There have been many great boxing movies over the years, but most of them are about white champs ? and there aren't many of those in the real world
The ratio of good films about boxers to bad films about boxers is extraordinarily high. That may be because there is something inherently thrilling about the manly art, but it may also be because Hollywood doesn't make a movie about boxers every week, whereas it does make a movie about young men who treat women badly 52 times a year. It may also be because the great movies about boxers become lodged in the public's memory, while the bad ones (The Main Event, a woeful 1979 outing starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal immediately comes to mind) simply vapourise. It may also be because so many movies about boxers have been directed by talented directors (Martin Scorsese, John Huston, Michael Mann, Martin Ritt, Jim Sheridan, David O Russell, Clint Eastwood), whereas movies about young men who mistreat women get directed by clowns. For whatever the reason, we are lucky to have as many great boxing movies as we do. You certainly can't say that about rugby.
Boxing films have been much in the air recently because of Russell's stirring new release, The Fighter. With Christian Bale giving the performance of a lifetime as a washed-up welterweight contender whose younger half-brother (Mark Wahlberg) has also entered the family business, The Fighter combines numerous narrative threads and has a great deal to say about family, class, drugs, romance and holding on to one's dreams. Bale's performance is so stunning that it seems like a new, emotionally re-engineered Christian Bale has replaced the limp, overmatched actor who got upstaged by his co-stars in 3.10 to Yuma (Russell Crowe), Public Enemies (Johnny Depp) and The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger). The same is true of Amy Adams, who played a lovable nitwit in Junebug, a lovable nitwit in Doubt and a perky nitwit in Julie and Julia, but who here takes a sharp turn from her apparent career path as the second coming of Meg Ryan by playing a tough, savvy, determined townie who, to all appearances, would dearly love to get out of town.
Even before The Fighter started making waves ? it also features a juicy performance by Melissa Leo as the boys' acid-tongued mother ? there was a good deal of chatter about the boxing film genre in general. In December, the character Rocky Balboa from the six Rocky films was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame, the first time a fictional entity had been accorded this high honour. Shortly after that, the industry celebrated the 30th anniversary of the release of Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, conveniently forgetting that the film did not do all that well at the box office when it first saw the light of day. Given that it has only been seven years since Eastwood's offbeat Million Dollar Baby won the Oscar for best picture, and just six years since Ron Howard's rousing, if somewhat less successful Cinderella Man premiered, it is safe to say that the past decade has been very good for the boxing movie genre indeed.
These films all have two things in common: they are basically rags-to-riches stories about underdogs who came out of nowhere to achieve greatness, and they are all about white people. A white person myself, I have nothing against films revolving around white people ? I loved Bringing Up Baby, Psycho and Jaws ? nor do I think that there is anything sinister about the preponderance of motion pictures dealing with white boxers. Fat City was great, The Boxer was superb, and classics like Requiem for a Heavyweight, Kid Galahad and The Champ are all burned into my psyche. But white people are pretty rare inside the ring, certainly at the highest levels (the recent ascendance of all those giant brawlers from the post-Soviet states to the various versions of the world heavyweight title notwithstanding).
There's certainly no rule that motion pictures have to be faithful to reality; everything from King of Kings to King Kong to The Last King of Scotland to The King's Speech take liberties with the facts. Still, if virtually every motion picture about jazz, basketball or the civil rights movement focused on the exploits of intrepid, charismatic white people, to the exclusion of the black people who actually dominate these milieus in real life, somebody might start to notice.
That is the situation we are in today. The last high-profile motion picture to deal with a black boxer was Mann's Ali (2001) co-written by Stephen Rivele, a college classmate of mine who introduced me to my future wife and then never spoke to me again. It was a good, though certainly not a great film, hampered by the fact that Will Smith lacked the vivaciousness and charm of Muhammad Ali. The genius of Ali was better captured in When We Were Kings, a 1996 film about Ali's epic 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" with reigning champion George Foreman in Zaire. But When We Were Kings is a documentary, and the general public rarely sees documentaries. Moreover, documentaries rarely enter the world of mythology the way dramatic films like Rocky and Raging Bull do. That's just the way it is.
In 1999, Denzel Washington played Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in The Hurricane, a film about a middleweight contender who spent 20 years in a New Jersey prison for allegedly participating in a triple murder. The subject of a memorable Bob Dylan song, Carter's case became a cause celebre among liberals in the United States, who claimed the boxer had been railroaded by the police and the government. Carter was eventually released from prison, though detractors never stopped insisting he was guilty. One thing cannot be contested: The Hurricane, a flawed, self-congratulatory film that is less about boxing than about racism, does not fall into the heartwarming, inspirational mode of Cinderella Man and Rocky and The Fighter. Like so many of his films, it was lifted above mediocrity almost entirely by Washington's talents. But in the end, it was lifted only slightly above mediocrity.
Since Ali, with the exception of a few negligible, low-budget releases, there have been no films of any consequence featuring black boxers. Hmm. I once suggested in print that the Rocky films might have a mildly racist subtext ? inadvertent, to be sure! ? in that the white public, rankled that they could never have a white champion in the real world, simply retreated into the realm of fantasy, where they could. It was thereupon pointed out to me that Rocky is a fairytale, and that fairytales are absurd, and the most absurd fairytale of all is the idea that a short white man could become heavyweight champion of the world. By this reasoning, everyone who watches Rocky already knows that it is a fairytale, and thus racial issues have nothing to do with it. I would suggest that proponents of this view do not know much about white people, and even less about Philadelphia.
Moreover, once Rocky scored big, its fairytale aura faded away. In the original Rocky, the converted South Philly goon gives Apollo Creed, Sylvester Stallone's crude Ali stand-in, more than he can handle, but does not actually win the fight. In Rocky II, he does. This is where the fairytale becomes preposterous; when Rocky II was made, in 1979, it had been 19 years since a white man ? the Swede Ingemar Johansson ? had been world heavyweight champion. In the 20 subsequent years, until Vitali Klitschko began the eastern invasion of the division, there were two white heavyweight title holders across the four different boxing federations, against 28 black ones. And one of those two, Francesco Damiani, barely counts because no one was interested in the belt he won while Mike Tyson held the other three.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Fighter, I thought Million Dollar Baby was kind of sweet, and I admired Russell Crowe's performance in Cinderella Man, even though the film itself was oddly inanimate. Still, I wouldn't mind occasionally seeing a good movie about a fantastic black boxer. It's not like there haven't been plenty to choose from: Mike Tyson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sugar Ray Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, and Tommy Hearns, just to name a few. Louis, for example, knocked out Hitler's favorite son, Max Schmeling, in a famous 1938 bout at Yankee Stadium after losing to him two years earlier; it was probably the most important fight in the history of the world. That would make an interesting film. So why no takers? How come these things only get made for television?
I don't think I'm asking for the moon here. It's not as if I'm suggesting that Hollywood start making films with names like Eskimo TKO, to make up for decades of callously overlooking the vast pugilistic prowess of Inuit flyweights. It's not as if I'm asking Hollywood to start making movies about hermaphrodite boxers or blind Macedonian boxers or boxers who slug it out from wheelchairs or boxers who can cite Arthur Rimbaud in the original French. I'm only asking Hollywood to occasionally make a film that more closely reflects the reality of the boxing world as we know it. If you can have six Rockys, why do we only have one Ali? If we have movies about a so-so white middleweight and a scrappy white welterweight and a couple of pint-sized heavyweights, why can't we have a movie about Mike Tyson, whose rise and fall is as tragic a story as the boxing world has ever known?
So yes, my request is modest. Every once in a while, perhaps every seven years or so, somebody should make a motion picture that lionises a black man, a film that depicts an overmatched wretch from the wrong side of the tracks who comes out of nowhere, ignores the seemingly insuperable odds, and becomes heavyweight champion of the world. This, in fact, is the Mike Tyson story. And the Leon Spinks story. And the Jersey Joe Walcott story. And ? but I digress.
One final plea to Hollywood: When you're done with the African-American project, you might try making a movie about Hispanics. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there were a couple of good Latino boxers out there.
The Fighter is released on 2 February.
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