Fight Night

...Every shot is a clich...

...Its hero is vaguely portrayed as a victim of the system, a bit of a rebel and a survivor, tough but good-hearted...

...With so much theater and accomplished fighting in the ring, the boxing movie had gone into decline by the early 1970s...

...Like all boxing movies, Somebody Up There Likes Me ends with a vivid, bloody dramatization of the Big Fight—in this case, a legendary middleweight battle, Graziano vs...

...But Eddie soon finds himself sinking in a world of moral compromise...

...Picture the boxing scene today, and one thinks of the WBA, the WBO, the IBF—and the FBI...

...La Motta's credo is: "Just don't trust anybody, anywhere, anytime...

...But there is Ali, utterly at ease, joking, boasting, poeticizing, modulating his mood, adjusting his tone, controlling his audience, and holding the media in thrall throughout his career...

...If Charlie wins, he risks swimming the Hudson in a pair of cement shoes...

...Carbo and his boys routinely muscled fighters and their managers to take bribes and rig matches—even championships...

...Played by Paul Newman in the film, Graziano went on to become a top contender and, the film suggests, a model husband...

...Prizefighters are often colorful figures, driven by risk...

...At close range he finds the fight game a tawdry circus of gamblers and pimps and managers who regard their fighters with sneering contempt...

...As a fighter, La Motta was celebrated for his steady legs and concrete head...

...Boxing draws watchers on cable television, but it has seen far better days— most of them a long way back, when Joe Louis was champion and Sugar Ray Robinson a rising star...

...Tyson remains a feared puncher, having amassed forty-three knockouts in fifty-four fights...

...The best films about Ali are both documentaries: A.K.A...

...Smart fighters can, with the right guidance and legal advice, leave the game rich and secure...

...The truth is, the challenger Tyson is the real star of this shabby show...

...But then the film turns...

...He also wants to impress his girl—a painter who quotes William Blake and represents, the film makes clear, an ideal of refinement and grace...

...His girlfriend (Talia Shire) is lifted from Pier Angeli's portrayal of Graziano's wife in Somebody Up There Likes Me—just as Stallone's Rocky is essentially an extended imitation of Newman's loose imitation of Graziano...

...Ali, in fact, has little to say about boxing and a good deal to say about big-budget films assembled to divert everyone and offend no one...

...Danny's career ends, however, when he's blinded during a title fight...

...Cassius Clay (1970), which concentrates on Ali's early career, and When We Were Kings (1996), which recounts his legendary 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire...

...A.K.A...

...They all want to go to college...

...Boxing also redeems Rocky Balboa...

...You let him get beat to a pulp," Eddie tells Benko, "and then you leave him with a hole in his pocket...

...Ben Kingsley did a much better Gandhi...

...Fat City shows that real fighters are almost always troubled, oddly vulnerable souls for whom discipline and distraction are more pressing needs than the distant prospect of wealth and fame...

...And then there was Raymond "Boom Boom" Mancini, who was himself like a scripted charac-ter—a resilient, likable lightweight who fought in tribute to his father, a top contender in the 1930s and 1940s...

...La Motta's book is a compelling if unfocused piece of self-analysis by a man who, despite his lack of formal education, had read fairly widely and thought frequently about the roots and consequences of his self-destructive actions...

...A.K.A...

...Toro's myth is shattered when he meets the reigning champion, a psychopathic brawler obsessed with making "the Wild Man of the Andes" look bad...

...It stars James Cagney as Danny Kenny, a likable fellow and—for movie audiences in the 1940s—a recognizable type...

...Like Danny Kenny, its lead character Charlie Davis isn't particularly attracted to the violence of the ring...

...So Benko looks elsewhere for fresh blood and finds a circus performer and promoter's dream named Toro Moreno in Argentina...

...You need a subscription to Ring magazine just to keep track of them all...

...Stallone obviously admires his own physique, and the film grants us plenty of opportunities to admire it, too...

...When one compares Ali's performance outside the ring with Tyson's or Lewis's—when one compares his performance inside the ring, for that matter—one has to admit that his day was a much better time for boxing...

...Lewis is the defending champion, a tall, talented boxer who tends to work very fast or very slow...

...I will take Lennox's title, his soul, and smear his pompous brains all over the ring...

...Although Newman doesn't look like he spent years drinking protein supplements on Muscle Beach...

...But Fat City is also a fine, unpretentious film offering a fair look at the world of small-time prizefighting...

...Long before Mike Tyson, Ali understood that fighters with vivid personalities are more likely to attract publicity and that provocation is good for the gate...

...And what about Lewis's delicate chin...

...Ali was not a reader or a highly thoughtful man given to prolonged bouts of self-analysis, like Patterson...

...Not surprisingly, many of the better boxing films of the era— including Champion (1949), The Set Up (1949), and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)—took up boxing's seamier side...

...The press ignores it except when Tyson goes bonkers or some other scandal looms...

...Recent court trials have exposed, at the sport's highest levels, a continuing pattern of corruption and sleaze...

...One thinks more readily of Jerry Quarry, Floyd Patterson, and—most of all— Muhammad Ali, all of whom have suffered boxing's "occupational hazard": permanent damage of the brain...

...He grew up in a fairly stable lower-middle-class family...

...He beat Ray Robinson and Marcel Cerdan, and he held the middleweight crown...

...But the result was a much worse time for boxing movies...

...Similar values pervade Body and Soul (1947), a darker movie with a more explicitly anti-boxing theme...

...In one especially amusing segment, Ali debates his place in boxing history with the cranky Cus D'Amato, another of boxing's great characters and the man who educated Tyson in the first stage of what was once a promising career...

...He's like the seven million New Yorkers who, the film announces, "come like locusts from every nation on the globe, clawing and fighting their way to get a foot on a ladder that might lead them to success...

...Ali's ring career is covered more or less, although his losses and near defeats—to Norton, Leon Spinks, and Holmes—are ignored...

...Rocky's gruff but trusty trainer (Burgess Meredith) comes straight from Central Casting...

...Based on Budd Schulberg's 1946 novel, The Harder They Fall (1956) is the best of these...

...Graziano started life in a slum, taking naturally to crime and spending time in the can...

...There were, however, some notable exceptions, including Fat City (1972), directed by John Huston and based closely on an excellent novel by Leonard Gardner...

...Its main villain, Nick Benko, is a ruthless promoter convinced that boxing is nothing more than a crude form of show business...

...Danny drives a truck but aspires to more...

...If he loses, he retires a wealthy man...

...Toro (played by Mike Lane) is modeled partly on Primo Carnera, a lumbering giant who briefly held the heavyweight belt in the 1930s, following a series of dubious victories...

...In "Legalized Murder," a 1950 article for Look magazine, a physiologist named A.H...

...The boys are getting too smart...

...He stays true to his girl, and he supports his brother, a composer whose symphonic salute to New York City (scored by Max Steiner) functions throughout the film as a rousing leitmotif...

...Cassius Clay reveals, Ali, like Lennox Lewis—and unlike so many other fighters, including Mike Tyson—didn't endure want or neglect as a child...

...Like Fat City, it opens with gritty scenes of urban blight...

...Brian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore...

...Built like a silo and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Toro towers over his opponents...

...Consider City for Conquest, directed by Anatole Litvak and released in 1940...

...But stoicism and humility were popular American virtues sixty years ago, and so he accepts his fate and maintains his good cheer...

...More recently, however, he's become noted less for his boxing skills than for his bizarre behavior...

...Cassius Clay also includes splendid footage of Ali's earliest fights, including his two bouts with Sonny Liston, who was not fat and flat-footed but a finely conditioned fighter with firm, if limited, ring command...

...They're generally surrounded by trainers, managers, and flacks, but ultimately they work alone, in a confined but public space, their strengths and weaknesses brutally exposed...

...The Hurricane, Play it to the Bone, and a host of other boxing melodramas have appeared on HBO...

...When We Were Kings includes ample clips of Ali at press conferences and in interviews, blustering, pronouncing, holding forth in his brazen way...

...Boxing's cinematic appeal isn't hard to understand...

...City for Conquest is a melodrama (and a good one) in which fidelity and selflessness are hailed as the highest virtues...

...Cassius Clay also shows how readily Muhammad Ali took to the stage...

...In the army, he assaulted an officer, went AWOL, and found himself incarcerated in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, where he learned to box— and boxing redeemed him...

...But as A.K.A...

...Or will he hang back, flicking jabs, building points, assuming that Tyson will fade...

...In Joe Louis's day, or even Muhammad Ali's, the sport could boast "undisputed" heavyweight, middleweight, and welterweight champions...

...Blessed with height, speed, and intelligence, Ali was a heavyweight who fought like a middleweight, with speed and guile, like Sugar Ray Robinson, his boyhood hero...

...So you win, you retire as champion, and be proud...

...Meanwhile, great middle-weights appeared: Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran...

...Rocky, too, is a chump, one assumes, caught in a dirty world of fruitless struggle...

...But Eddie has bills to pay, and he's tired of scraping by on a newsman's wages: "When a man passes forty," he says, "he shouldn't have to run anymore...

...So is Shane Mosley...

...Ali's large, often disturbing personality isn't conveyed by the shallow script or by Will Smith's reverential imitation, which looks impressive in clips but soon proves wearing...

...But it is also cloying and annoying...

...In the 1950s and 1960s, television still inspired a certain awe, and video interviews of the era show even veteran performers and public figures looking stiff before the camera's eye...

...But he fears failure and poverty, and he wants to support his family, struggling for respectability on New York's Lower East Side...

...One hesitates to knock the most popular boxing movie of all time, and Rocky does have its charms...

...Iron Mike" is "Mad Mike" now, vowing that on the night of the fight "flesh will not be enough...

...So Benko feeds him "tank artists" paid to cower and drop...

...The two talk similarly, walk similarly, and are similarly shy around girls...

...Boxing revived during the 1960s, thanks largely to Muhammad Ali, who—as Cassius Clay—first won the heavyweight title in 1964 at the age of twenty-two...

...Like Somebody Up There Likes Me, Raging Bull is based on one of the better boxing books: Jake La Motta's 1970 autobiography...

...These days, in 2002, boxing is not, in fact, hopelessly corrupt...

...Ali is all surface, and its real interest is in all those cool props from the 1960s: tailfins, console televisions, rayon shirts...

...Sylvester Stallone, its screenwriter and star, reached back to the 1950s for inspira-tion—specifically, to Somebody Up There Likes Me, the 1956 adaptation of Rocky Graziano's bestselling autobiography that celebrates boxing's character-building virtues...

...But elsewhere he admits that his life has been ruled and warped by fear of "God, fate, life...

...Ali, by most accounts the underdog, won the "Rumble in the Jungle" by relying on defense, using his arms to block countless hard blows until Foreman wore himself out...

...Perhaps as a result, the movie proved a mess: an unfocused piece of Hollywood hagiog-raphy with the pace and look of a made-for-cable movie...

...He was blessed with discipline and determination, and he believed that great fighters were noble figures and masters of their profession, like doctors and lawyers—a point he stresses in this quirky documentary...

...All the good fighters are gone," he laments...

...Other fighters, "their brains knocked out," became "the living dead of pugilism, the victims of its occupational disease: punch drunkenness...

...Thus Andrew Lewis is welterweight champion...

...To help promote Toro, Benko hires an unemployed sports reporter named Eddie Willis, played by Humphrey Bogart in his final film role...

...Raging Bull also nods to the boxing films of the 1940s and 1950s—but Scorsese is no Stallone, and Raging Bull evokes darker, more explicitly anti-boxing films like Body and Soul and The Harder They Fall...

...Ali, one of last year's most widely promoted films, has just been released on video, and a slew of further boxing movies are in the works, including—for better or worse—Spike Lee's treatment of Joe Louis's famous bouts, in 1936 and 1938, with Max Schmeling...

...Last year's film treatment, Ali, was credited to four screenwriters...

...And like westerns, boxing movies are almost always morality plays, inevitably informed by the values and assumptions of their times...

...Boxing movies, good and bad, appeared almost yearly from the late 1940s through the early 1960s...

...In the film version of Raging Bull, La Motta is sadistic, masochistic, and crude...

...Stallone's script casts the sport in a wholly positive, if fanciful, light, largely eliminating the presence of shifty promoters and suggesting, impossibly, that a champion like Apollo Creed can blithely pluck contenders from the ranks of unheralded bums...

...Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, boxing was thick with talent, which meant that Ali's opponents included some brilliant fighters: Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes...

...Its protagonist, Billy Tubbs (Stacy Keach), is first glimpsed in his grim apartment surrounded by empty bottles of booze: In an era of bleak movies—including Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and Joe (1970)—Fat City provides its own atmosphere of failure and despair...

...Many longtime fighters have survived the sport and thrived: Just ask George Foreman, television commentator, grill salesman, and millionaire...

...But Scorsese is less interested in La Motta's boxing than in the harrowing landscape of his mind...

...But the fact that boxing destroys so many of its own is one of the key elements of its dramatic appeal...

...But Ali wasn't alone...

...Suppressing his scruples, Eddie becomes Toro's publicist and, eventually, his trusted friend...

...The success of Rocky very probably inspired the 1980 release of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, which, like Rocky, was produced by Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler...

...The Jewish Charlie has his conscience stirred when, just prior to the bout, he visits his old neighborhood and meets a friend full of ethnic pride...

...By this point Charlie has been thoroughly compromised by the fight game and Roberts's world of fast money, swank night clubs, and flashy dames...

...Either way, there's something worth watching...

...The contender climbs...

...These prominent heavyweights have been avoiding each other for more than a decade, opting for easier paydays against more yielding foes...

...Most impressively—and fateful-ly—he could take a punch and a pounding better than any big man, ever...

...Against Tyson, will Lewis rush his attack, seeking a quick knockout...

...These sanctioning bodies—including the World Boxing Association, the World Boxing Organization, and the International Boxing Federation—often promote different contenders and crown different champions...

...Despite the presence of popular fighters—especially Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, and Archie Moore—the press increasingly portrayed the sport as dishonest and dangerous, the athletic equivalent of Russian roulette...

...In the film's final scenes, Eddie is back at his typewriter, vowing to expose the plight of fighters in a murky system run by dishonorable men...

...Charlie's moral dilemma comes when Roberts, the gambler who promotes him, orders him to throw a big fight...

...In forty-two fights, he's lost only twice—but both times, Lewis's opponent eliminated him with a single punch...

...And to have true careers, fighters require a trait that guys who read the Wine Spectator tend to lack: the regular, focused ability to pummel another human being and, in turn, absorb countless blows to the head...

...he is jealous, paranoid, and capable of throwing a fight for a bigger payday down the road...

...But he doesn't know a straight right from a left jab...

...Senate hearings in the early 1960s confirmed the wide assumption that professional boxing had been essentially run for years by Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo, shifty promoters with links to organized crime...

...Fat City opens with shots of the seedier side of Stockton, California...

...Rocky, of course, makes the most of his bout with Creed, and his brave performance underscores the patriotic themes of a film released in the bicentennial year...

...Think only of Lewis's dubious "draw" with Evander Holyfield in 1999, or of Lewis, a year later, effortlessly dispatching the hapless Michael Grant...

...This was a bad time for the sport, and its critics were even more vocal than they are today...

...He is a good fighter but a weak man, a flawed hero in unheroic times...

...In his final fight, Toro is savaged, left battered and senseless on the mat...

...Now there are sometimes three or more "world champions" in seventeen weight divisions, from heavyweight to what the IBF calls "mini-flyweight...

...The underdog fights his fears...

...Steinhaus claimed that an average of ten fighters died each year from boxing-related injuries...

...They don't want to fight for a living...

...But here, Charlie Davis is champion...

...If this proves untenable, will he settle for biting Lewis's ears...

...And like Lewis, Cassius Marcellus Clay started boxing as a boy, mentored by men who believed in the sport's character-building virtues...

...And so is Vernon Forrest...

...But Benko worries that marketable fighters have grown scarce...

...His popularity stemmed, in large measure, from his instinctive skills as a celebrity in an exploding media age...

...Like Babe Ruth, Ali was one of sport's transcendent figures, somehow embodying—and exploiting—the spirit of his times...

...But anti-heroes weren't around in Hollywood in the 1940s...

...It's confusing, too...

...Clay is all adrenaline, bouncing and jabbing, a blazing force of life...

...And like many fighters, including Tyson, Ali had a dark side that emerged during his crude, cruel taunt-ings of Joe Frazier, a tough fighter with a thin hide...

...Or punching the referee...

...The last few years have seen Night and the City, The Great White Hype, The Boxer, Snake Eyes, and more come to the theaters...

...The jaded Eddie quickly spots Toro's liabilities: "a powder puff punch and a glass jaw...

...Tony Zale...

...Initially Rocky (1976) appears set to cover similar ground...

...The curious thing, however, is that when real boxing slumps, movie boxing thrives...

...Over in Europe," he reminds Charlie, "Nazis are killing people like us, just because of their religion...

...Benko completes the humiliation by stealing Toro's pay, leaving him fifty bucks out of a million-dollar gate...

...He's all set to take a dive...

...The champion fights his demons, his temptations, and the twin lures of lust and greed...

...He looks like a guy who lived in the Village, studying method acting with Elia Kazan...

...Proud of his accomplishments and protective of his family, the filmversion Graziano stops running with hoods and gamblers, and refuses to take a dive...

...Like westerns, movies about boxing are a long-established film genre of strong tropes that the viewer immediately recognizes...

...In recent years, boxing, like yoga, has become trendy, and it's still not uncommon, in some big-city gyms, to spot sous chefs and software designers hitting the bags and looking tough...

...Ali fought hundreds of times as an adolescent, winning amateur titles and a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics...

...Danny claws and fights, hits it big, and takes his success in stride...

...its hero, Rocky Balboa, is a club fighter with vague means of support...