Mark Robson (1949)
Carl Foreman’s screenplay (from a story by Ring Lardner) and Mark Robson’s direction are as ruthlessly efficient as the film’s protagonist, Michael ‘Midge’ Kelly, is in the ring; but perhaps you need either an appetite for the fight game or a detailed knowledge of boxing movies – or both – to enjoy and appreciate Champion. Even these two things together may not be enough to warm to the film. Manny Farber’s criticism repeatedly discloses a real enthusiasm for sport as well as a gift for describing its realisation on the cinema screen. In his review of Champion in 1949, Farber starts by noting that ‘the studios have been turning out fight films as fast as they could steal each other’s material’. He goes on to point out, exasperatedly, that:
‘The scenarios seem to have been written by a gossip columnist – they concentrate on spanking the hero for the un-Christian way he breaks training by smoking, the mean treatment he accords to his friends, and, most of all, his crude, ugly approach to women. He goes with disreputable females, mistreats his mother and the girl back home waiting for him …
The romanticism of the script is quite restrained, compared to the peculiar business that goes on in the ring. Whereas real fighters actually hit each other about one sixth of the time, the fearless “phenoms” of the cinema are hitting every second – and never anywhere but flush on the chin or in the stomach; in spite of this, the hero is usually looking around the audience for someone he knows. … There are no decisions, fights are never stopped …’
Unless I missed it, Kirk Douglas’s Midge Kelly stays off tobacco. Otherwise, Champion bears Farber out in all the above details, and plenty more.
Midge and his brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are travelling from Chicago to California, thumbing lifts and hitching on freight trains. They’re just about penniless, having bought a share in the Los Angeles diner they’re heading for. They get a lift into Kansas City from a boxer called Johnny Dunne (John Daheim) and his girlfriend, Grace Diamond (Marilyn Maxwell). Dunne is fighting in Kansas City that night and a promoter offers Midge $35 if he’ll fill in for a boxer who’s dropped out of one of the supporting bouts. Desperate for funds and game for anything, Midge agrees, although the promoter eventually pays him only ten dollars, claiming the remainder as a management fee. Midge doesn’t intend to box again but, when they reach LA, the brothers discover they’ve been swindled over the diner share too – and end up waiting tables and washing dishes. Both Midge and Connie are attracted to Emma (Ruth Roman), whose father runs the restaurant where they work. Midge gets too close to her: a shotgun wedding follows. A fight trainer called Tommy Haley (Paul Stewart) approached Midge after his fight in Kansas City and told him, if he ever needed a break, to come to the gym that Tommy runs in Los Angeles. Midge, with Connie in tow, soon abandons Emma and heads for the gym.
It’s the first step en route to the middleweight championship of the world and Emma is the first of a succession of people – the salt of the earth, rotten apples and something between the two – whose trust Midge betrays on the road to the top. The decent folk include, as well as Emma, Tommy and Midge’s ailing ma (Esther Howard). Among the wrong ‘uns are the self-serving Grace Diamond and the organised crime bosses who expect Midge to throw a fight against the long-time title hopeful Johnny Dunne. Connie and Palmer Harris (Lola Albright), who falls for Midge after her husband (Luis Van Rooten) has replaced Tommy as his manager, are relatively ambiguous figures. Champion goes about its job confidently but so predictably that it’s only in the supercharged melodrama of Midge’s climactic title defence against Dunne – their paths keep crossing! – that the film is undeniably startling. Carl Foreman, Mark Robson and the editor Harry W Gerstad (who won an Oscar for his efforts) give this last title bout the works: it feels all of twelve rounds but the fluctuations and the dynamic brutality of the action are compelling.
This was the first movie produced by Stanley Kramer. In view of what he went on to do, it’s hard to avoid thinking that Kramer had a big hand in turning the finale into a resounding jeremiad. The film, before it sets about telling Midge Kelly’s success story in flashback, opens with a ringside commentator’s introduction of Midge as not only a champion but also a popular hero. By the time Champion reprises the commentator’s spiel – as a prelude to the final fight – we know how hollow his words of praise are. It’s still a shock, however, that the wages of Midge’s sin are death: he eventually keeps his title but loses his life (a brain haemorrhage in the locker room afterwards). Although a large part of its commercial success must have been thanks to the tickets bought by boxing fans, the movie implies that Midge went irredeemably wrong the moment he got into the corrupt and corrupting fight game.
Playing Midge Kelly made Kirk Douglas a star. You get a powerful sense of the actor’s relish in landing so emphatically dominant a leading role and his pride in the physique he gets to show off. (His musculature is so developed beside John Daheim’s that poor Johnny Dunne never looks to have a chance against Midge – though I’m not sure Douglas’s upper body actually resembles the typical prizefighter’s physique of the time.) Kirk Douglas’s surplus dynamism on screen sometimes went to waste. There’s no risk of that happening on this energetic assignment and his acting meshes perfectly with the style of Champion. This means, unfortunately, that he’s also somewhat monotonous: like the film as a whole, it’s only in the in extremis closing stages that Douglas is truly extraordinary. The contrast between the brothers is comically overdone by giving Connie a limp and a walking stick but Arthur Kennedy does well in the part – particularly in the lovelorn Connie’s scenes with Emma. (Kennedy has a fine moment when – after Emma, in distress, has removed the wedding ring that binds her to Midge – Connie gently and regretfully puts it back on her finger.) The actresses in the three main female roles have, in dramatic terms, similarly thankless tasks but the casting of Ruth Roman, Marilyn Maxwell and Lola Albright ensures they’re effectively contrasting presences in the story.
4 September 2016
