Sports Films

BOXING FILMS AND CLASS

More Hollywood films have been made about boxing than any other sport. The most common narrative for the prizefight film involves the boxer's quick rise from disadvantage to the title, followed by a fall from grace usually due to the seduction of wealth and fame, and some form of redemption in the third act. The heroic triumph over long odds implied in such a bare-bones plot summary explains in part why so many boxing films have been made, and also probably why some of the biggest male stars in the movies have played boxers, including James Cagney, John Garfield, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Elvis Presley, James Earl Jones, Robert DeNiro, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Denzel Washington, and the biggest box-office boxer of all time, Sylvester Stallone.

While boxing films frequently emphasize self-determination, the historical record again intrudes on many of these stories. Historical contextualization appears in the form of the economic exploitation of desperate and inexperienced boxers by those who run prizefighting, and through the fighters' own handicaps, which are due to their backgrounds of deprivation. Some boxing films therefore take the position that the most effective strategy for a working-class fighter to overcome these barriers requires the support of family and community.

Hollywood boxing movies can be classified into three groups. The first, made during the Depression years, serves as a metaphor for the society at large, attempting to resolve a contradiction between the values of rugged individualism and the values of community. Boxing films of the 1930s such as Winner Take All (1932), Golden Boy (1939), and They Made Me a Criminal (1939) celebrate a working-class hero who tries to beat the odds to escape the urban jungle and the exploitation of the fight game. In the spirit of the New Deal, however, these pictures also stress the importance of group support to help the protagonist succeed.

A second cycle of boxing films includes seven movies released between 1947 and 1956. Three of these, Body and Soul (1947), The Set-Up (1949), and The Champion (1949), use a combination of noir and neorealist styles to criticize the exploitation of working-class fighters. In reaction to the political repression of the McCarthy-era blacklists and the increasingly nonwhite makeup of prize-fighting, films from the 1950s such as The Ring (1952), The Joe Louis Story (1953), The Harder They Fall (1956), and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) shifted their focus to liberal models of assimilation as the best response to class and racial disadvantage.

The third cycle, which started in 1976 and is ongoing, is the most diverse. Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) feature protagonists who passionately believe in their ability to single-handedly overcome social identities defined by class and gender. Sylvester Stallone's character in the first film realizes that goal, while Robert DeNiro's Jake LaMotta character in the latter movie achieves a kind of Christian transcendence for finally accepting its impossibility. Several of these third-cycle films, including Rocky , When We Were Kings , and Only in America: The Don King Story (1998), represent Muhammad Ali, either to support his politics of anticolonialism and black unity or to discredit his critique of white privilege in order to support the idea of a self-reliant individualism. Finally, several of the most recent boxing films, including The Great White Hype (1996), The Hurricane (1999), Girlfight (2000), Play It to the Bone (2000), and Undefeated (2003), illustrate that issues of class, race, and gender are best understood by recognizing their tensions and interdependence.