to have a good shot of beating Jack. It looks like the end of Jack's career, except that Bob's promoter (Forrester Harvey) offers Jack a job as Bob's sparring partner. Meanwhile, Bob is trying to put the moves on Jack's girl, and Jack is none too pleased about it.

Eventually, Jack starts rising up the ladder of success in the boxing world, going from the bottom of the card to the top, although it's a strain for Mabel, who is increasingly torn between Jack and Bob. You can probably guess that the plot is ultimately going to require Jack to go up against Bob in the ring in the big fight, with Jack fighting for Mabel's love (although we find out during the big fight that she has made her decision in favor of... well, did you think I was going to say who?).

The Ring is not the sort of movie that one thinks of when one thinks of Alfred Hitchcock, although the whole "master of suspense" thing really didn't kick into high gear until the mid 1930s with The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps. The Ring isn't bad, although I personally prefer The Lodger when it comes to Hitchcock's silent movies.. But The Ring is certainly more than worth a watch, and not just because it's one of Alfred Hitchcock's early movies. It would still stand favorably on its own if you didn't know who the director was.

They Made Me a Criminal

I've mentioned the film They Made Me a Criminal, on several occasions, but I don't think I've ever done a full-length post on the film. It's airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM as part of a day of films starring John Garfield, so now is finally a good time for that full-length post.

Garfield plays Johnny, a boxer living in New York City who is fairly successful, but also living a bit of a lie. He talks about his devotion to his mother, but he doesn't really have a mother and likes to party with the ladies, especially girlfriend Ann Sheridan. A reporter discovers this and when he threatens to write a scathing exposé on Johnny, Johnny's manager hits the reporter over the head with a liquor bottle: Johnny by this time is too drunk to know what's going on. Johnny's manager isn't such a good guy; not only having committed murder, he robs Johnny by taking Johnny's watch. But since this movie was made under the Production Code, we know he's going to get it, which he and Sheridan do when the car the manager is driving crashes, burning both of them to a crisp. Because the manager has Johnny's watch, the police naturally assume Johnny's dead.

All of this is obviously a problem for Johnny. Even worse for him is that, when he goes to his lawyer for some legal advice, the lawyer swindles Johnny out of his life savings. Johnny is reduced to becoming a hobo, trying to make his way across the country doing menial labor. Eventually he winds up on a fruit farm run by tough Granny (May Robson), working it with the young lady Peggy (Gloria Dickson) and several ragamuffins, one of whom is Peggy's kid brother (these young men are played by the Dead End Kids). Granny and Peggy are kind of suspicious of Johnny, but the relationship between all of them seems to work reasonably well. There are things Johnny can do that the women can't, and he needs a place to stay. Besudes, he's kind of falling for Peggy.

Ah, but you know this can't last. New York Police Detective Phelan (Claude Rains) is on the case, certain that it wasn't Johnny who died in the car crash. And he is determined to get to the bottom of what really happened. Eventually, their paths are going to cross: one of the Dead End Kids gets the bright idea that the farm could bring in more money if they had a working service station, but they need the captial for it. Johnny could get the capital by taking part in a boxing promotion, but that would bring him publicity which he doesn't want. You know too that Det. Phelan is going to find out about any such boxing match....

They Made Me a Criminal is one of John Garfield's earliest movies, and you can see already how good he is at playing men who have had tough lives, or who are generally tough, without getting to the level of nastiness that Lee Marvin would portray in the 1950s. This role fits him like a hand in a glove, as clichéd as that may sound. Claude Rains, on the other hand, has a role that in theory doesn't fit him: there's no way somebody so elegantly British should be a New York police detective. Yet Rains takes what he's given and gives a very entertaining performance. (Then again, he'd already had experience with being a thoroughly-miscast American in They Won't Forget.) May Robson is as tough-as-nails but endearing as she wan all her old lady roles. The Dead End Kids also add value, as they're not overused. It was still some time before they'd be given a movie series of their own, where their low-brow humor and dumb scripts could doom a B movie. They get one particularly good scene when they and Johnny decide to go for an illicit swim in a water tank, only for the farmer who owns the tank to turn on the tap, causing the water slowly to drain from the tank and threatening to strand them.

They Made Me a Criminal has gotten a DVD release, and not an expensive release from the Warner Archive collection.

Oscar death match: Rocky vs. Network

TCM kicks off its annual 31 Days of Oscar this morning, with the theme for this year being an "around the world" theme of TCM grouping the movies more or less by where they were set. The prime time lineup for tonight has quite a few movies set in Philadelphia, starting at 8:00 PM with Rocky, which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1976. I know a lot of people who think it's almost a travesty that Rocky won the Oscar that year and not Network. After all Network has biting social commentary, and Rocky is supposedly just a feel-good movie. To be honest, though, I'm of two minds as to what should have won Best Picture that year.

For me, the thing is that I find both pictures are worthy of the award. Network certainly does have biting social commentary, and is prescient in the things it was saying about the state of television. I find, however, that a lot of people who talk about these points seem to want to use them to bash one particular broadcaster or another, depending on their particular political point of view. (I think you can guess which channel comes up most often in this regard.) When it comes to politics, or in my case ideology, I'd argue that all of television news i pretty lousy, what with its moral panic of the day and the emotional appeals of "won't somebody think of the children". As for the actual on-screen product in Network, not only is there the biting satire, there are some pretty damn good performances by much of the cast. And it has its iconic moment, with Peter Finch as Howard Beale telling everybody to shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!"

Rocky, as I said earlier, often gets dismisses for being a "feel-good" movie, which implies that either it doesn't have any political views, or worse, it has the wrong political views. I think, however, that this does the movie a gross disservice. Rocky certainly has commentary to make, but it does so in a rather more subtle way than many pictures that are trying to make their points in a serious way. (Let's leave satire aside here; my previous comment is to compare Rocky to dreadfully blunt films like Philadelphia.) When Rich Eisen was Guest Programmer back in June 2010, he selected Rocky and commented that it wasn't so much a movie about boxing as it was a love story set against the world of boxing. It's also a social commentary about the state of the lower classes which just happens to be set against the world of boxing. Look at the conditions Rocky is living in, and it's not all wine and roses about the Americn dream. Rocky also has a decidedly ambiguous ending. Also, like Network, there is an iconic image, that of Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of Philadelphia's City Hall, set to the music of Bill Conti, which has also stood the test of time more than most Hollywood music. Play "Gonna Fly Now" and everybody gets the reference.

Is Rocky better than Network? I'm not certain which one is better, but both are transcendent movies.

Fat City

Twenty-some years ago when I was a teenager, the local newspaper's TV listings said that the PBS station was going to be airing the movie Fat City. The title sounded interesting, so I stayed up for the 11:00 PM or 11:30 starting time, only to be assaulted by the sight of a paunchy Stacy Keach in just his undies getting out of bed and getting ready for the day. I didn't need to be assaulted by this, and I would have had to stay up close to 1:00 AM to see the end of the movie, so I said the heck with it and went to bed, which is probably for the best, as I don't think this is really a movie that the younger set will understand. But, I remembered the title, and when it finally showed up on TCM a few years back, I sat down and watched it. Fat City is once again back on the TCM schedule, airing September 5 at 6:00 AM ET.

The aforementioned Stacy Keach plays Billy Tully, an aging boxer whose career is on the decline, as if it were ever even on the ascendancy. Billy is living in a dingy hole in the wall in Stockton, California, hoping that he might one day get a chance at another fight, and training half-heartedly while living a hand-to-mouth existence. On the first morning we see him, Billy goes to a local gym where he meets young Ernie (Jeff Bridges), a greenhorn who likes boxing and is too naïve to have been ground down by the world of boxing yet. Billy thinks Ernie has some ability and takes him to the gym where Billy would practice if he could afford it. The rest of the movie deals with each of the two men trying to manage their personal lives while getting their boxing careers going.

It's not much of a plot, but then, Fat City is much more of a character study. In as much as it focuses on these people, Fat City succeeds quite well. These are characters who start off the movie not having much going for them, and end the movie having just about as much, if that much. Back in the days of the studio system, Hollywood had a tendency to glamorize boxing with characters like Robert Montgomery's in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. When things weren't this glamorous, the seamier side of boxing was generally overlooked, as in They Made Me a Criminal or The Champ. Not so with Fat City. Boxers who can't make it anywhere near the top are brutally chewed up and spit out, left to eke out threadbare existences. This image is greatly helped by the fact that by 1972, when Fat City was released, it was much more common to use location shooting, making the sort of crappy apartments characters like these would live in easier to depict: just film the real thing. The living spaces here are reminiscent of movies like The Panic in Needle Park, or the beginning of Five Easy Pieces.

Even if you're not interested in boxing (and I'm not very interested in it), Fat City is still an excellent movie well worth watching.

You didn't really think it was clean, did you?

I don't think I've ever done a full-length blog post on Humphrey Bogart's last movie, The Harder They Fall. It's airing tomorrow afternoon at 1:30 PM ET, so now is a good time to post on it.

Bogart plays Eddie Willis, a sportswriter whose career has definitely hit the skids. Things might be beginning to look up for him, though, with the possibility of a good paying job. That job is to help boxing promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) make a name for Benko's latest find, the Argentine boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane). Moreno's plus is that at 6'8" and 270 lbs. or so, it's theoretically hard to bring him down. In reality, however, Toro can't punch, and has a glass jaw. It should be easy for any competent boxer to knock him out. Benko knows this of course, and Willis figures this out pretty quickly. But there's still money to be made, and Benko intends to do this dishonestly, by setting up a series of patsies for Toro to beat, before Toro can get the big-money bout. All Willis has to do is go along with the ruse.

Now, I'm not much of a fan of boxing, not even amateur boxing. So in general, I should dislike movies about boxing, especially those that romanticize it, and like a movie such as The Harder They Fall that exposes the seamy underside of the sport. That isn't quite reality, in that there are quite a few boxing-themed movies that I find quite enjoyable. As for The Harder They Fall, what I personally find good about the movie isn't about the message it says about boxing, but how it's really more a parable about journalistic integrity (not that there's much of that either these days) that just happens to be set against the backdrop of the boxing world. One could argue that Bogart's character in One Fatal Hour faces much the same dilemma as his Eddie Willis character.

The Harder They Fall seems not to be in print on DVD in North America.