Pre-Code Parade: THE PERSONALITY KID (1934)

Pat O'Brien often played a mentor figure for James Cagney in Warner Bros. pictures, but when Cagney wasn't in the picture O'Brien was often cast as a poor man's Cagney, playing similar roles with less charisma, less intensity and far less physical grace. Roles like The Personality Kid seem like Cagney cast-offs. O'Brien plays an up-and-coming boxer -- the real-life fighter King Levinsky was often called "the personality kid" in 1934 news stories -- whose savvy spouse (Glenda Farrell) acts as his business manager. O'Brien is the sort of boxer that used to be called a "dancing master" before Muhammad Ali made fancy footwork respectable. He's a showboater who taunts his opponents, knowing they can't lay a glove on him. In the first fight we see he makes the opponent look amateurish. This bum misses so wildly that he falls down almost every time he throws a punch. It looks like a Toughman competition before O'Brien finishes his man. Then director Alan Crosland does his most creative work in the film. O'Brien boxes much like Sugar Ray Leonard, throwing furious flurries of punches that impress quantitatively if not qualitatively, and Crosland films these flurries with rapid-fire editing of a speed and rhythm rarely seen in 1930s Hollywood, cutting on every punch until you're nearly as dizzy as the bum going down for the count. Watch more than one of these sequences and you may believe that O'Brien is as good as he thinks he is.

With Farrell's guidance -- and who would doubt her acumen? -- O'Brien rises up the ranks and becomes an object of high-society curiosity. Like Cagney in 1932's Winner Take All, O'Brien is taken up by a socialite (Claire Dodd) who sees him as an intriguing primitive type. She has him pose for paintings in the traditional strongman/caveman costume, and if he can't keep up with the sophisticated conversation he basks in the attention. Little does he realize that he's living a lie. He learns the truth after his latest victory when he hears his defeated opponent boast of his acting skills. Our hero refuses to believe that the other man took a dive but sees the light when the loser decks him in the dressing room. He hunts down the promoters and confronts them with his knowledge in front of a reporter. They angrily inform him that his manager/wife was in on the con, and at home she confirms it, telling hubby that it had to be this way because he doesn't really have a punch and would never get a title shot otherwise. Now that he's blabbed, of course, he definitely won't get one. Blaming wifey for that, he walks out on her, not knowing that she's carrying his child.

O'Brien is soon reduced to playing the strongman role for a patent-medicine show, but when he finally learns about Farrell's advanced predicament he tries to get back in the fight game. The most he can do is go to work for his old promoters and take a dive himself for the latest contender in order to provide for his little family. In the ring, his sense of honor and the promise of the winner's purse inspire him to double-cross the promoters. Aided by his old trainer (Clarence Muse, in a nod to the era's segregation, has to make his way all the way down from the nosebleed seats to reach ringside), O'Brien proves to the world that he has a punch after all, then proves to himself, confronting the promoters and his goons afterward, that he can take a punch as well. It's all good in the end, as the reporter who exposed him previously now lobbies for his formal reinstatement. Farrell looks forward to raising children on a little farm, but O'Brien now has new cause to believe his own hype again.

In a Cagneyesque role O'Brien only proves that he's no Cagney, but he has decent chemistry with Farrell and plays the sap well. The dependable quality of the Warners stock company and Crosland's lively direction of the fight scenes lift the picture a little above its utterly predictable plot and make it an entertaining little programmer of the sort Warners made in bunches in Pre-Code times.

Now for the trailer, boasting some original footage, from TCM.com

Pre-Code Parade: THE LIFE OF JIMMY DOLAN (1933)

In 2013 the Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o got into trouble for talking about his tragic romance with a girlfriend who didn't exist. Jimmy Dolan could sympathize. Jimmy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a champion boxer who wins hearts by making shout-outs to his ma during post-fight interviews. It's part of his image as a clean-cut, clean-living American youth. Post-fight and post-interview, Jimmy's a different man. He gets drunk. And when he gets drunk, he lets slip that his mom's been dead for years. Then he realizes that he's let that slip in the presence of a reporter. He and his manager (Lyle Talbot) desperately try to persuade the reporter not to blab in print, but there's no way the man is letting go of that scoop. Jimmy becomes more desperate and slugs him. But whoops! The reporter dashes his brains out on a fireplace and Jimmy's a killer. Manager and girlfriend hustle a dead-drunk Jimmy away, but finally decide to ditch him and let him face his fate alone. Some friend Talbot is: he takes Jimmy's money and his fancy watch. That way, when Talbot and the girl are killed in a car crash, the police identify Talbot's charred corpse as Dolan by the watch. Well, most of them: Phalaxer, a disgraced detective (Guy Kibbee) -- a man he'd nabbed was proven innocent, but only after he fried -- visited Jimmy after that last fight and remembers him wearing his watch on the opposite arm from the corpse's. No one's listening to him, however, and Jimmy, when he tries to collect his purse from the fight, learns from a shocked promoter that he's legally dead. The promoter advises him to disappear, become a bum, keep his head down, avoid people. He'll only need a fraction of his purse for that.

So goes the first act of Archie Mayo's film, and it's a decent shock to see Talbot exit so early. It's practically a new film from there as Jimmy ends up out west as a handyman at the little farm for crippled orphans run by Auntie Moore (Aline MacMahon) and her niece Peggy (Loretta Young). They're raising some precocious orphans there, including Mickey Rooney, "Farina" Hopkins from Our Gang, and Dawn "Anne Shirley" O'Dea. But they're also very poor, and you can see where this is leading. Just as Jimmy Cagney would in Winner Take All this same year, Jimmy Dolan (under his alias of Jack Daugherty) will enter the ring again to raise money for the farm. He has to fight the local champ, "King Cobra" (a menacing Sammy Stein), who's taking on two other men, including a young and scared John Wayne, the same night. Jimmy will earn $500 for every round he lasts against the bigger man, and he thinks his style is a good match for him. But one of the orphans happened to take a picture of him on the farm, and that picture won a contest and was published in a magazine, and back in New York Detective Phalaxer saw the picture. Burning for vindication -- he fantasizes himself lording it over his humbled boss (an unbilled Edward Arnold) -- Phalaxer embarks on a Javert-like quest to prove his hunch, showing up at the fight arena to distract Jimmy from the task at hand. King Cobra has destroyed the Duke and the other prelim palooka, neither of whom did much to soften up the brute for Jimmy. Nor can Jimmy really open up on him from fear that Phalaxer will recognize his style -- and the detective is absolutely convinced that "Daugherty" is his man anyway. This is probably as close to a literal "no win" situation as you can get....

Jimmy Dolan is interesting to watch for all the familiar faces who go unnamed --  not only Arnold but Rooney, Shirley and Clarence Muse all go unbilled. Wayne is tenth-billed; he was let out of Warners' B-western ghetto occasionally, most notably in Baby Face, and makes more of an impression now, probably, for his atypical nervous turn than he did during the first run.  On top, Fairbanks was near the end of his Warners contract, a period practically unknown for decades when he was best known for later swashbuckling roles. The revival of Pre-Code movies demands a reappraisal of Fairbanks, who at Warners was far from the genetically-predetermined type he would become. I'm often impressed by his range in these pictures, or else by the continuing novelty of seeing him play bums, boxers, gangsters, etc. He has one of those Noo Yawker voices that gave Warner Bros. films their era-defining snap and puts it to good use here. There's not much he can do with the climactic melodrama, but he's quite good as the dissolute dope of the first act, more convincing as a pug than the name "Douglas Fairbanks Jr." might lead you to expect. The more I see his Warners films, the more I'm convinced that Junior is a worthy member of that greatest of studio stock companies. Dolan isn't really anyone's finest hour -- Loretta Young has another largely thankless ingenue role -- but everyone's trying and for a Warners fan it's not at all unpleasant, even though longer than average, to sit through.

Here's your trailer, courtesy of TCM.com as usual.

Pre-Code Parade: WINNER TAKE ALL (1932)

James Cagney was an unprecedented movie star, a distinctive produce of talkies and Pre-Code cinema, a sexy thug. Think of the tough-guy stars of silent movies, or Cagney's tough-guy peers in the early Thirties: hulking slabs of beef like Wallace Beery or George Bancroft. A certain burliness was expected of film's top brawlers. By comparison, Cagney was a runt, but he made up with ferocity (making "Tarzan look like a sissy") what he lacked in mass. In fact, he overcompensated. Cagney's stardom is impossible today, insofar as violence against women, exemplified by that grapefruit smashing into Mae Clarke's face forever, was a key part of his persona. It was something Depression audiences wanted to see, and I don't think they had something against women. Sexy brutes like Cagney and Clark Gable were the sort of charismatically ruthless survivors -- interestingly, "caveman" was a popular label for them -- that audiences wanted to be or wanted to have in hard times. They were suited for those new hard times in a way many slightly older matinee idols -- John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro, Richard Barthelmess -- weren't. Roy Del Ruth's Cagney vehicle emphasizes the contrast between its star and the older type by showing Cagney the scrapper succumbing to the temptation to become a "powder puff" -- a pejorative associated with Rudolph Valentino, the dead exemplar of the old stardom.

Introducing Winner Take All on a night dedicated to child actors, TCM host Robert Osborne strained to emphasize Dickie Moore's role in the picture as proof of the influence on Warner Bros. of The Champ, M-G-M's Oscar-winning hit about a boxer and a kid. But Winner is plainly a riff on Cagney's persona, and Moore's role is relatively insignificant and unsentimental. Cagney plays Jim Kane, a contender taking a sabbatical from the ring, implicitly to dry out. We first see him as the beneficiary of a benefit night at the arena, the fight fans throwing money into the ring for him as he makes a halting speech of thanks. He's sent west with a friendly warning from his manager (Guy Kibbee) and his second (Clarence Muse) to lay off the high life and keep out of trouble. In his exile he falls for a young single mother (Marian Nixon) who'd once waitressed at Texas Guinan's legendary nightclub, and takes a tough fight to raise money for her when her insurance company stiffs her. Once word gets out that he's fighting again, Kibbee calls him back to the big city, where his handsome brutality captivates a socialite (Virginia Bruce) who invites him to a high class party and otherwise seduces him. Bruce shows off some seriously low-cut lingerie to get the job done, and our hero soon forgets the mother and son out west.

Not realizing that the socialite is turned on by his freakshow value as a broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared brute, Jim decides that he should make himself more attractive to her and has plastic surgery. To preserve his new good looks, he adopts a dancing defensive style in the ring, winning fights easily but displeasing fans who want a good old-fashioned scrap. His new habits earn him the "powder puff" tag, and Kibbee warns him that he's risking his career. In one tremendous moment, Kibbee shows who's boss by laying out the intractable Cagney with one punch. Still, Jim's determined to do things his way, even when he learns that he's begun to bore the socialite, who walks out on him in mid-fight one night. Desperate to impose his will, he insists that she sit in the front row for his next bout, but learns just as the bell rings that she's taking passage on an ocean liner instead. Learning that he has only 20 minutes to reach the ship and stop her from leaving, he abandons his new style in a hurry to knock his man out as soon as possible. Ruining his new face in the process, he gets the job done and rushes to the docks in his boxing trunks, only to find the socialite trysting with another man. Now knowing the score, he kayoes the interloper, gives the socialite a kick in the rear, and heads home to make his apologies to the little mother from out west, who'd followed him back to New York only to be blown off shortly before. The film ends with adorable little Moore bopping our hero on his bandaged nose.

Winner Take All puts Cagney into some fish-out-of-water situations with predictable results. Asked for his opinion of the Soviet Five-Year Plan, Cagney tells a society gathering that he doesn't trust those installment schemes and always pays in full up front. When a butler laughs at this, Cagney lays him out. Apart from Public Enemy, Cagney was mainly a comic figure in the Pre-Code era, a transgressor who gets away with what we wish we could -- usually smacking the sort of people we wish we could. Again, it says something about the era that his victims so often include women (he gives his niteclub date in the flashback a face full of seltzer water), but it doesn't look like many women objected back then. His violence was essential to his manhood, and Winner underscores this, stressing that it's not merely the physical grace that Cagney was praised for later but his willingness to mix, to put his chin out, get as good as he gives, that defines him. Cagney himself apparently disagreed, and the publicity for Winner acknowledges that it led to conflict between star and studio. Money may have been the provocation -- Cagney didn't like that he was making less money than Dick Powell -- but the actor was also unhappy with the limited range of roles that Winner seemed to enforce. A year later, he was singing and dancing for Busby Berkeley in Footlight Parade, but Winner showcases his dancing skills in the squared circle. The ballyhoo had you believe that Cagney was so convincing as a boxer that you'd assume he'd fought professionally. But Winner's fight scenes are not much less pantomimic or risible than those in City Lights. They don't exactly remind me of period fight films. But they express the idea that Jim Kane is first a nonstop scrapper, then an untouchable dancing master. In any event, the film is a comedy, so we probably should seek pugilistic realism elsewhere. What we have in Winner is a relatively minor Cagney comedy that nevertheless ought to be essential viewing for his fans for the way it struggles to figure out who exactly Jimmy Cagney the movie star persona was: lover, lout, or both.

We can't wrap this up without the original trailer, provided as usual by TCM.com

Depression Fighters: THE PRIZEFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1933) and CARNERA THE WALKING MOUNTAIN (2008)

When I first saw Wilson Yip's martial arts biopic Ip Man (2008), the film's backdrop of economic deprivation during the 1930s immediately reminded me of Cinderella Man (2005), Ron Howard's Depression-set biopic of boxer James J. Braddock. If three films make a genre, then Renzo Martinelli's 2008 biopic consolidates a global "Depression fighter" genre and simultaneously achieves the genre's reductio ad absurdam. If, after watching Ip Man, I had concluded, "Any country can do this!" I would have balked at Italy's turn. That country's combat-sport hero of the era was Primo Carnera, a figure for whom the "print the legend" approach probably isn't an option. The legend of Primo Carnera, after all, is that he was a fake, a bum, a talentless lummox whose path to the heavyweight championship was paved with fixed fights and whose reign ended the moment he met a real fighter in a real fight. The legend was locked in place by the 1956 movie The Harder They Fall, which didn't fool Carnera by making its dumb-ox patsy a South American, yet casting Carnera's real-life nemesis Max Baer as the fighter who destroys Humphrey Bogart's hapless protege. Carnera reportedly sued the producers for defamation, but another half-century would pass before anyone attempted a cinematic rehabilitation of the fighter's reputation. In Martinelli's account, Carnera (Andrea Iaia)is a guileless giant who can and would fight for real and takes offense when his initial manager (F. Murray Abraham) pays his first foes to take dives in order to protect his novice prospect. That Carnera could do real damage is indisputable; at least one opponent died after fighting him. While some historians suspect that the fix was in when Carnera beat Jack Sharkey for the crown in 1933, The Walking Mountain (a mundane rendering of his more alliteratively lively nickname, "the Ambling Alp") portrays the fight as an honest triumph for its hero.

Walking Mountain stresses how Carnera inspired pride in Italians and Italian-Americans (and spared his children the poverty he suffered in childhood; an epilogue notes that two junior Carneras grew up to be doctors) but avoids engagement with the political implications of that fame. Martinelli doctors newsreel footage to show his Carnera alongside Mussolini and has the actor give the Fascist salute in the ring, but these are just matters of period detail for the director -- one wonders how the dreaded Uwe Boll handled the political angle in his 2010 Max Schmeling biopic, for comparison's sake. Carnera suffers, I think, from ignoring politics simply because there has to be a political context in the global boxing ring when Carnera, representing Fascist Italy, Schmeling, representing first Weimar and then Nazi Germany, and Max Baer, a Jewish-American who wore the Star of David on his trunks, all wore the championship belt. I'm not saying poor naive Primo has to answer for Mussolini's crimes, but I do feel that the political drama of the period would add to the drama of the fights, as it does when filmmakers contemplate the rivalry of Schmeling and Joe Louis. And Walking Mountain can use all the dramatic help it can get. Martinelli doesn't do a very good job with the fight scenes. His staging of the Carnera-Sharkey fight is less dramatic than the actual newsreel footage. In filming the climactic Carnera-Baer bout he falls between two stools, unable to decide, it seems, whether Rocky or Raging Bull should be his model. The beating Carnera takes at Baer's hands ought to be a moment of supreme comeuppance, like Jake LaMotta's last fight with Sugar Ray Robinson in the Scorsese film, but Martinelli is incapable of investing the action with anything like Raging Bull's thematic force, much less Scorsese's expressionistic exaggerations. In part that's because Martinelli wants to emphasize Carnera's courage and perseverance under extreme adversity as the champ struggles to fight with an injured ankle while Baer gets away with all manner of dirty tactics. Nor, despite some scenes when Carnera is mean to his wife, do we get the feeling that Primo has this beating coming, especially since we understand him to be innocent of all the chicanery that advanced him early. Overall, Martinelli seems more interested in making a period piece by artificially aging or decolorizing his footage than in making his story more than a collection of fight-film cliches. But he doesn't even get the period right all the time. One anachronistic scene shows the filming of a TV preview of the Carnera-Sharkey fight of 1933 -- a year when TV was still almost purely experimental.

One angle Martinelli might have worked was whether fame went to Carnera's head. It would have been interesting, given the importance of Carnera's rivalry with Baer, had Martinelli done something with the two fighters filming W. S. Van Dyke's The Prizefighter and the Lady in Hollywood before their title fight. In the M-G-M production, Carnera plays himself as the heavyweight champion, while Baer plays a toned-down (and anglicized?) version of himself as "Steve Morgan." Reportedly, Baer was so impressed with himself as an actor that he wore Steve Morgan's robe to the ring for his real fight with Carnera, months after they filmed a kind of pre-enactment of the battle for the movie. Baer was already considered the top contender after having KO'd Schmeling, and Prizefighter has to be considered a unique instance of using a fictional film to promote a real-life fight. In fact, the film plays out like a Bizarro-world version of the historic bout, with Baer's Morgan taking a massive beating at Carnera's hands as a kind of Scorsesean comeuppance for the fictional character's arrogance and his betrayals of a long-suffering wife played by Myrna Loy. But before it ends the fight becomes more Rocky than Raging Bull -- as is usual with fight films -- as Steve Morgan mounts a major comeback once his spurned, sometimes-sozzled manager (Walter Huston, here billed below Carnera and ex-champ Jack Dempsey) and his still-faithful wife give him their tactical and moral support. It's an original-style Rocky finish -- the fight is a draw and Carnera retains the title, but is treated as a victory for Morgan. It was really the only finish the film could have. I can't see either fighter agreeing to appear if the script had one of them losing.

The Max Baer biopic is an event waiting to happen. His reign as champion has been bracketed by two other pictures, Walking Mountain and Cinderella Man, both of which portray Baer as a boorish, brutish villain -- though the Carnera picture has the bad guy gain respect its hero in the approved Apollo Creed manner. You'd think someone would want to make a picture about a proud Jew who beat the crap out of a "Nazi" and a "Fascist," yet the consensus of filmmakers who've actually used Baer as a character is that he was a creep, a jerk, an asshole who could kill people with his gloved hands. For all I know, the Carnera-Baer fight was the only heavyweight title match pitting two fighters credited -- if that's the right word -- with killing opponents against each other. The filmed record shows that Baer was a dirty fighter and a supreme trash-talker and taunter. He does not seem to have been a nice man. Yet he was considered handsome for a fighter, especially by contrast with Carnera, and M-G-M thought they could make him a sex symbol. According to one contemporary report, Clark Gable was originally slated to star in Prizefighter until someone from the studio saw the Baer-Schmeling fight. The promotion for the picture heavily emphasized Baer's sex appeal, as did the fighter himself. He pitied the German women who were unable to see him on film after the Nazis banned the picture.

As an actor, Baer makes an honest try and isn't awful, but he lacks essential movie-star charisma. His face and voice simply aren't expressive enough, though his arrogant personality sometimes shines through. He isn't helped by a corny rise-fall-and-rise story and the hackneyed heart-interest elements. There's a weak subplot featuring Otto Kruger as history's least assertive gangster, the Loy character's erstwhile boyfriend and employer who supposedly has a hate on for Steve Morgan yet can't motivate himself to do anything about it. His idea of ultimate vengeance is to invest in the promotion of the Carnera-Morgan fight so that Loy will see her hubby humiliated and abandon him. But he's still an old softy, unwilling to take what he thinks is his, and where's the fun in that? Fortunately, Van Dyke milks the climactic fight for maximum drama, starting with a slow build-up, Madison Square Garden style, to establish authenticity. He films the entire ritual of the ring announcer introducing the judges, the timekeeper and the old-time fighters (including a professional wrestler, Strangler Lewis, clearly regarded as the boxers' peer) before the fighters arrive. The director makes Carnera look as powerful as the fighter probably ever did; taking deep breaths with a massive chest and with his arms stretched over the ropes between rounds, he looks like he should have broken Baer in half in real life. It goes to show that looks aren't everything.

Apart from the fight, the highlight of the picture is Max Baer's big musical number. Prizefighter is a semi-musical -- Loy gets to sing (or lip-synch?) two songs -- and part of Steve Morgan's decadence is his decision to go on a vaudeville tour. There's something surreal about the concept; this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about what a fighter shouldn't do, but by filming it over a period of weeks in Hollywood, Baer is doing in real life what the film says his fictional self shouldn't do. As for his big number, "Lucky Fella" isn't as blatantly lewd or as relentless a parade of flesh as many Pre-Code spectaculars, but it's rather suggestive in its energetic way. The star is supported by perhaps the most athletic cohort of chorines assembled in the era for a satire on the rigors of a training camp. Van Dyke takes an anti-Berkeley approach to the scene, emphasizing the stagy artifice for added amusement as Baer and his harem run frantically in place, the girls collapsing one by one as the landscape rotates past them, symbolizing the hero's sexual prowess until a final girl defies the odds -- but look at the damn thing yourselves. MaxiesGal uploaded this priceless clip to YouTube.



A Baer biopic would almost be worth it just to have someone recreate this scene. But we're more likely to see Spike Lee finally film his and Budd Schulberg's Joe Louis screenplay -- Schulberg wrote the story for The Harder They Fall, by the way -- before anyone tells Baer's side of the story. Maybe Max Jr., the erstwhile Jethro Bodine, has the rights tied up. But if there's an interest in the ways mighty men survived hard times by fighting, there should be a market for Max Baer, warts and all. I suppose we like these boxing (or martial arts) stories because, unlike the stories of stars of team sports, they're all about individual accomplishment. In a way, a fighter is the ultimate self-made man, even when surrounded by managers, trainers, family etc. As such, he may be a special symbol of hope in tough times. He inspires even as he loses, even when he loses badly, as long as he doesn't stop trying -- or so filmmakers always hope.

THE FIGHTER (2010)

One of the most frequently repeated criticisms I've read of David O. Russell's latest film is that it ended too early. Reviewers familiar with "Irish" Micky Ward's career often opined that the film would have had a more fitting climax had it shown Ward's fights with Arturo Gatti, which are considered some of the best, from an action standpoint, of the last decade. Never mind that Ward lost two of three of those bouts; they're all presumed to be more dramatic or cinematic than the fight in which Ward actually won his championship and which closes The Fighter. These complaints missed the point. The complainers thought they were watching a boxing movie, or The Micky Ward Story, instead of the film Russell made, which is about something else.

The confusion may be understandable given that the film is named after Mark Wahlberg's character and that Wahlberg has top billing. But you may recall that Christian Bale won an Oscar for playing Ward's crackhead brother, and that Melissa Leo won an Oscar for playing their trashy, controlling, clannish mother, while Wahlberg went home empty-handed. That's because he walked into a kind of trap. Sometimes the lead actor or star is doomed to have his film stolen from him by a flamboyant supporting player. But The Fighter is a film designed to be stolen from its star by everyone else on screen. This isn't Wahlberg's fault, unless you blame him for taking the part in the first place. He actually gives a very creditable performance, but the story requires Micky Ward, the ostensible man of violence, to be the relatively calm, almost passive center of a maelstrom of dysfunction. Everyone in his orbit is some sort of white-trash gargoyle, including not just his mother and brother but all his shrieking skanky sisters and even his otherwise sympathetic girlfriend (Amy Adams was also nominated for an Oscar), who becomes as territorial and possessive toward Micky while protecting him from his kin as they've been protecting him from her. The irony of the piece is that Micky doesn't see why everyone should be fighting over him. Forced into an either-or choice late in the picture, he rejects it. The film's been setting us up to want him make a clean break from his dreadful family, but at the climax, which comes before the title fight, he insists that he can't walk away from either his family or his girlfriend or his new handlers -- he needs them all on his side to prevail. There's something almost wholesome about the film's endorsement of compromise, however anticlimactic it may seem in performance. And when you consider that that's Wahlberg's big moment rather than any fight he's in, you see why he's been eclipsed, however unfairly, by his supporting cast.

By comparison, Christian Bale dominates the film as if this were the Dicky Eklund comeback story that his character presumes that the HBO crew is shooting as they follow him into crack dens. Look at the poster above and tell me who the star is. If you told me that second-billed Bale actually had more screen time than top-billed Wahlberg, I'd believe it. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this, except that it doesn't make sense to nominate such a performance for Best Supporting Actor. Bale is clearly the co-star of the movie and the Academy should have treated him as such. As for Melissa Leo and the other performers, I'm not familiar enough with them to judge their skills as actors, but they were uniformly convincing in their trashy roles, while Russell planted them in an equally convincing milieu. Style takes second place to storytelling here, and that's appropriate for the subject matter.

Micky Ward presumably had his family issues straightened out by the time he fought Arturo Gatti, so from Russell's standpoint there wasn't really a story left to tell, however dramatic fight fans found those battles. But I can understand the reviewers somewhat. A few years ago, after watching Cinderella Man, I thought that Ron Howard should have ended it with Jim Braddock losing his title to Joe Louis, one hero yielding his place to a greater, but not without a valiant struggle. Given that Braddock did floor Louis during that fight, I felt that it had real dramatic potential. But Howard had told the story of overcoming adversity and despair that he wanted to tell, and I don't think his film is really worse for ending when it did. The same goes for The Fighter. Sometimes boxing films are about more than boxing, and then the last thing they need is more boxing.

...But for those who are curious, here's the sequel, Ward-Gatti I, as condensed and uploaded to YouTube by the folks at HBO.


April 28th: And here's another sequel: Alice Ward, the fighters' mother, passed away this week.

In Brief: REVENGE (Boi s Ten'yu 2: Revansh, 2007)

At first glance, nothing seemed to say "wild world of cinema" more than an action-packed Russian movie about a boxer feuding with the Mexican mafia, but Anton Megerdichev's movie, a Weinstein Company DVD release in America, is both more and less than meets the eye. For starters, "Revenge" proves to be a sequel to an earlier "Shadow Boxing" movie that may not be available as an American disc. But even without a recap of the previous film, it's fairly easy to figure out what's been happening. Our hero is Artem Kolchin (Dennis Nikiforov), an aspiring fighter in a middling weight class. His path to a title fight with an American champion took a detour that sent him to jail. The detour involved a powerful gangster who also ended up in prison. The sequel (which is subtitled "Revenge" in the original Russian) shows Artem a free man with his wife, presumably retired from boxing until his old manager comes up with a deal that will finally land him that title shot. Artem goes to America to train and shakes his ring rust quite fast. He wins his first comeback fight by a one-punch knockout. That makes him the hero of the gym, except in the eyes of Cesar, a Mexican kid with a big chip on his shoulder and a desire to be the alpha dog. Their rivalry finally explodes when a sparring match gets out of control and Artem accidentally beats Cesar to death.

Cesar's dad is Felix Mendez, a bigtime gangster who demands the same revenge the title does. After he sends a hitman into Artem's rented home, our hero decides to flee the country, but he and his wife take separate flights. He makes it back to Russia, but she doesn't. Now she'll be killed if Artem doesn't return and submit himself to Mendez's vengeance. Somehow, word of all this has reached the gangster from the first film in his cell in the city of Vladimir. Since Mendez has ties to Russian organized crime, a tough cop (also from the first film?) negotiates a scenario in which the gangster will leave prison, take out Mendez and help Artem rescue his wife. Fearing a double-cross by the cops, the gangster soon violently shakes his police tail. When he and Artem reach America, the gangster promptly delivers Artem to Mendez. But Artem's friends in the States have a hidden ace: the gangster has a son here whom the good guys take hostage, demanding Artem and his wife in exchange. While the intrigues between the Mexican and Russian crimelords play themselves out, Artem has to get back in shape fast to make his title fight date....

I'm not sure what I was expecting that would give this film a distinctly Russian flavor, but I finished it thinking it could have been made practically anywhere. It's filmed in a kind of generic global style that's heavy on needless flashbacks and flashy camera tricks. Megerdichev tries every trick in the book to make his fights visually interesting; the results are inevitably hit-or-miss, but in the climactic title bout especially he does succeed in dramatizing boxing in some fresh ways. To his credit, he doesn't stage Rocky fights in which every punch is a haymaker; his fighters duck and block and make each other miss, and even clinch at times. He films at variable speeds and freeze-frames occasionally to highlight near-misses and decisive blows. He shakes the camera and blurs the image and throws in disorienting montages to portray Artem's punchy perspective at crisis moments. The director's most successful gambit comes just as Artem is making his big comeback. The champ is still getting in some heavy shots, and after one solid hit to Artem's head the screen goes black -- and stays black for tense seconds before fading back in to as Artem shakes off the effects of a powerful blow. Megerdichev also doesn't overdo the comeback; the champ remains a formidible opponent throughout, defying our expectations by getting up not once, but twice after potential knockout blows from our hero. He takes the best Artem dishes out, and that keeps the fight suspenseful until a clever anticlimax. Once the champ gets up that second time, you're most likely asking yourself whether Artem has got anything left to put him down with, and you may be thinking he can still lose -- but then the bell rings to end the fight. That leaves us with a different kind of anticlimax: a split decision.

"Shadow Boxing 2," as it's known in some territories, disappointed me as an action movie -- Artem does too much running and not enough ass-kicking for my taste -- but it ends up an interesting experiment in post-Raging Bull boxing expressionism. If there'd been more boxing in it, I'd be willing to call it at least a halfway-decent fight film. As it is, it's a muddled, overlong, sometimes overstylized affair that might still be of interest to fight-film fans and anyone curious about Russian cinema outside the art houses.

This Russian trailer was uploaded to YouTube by sjada22:

THE BOXER (Un Uomo Dalla Pelle Dura, 1972)

Robert Blake and Ernest Borgnine's careers both seemed to be on the upswing in 1972, so what are they doing in this Italian crime movie filmed in Albuquerque? Only their accountants know for sure, I suppose, but it looks like the film didn't open in America until after Blake made it big as Baretta on TV. This movie (whose Italian title translates very roughly to "A Man of Tough Skin") was directed by Franco Prosperi on a break from his collaboration with Gualtieri Jacopetti of Mondo Cane and Goodbye Uncle Tom fame. The Mill Creek edition on the Suspense Classics set is a pan-&-scan copy that sounds like it was edited for television, since the sound drops out whenever Blake's character is about to swear.

Our star plays Teddy "Cherokee" Wilcox, a small-time club fighter who breaks violently with Whiskey, his manager, over an $800 purse. He heads to New Mexico, where he encounters a generic-looking hippie at a Texaco station. The hippie promises "the kingdom of heaven" if Teddy gives him a lift, but Cherokee has problems of his own and drives off. He ends up at a diner where the waiters ignore his request for a cheeseburger. In protest, he spills condiments, cigarette butts and coffee on the counter.

He tells the waiter, "I made a swimming pool for you," and is about to put the man's face in the pile when Mike Durrell recognizes Teddy. Mike is a successful sportswriter, an assistant editor at the local paper. "You got a good job," Teddy says, defining the film as a period piece.

Mike invites Teddy to hang out at his place, but our hero grows restless. "If I relax anymore I'm gonna go bananas," he protests. So Mike hooks him up with Nick (Gabriele Ferzetti, "Mr. Choo-Choo" from Once Upon A Time in the West), a fight trainer who promises to "make boxing what it used to be." And Teddy rises through the rankings until a voice on the telephone tells Nick that his fighter has to lose his next bout, or Nick will die.

Meanwhile, the mysterious hippie has turned up at the training camp, where a fellow named Ching invites him to bet on the upcoming fights. "I never bet," the hippie demurs. "It's pretty hard to win that way," Ching observes. "You're wrong," the flower child replies, "I always win."

At the fight, Teddy is having his way with Joe Louis Tucker, a top middleweight contender. I pity the TV audience for this bout, since they're stuck with an incompetent announcer who identifies Tucker as "Joe Louis" and tells viewers that we'll be soon "beginning into" the next round. The technicians just seem baffled by the fact that the fight's still going on, as if broadcast time had run out during the feature bout. Anyway, between rounds, Nick rubs some gunk into Teddy's eyes to blind him. Prosperi illustrates this by blurring his image just slightly. Somehow, Teddy survives the round, realizes what Nick's done, goes berserk, throws him out of his corner, cleans his eyes out, and finishes Tucker in the next round.

Later that night, Nick invites Teddy to his place to explain what happened, unaware that an archetypal Italian black-gloved killer is in the house, poised to attack with a special pugilistic variation on the generic motif. He strikes when Teddy arrives, leaving Teddy laying and Nick dead. Teddy comes to and flees the scene, but not before bumping into Nick's daughter (Catherine Spaak) on the stairs.

Borgnine is Captain Perkins, the cop who leads the investigation. No fool, he instantly suspects Teddy, but Mike gives his pal a fake alibi. This leads to a tense exchange in Perkins's office.

Perkins: His file here reads like a cheap novel....Look at this: almost killing a university professor.
Teddy: Just a minute! He happened to be raping my girl at the time.
Perkins: That's not what she said at the trial.
Mike: See if it says anything about him being decorated for Vietnam.
Perkins: We've got that, too. Here, this will interest you. He was decorated for killing thirteen men.
Teddy: Yeah, well, they paid me to do it! You taxpayers!
Perkins: Are you still convinced, Mike?
Mike: If you've got a Bible I'll swear to it.

Ernest Borgnine in his opulent office, from The Boxer

Teddy is a pretty early example of the 'Nam vet as a troubled protagonist, an ex-con before the war and nothing but a fighter afterward. Blake plays him as a psychologically wounded but essentially sensitive soul rather than a psycho. Curiously, the psycho of the story is the hippie, but the movie is ambivalent about what he represents. Hippies were scary in their own right to some moviegoers who couldn't tell the difference between the corner pothead and Charles Manson back when hippies weren't yet the embodiment of ineffectuality. But the script eventually decides that our villain is not an authentic hippie, but "that phony who dresses up as a hippie." Whatever he is, he's a strange character.

After Nick's daughter (whom I don't recall ever being named) refuses to identify Teddy in a police lineup, she finds the hippie hanging out in her home. He idly clips his nails while questioning her about a mysterious notebook. He knows about the notebook, he explains, because his finger tells him things when he sticks it in his ear. So what about Nick's death?

Spaak: Do you know who killed him?
Hippie: Maybe. One thing's for sure. They killed him dead, all right.
Spaak: But why?
Hippie: Poor thing. I'm sorry, but he was a very stupid man. And what is worse, he thought he was clever.
Spaak: Why did you come to see me?
Hippie: To decide.
Spaak: Decide what?
Hippie: You're an orphan, right? I want to decide if you're going to be a live or a dead orphan.

Pseudo psycho hippie or the genuine article? Who is this actor, anyway?

Teddy realizes that the girl could change her mind about identifying him at any moment, so he has to solve Nick's murder to avoid the rap. Problem is, the people he turns to for help -- his old manager, a film crew with fight footage -- tend to suffer death by black glove, which only further implicates Teddy in Perkins's eyes. Only Mike is lucky enough to survive a murder attempt by the bad guy -- but why was that by gunfire rather than gloves? And why did Nick's daughter spare Teddy? Could it be so she can kill him herself? Can Robert Blake's desperate emoting and appeals to empathy save him? Can he punch his way to the truth while major twists remain in the plot? If the hippie is only a phony, on the sole evidence of Teddy's intuition, then what is he, after all? I'm afraid you'll have to see all that for yourself, but here's just one hint of the outcome.

While Borgnine coasts through his role, getting one amusing moment when he complains that there aren't enough cons available to fill a line-up, Blake seems to give the film his all, which may be more than the script deserves. He and the hippie make The Boxer worth watching, and I imagine it'd be more so if it could be seen in the right aspect ratio. I should acknowledge that Catherine Spaak makes it pretty watchable, also. Movie fans may know her from Dario Argento's Cat O' Nine Tails, which just happens to share a side with The Boxer on a Suspense Classics disc, in case anyone wants a mini festival. Perhaps this parting shot will inspire you.