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.