OTC50 #135

POSTED

AMERICAN CINEMA

LOVE FOUND IN A TIME OF CHAOS

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

L

ove can always be found, even in a time of chaos with people struggling with nothing within society.

Hollywood’s masterpiece is the development of beautiful art from that nothing often found inside society on the gritty streets. Stories told in the movies can often stir empty hearts in a way that life cannot.

The final film product is a result of artisans of all sorts dedicating their lives to a particular craft – from the actor masterminding the inner thoughts of a character to the craftsman building historically accurate sets in which the actor is to perform.

Hollywood does many things very well. Producers though cannot make an interesting sports movie other than a film about boxing.

Dramatists often recreate life more interestingly and more compellingly than the original narrative, partly because all those boring real-life moments, such as lining up at the gas station to fill up the motor vehicle, are not included in the script.

Hollywood time compresses real life years into an action-packed viewing. The mundane moments are the first to go.

Sports has proven particularly difficult to recreate better than the original storyline because of those adrenaline, charged moments estimating the victors and the losers.

In sports, those fleeting moments of champions are irreplaceable.

Sports already compresses, to precision, that fraction of a second in which the championship moment occurs, scoring a hockey goal or executing a game winning penalty kick in football.

Making a sports movie is more difficult than successfully remaking a classic film. Except for boxing movies.

Everyone wants to make a boxing movie, as a result. And everyone wants to star in a boxing movie, including some of the greatest actors in cinema, and great women actors, partly because the boxing film has become a metaphor for the American Dream.

Directors are not showing audiences the sport as much as teaching people about life and how to find love amidst the chaos in America. Boxing creates more disappointment than success, a bit like acting when 98% of casting calls end in rejection.

Individual hard work and persistence only occasionally pays off.

Screenwriter and actor Sylvester Stallone traces the path of the ideal boxer, mirroring his own life from rock bottom survival in Brooklyn to a Hollywood made champion of the world in Rocky (1976), directed by John Avildsen.

The struggle of life can be relentless at times with more work still required on and off the screen despite striking the hit of the decade. Capitalism is fiercely competitive in American, including in Hollywood.

Only a few years later, actor Robert DeNiro plays Jake La Motta in the Martin Scorsese biopic, Raging Bull (1980). DeNiro plays opposite Joe Pesci, and they will later co-star as gangsters in other Scorsese films such as Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995).

Scorsese shows audiences how the fighter finds love in between fights while becoming increasingly paranoid in a world filled with more mayhem than found inside the boxing ring fighting Sugar Ray Robinson.

Cathy Moriarty plays the love interest struggling to cope with an increasingly psychotic husband.

Americans are so fanatical about boxing that Scorsese cannot let go of the metaphor when he casts Pesci to beat up fellow actor Frank Vincent in Goodfellas, and then casts Pesci to beat up Vincent again in Casino. The fate of Vincent does not improve by insisting on a rematch.

These themes of love and chaos recur in The Fighter (2011), directed by David Russell, staring Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg as biopic brothers Dicky Ward and Micky Ward.

Bale shows how his character struggles with drug addiction in retirement, while still fantasizing about living his dream as champion of the world. Everything falls sideways for a bit when Dicky reveals he was already a drug addict before becoming a boxer at the age 12.

Amy Adams plays the love interest trying to get the boxer, played by Mark Wahlberg, out of the reach of the family members holding him back from the world title. Wahlberg plays Micky as a victim of the birth order and sibling rivalry within a large, blue-collar Massachusetts family.

The dysfunctional environment has a stranglehold on Mickey’s career, with his mother managing, and his brother training. The professional career faulters several times because the trainer spends more time in a crack house than in the gym, and the manager is so hard up for cash that she puts her son in obvious mismatches.

Like in life, the embattled boxer only succeeds when he escapes his family.

The Fighter narrative parallels similar mayhem and chaos in the storyline of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), directed by Robert Wise.

Paul Newman plays the eclectic Rocky Graziano who is training for the championship title fight in Chicago when he gets it in his head to fly home to New York to buy a soda for himself and an ice cream for his love interest, played by Pier Angeli.

The biopic character gets into trouble because of his natural boxing talents and unusual temperament.

Wise starts the black and white film out in a gritty urban environment with an overbearing patriarchal father humiliating the young child in front of his drunken friends.

The boy runs out into the street and ends up in a reform school. Wise bleeds the scenes so the young boy dissolves into a young man who winds up in front of the same overbearing patriarch.

Graziano runs from the New York City streets into the army, where, after boot camp, the young, enlisted man gets into more trouble.

Steve McQueen makes his feature film screen debut in the film as a streetwise, knife wielding low level gangster, stealing tires off of cars, while Newman plays the muscle.

When the boxers themselves are not so chaotic, the narrative portrays the world in which the boxer lives as tough and often brutal without redemption. For Wise, Newman and McQueen, life starts out as a struggle, and just gets more and more difficult.

Director Clint Eastwood paints a gloomy picture of boxing in general, and women’s boxing in particular, in a film loosely based on biopic material. Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman co-star with Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Eastwood’s boxing world is one of petty rivalries and broken loyalties. The film explores themes of kinship and the bond between friends struggling in relative poverty.

By this time, boxing movies have become a genre all to themselves with certain conventions developing over the years.

For example, the boxer must struggle financially, at least at some point during the film, whether or not the script is fictional or biographical.

Even the film Ali (2001), directed by Michael Mann, and starring Will Smith as Muhammad Ali, shows how the heavyweight champion of the world had to lend his name to the sale of hamburgers to pay for his legal bills.

Mann also shows that the boxer had several love interests at important moments of his career, including during times of financial difficulty.

Another convention in the boxing genre is that the filmmakers cast real life celebrities from the boxing profession. Director Ron Howard cast legendary trainer Angelo Dundee as the cornerman in Cinderella Man (2005).

Russell Crowe plays depression era fighter Jim Braddock, while Renee Zellweger plays the love interest. Howard shows how Braddock rode the rollercoaster of sports fortune through the Dirty Thirties.

And World Champion Sugar Ray Leonard plays a bit part in The Fighter, while heavyweight champion Joe Frazier plays a ringside guest in Rocky.

Rocky is said to be inspired by several biographical boxers.

Life sucks for Rocky in Philadelphia, as much as life does a few decades later for Dicky in Massachusetts. When Micky finally gets a title shot, all the sharks come out biting.

Stallone launches his acting career with the gritty film about a “no good boxer” who gets a chance of a lifetime when recruited to fight the reigning heavyweight champion.

Stallone creates compelling tension in the narrative between Rocky and his trainer. This convention of using the relationship between the fighter and the trainer as a narrative device is also used by Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard, and several successive boxing genre film directors.

The potential champion starts the film out of shape, and must spend a lot of time in the gym preparing for the main event. The relationship with the trainer is therefore crucial to the realism of the script.

In many ways, the training in boxing films is a standard just as boot camp is depicted in the opening scenes of war films. One stage in life cannot happen without the other.

Intertextual moments are rare, but Howard creates an intertextual moment with the film Rocky when his fighter brings up the issue of turtles at a press conference. Rocky had started out slowly with the boxing character barely holding life together through his relationship with two pet turtles.

Talia Shire plays the love interest who is the retail clerk at a pet store where Rocky buys food for his turtles. Rocky and Adrian eventually marry after a long courtship.

Most of Million Dollar Baby takes place in a gym owned by Clint Eastwood’s character as Swank creates a boxer who is stubborn enough to persist in being trained by Frankie, the gym owner, when Frankie ‘don’t train girls’.

Maggie runs into her white trash, dysfunctional family, while lamenting about the lack of a love interest.

Boxing movies on the surface seem like they should be easy to make, but filmmakers take their art seriously, and craft the films as carefully as they would any other biopic.

After the gritty reality created by director John Avildsen for Rocky, Martin Scorsese, Michal Mann and Ron Howard distinguish their boxing dramas by selecting biographical characters and creating a rich aesthetic to layer over the gritty chaos.

Available biographical material often includes films of the movie characters in actual fights. The director may then choreograph dramatized fight scenes step by step as they had occurred in the actual fight. Ron Howard creates this choreography in Cinderella Man.

Similarly, Michael Mann has Will Smith match the footage of the Ali fights against Sunny Liston and George Foreman.

The film, Rocky, paints a tough life with fighters hoping for a chance of a lifetime – as the only way out of poverty. The movie is so raw, replicating life on screen with so little movie magic so as to make the film perhaps the best boxing movie of all time despite being fictitious.

No better drama exists than that world found in real life stories about struggling boxers.

Actor Mickey Rourke seemed to have been so compelled by the film genre that he went from training as a boxer as a teenager to acting in Hollywood feature films, and then he went back to boxing again. Rourke shows off his boxing skills in the bar fight scenes of BarFly (1987), directed by Barbet Schroader.

Faye Dunaway plays the love interest. Barfly portrays Inner City poet Charles Bukowski in a constant battle with the streets of Los Angeles. Rourke never does make a boxing movie, just a metaphor about a boxing movie, as a poet would do.

Inevitably, Rourke stopped acting and went back into boxing from 1991-1994. Industry rumours suggested he had caused such a disturbance in the Hollywood Hills, partying and driving his uncensored motorcycles back and forth, that the industry blacklisted him.

When Rourke realized his own mistake, he began an acting career comeback which crystalized in the 2008 film, The Wrestler. However, the Queensberry Rules, which have governed boxing since 1867, ban wrestling in the ring, as Marlon Brando’s character Stanley Kowalski pointed out in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Life can be tough and unforgiving, but the love and friendship developed during the career is often more rewarding than the sometimes illusive fame and fortune being sought.

Halle Berry makes her directorial debut for the fictional story of a retired MMA fighter, in Bruised (2020). Berry also stars as the lead character, Jackie Justice, with the opening scenes finding Jackie disgraced, working a job cleaning toilets as a housekeeper to pay the rent.

Bruised becomes a story of redemption with the boxing metaphor turned inside-out, from within the fighter, and from without the boxing profession.

Jackson struggles to overcome gender-based barriers, such as surviving day to day with an abusive, controlling intimate partner, and the sudden need to care for a young child, after his father dies.

This narrative gets spun a bit more a few years later in the biopic performance of Sydney Sweeney as Christy Martin in Christy (2025).

Sweeney further develops the boxing metaphor about family violence, as Christy, like Jackson, marries her trainer, who in turn, turns out to be a violent abuser.

Christy is a bit of a natural, but she only gets to greatness by working with her trainer, Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster. Sweeney shows how Christy’s biggest battle is yet to be, when she struggles to get away from her abusive husband.

The true to life Christy Martin has a cameo at the end of the film.

Martin starts out so down low still, living with her parents in West Virginia, that she finds contentment living in a trailer near the gym – her professional boxing career all mapped out in front of her.

The boxing genre goes through different incantations, but the linking of the conventions of the genre creates a filmography, most of which underscores the rags to riches journey found inside the American Dream.

The genre twists the metaphor inside and out as subsequent directors look to gain attention with a bit of novelty. Rocky is a gritty film about an unknown boxer that gets stripped of all aesthetics to reflect the difficulty of rising up from the streets to accept the opportunities present.

The struggle to survive on the streets is almost more important than the boxing metaphor.

A few years later, Scorsese, in Raging Bull, uses just the opposite – a rich aesthetic over black and white film to portray the career of a world champion. The boxer, Jake La Motta, has more talent than Rocky Balboa, but he also has more chaos in his personal life, whereas Rocky found balance away from the gym with his love interest, Adrian.

Eastwood portrays the members of Frankie’s boxing gym as poor misfits. And from those hard luck cases, only one or two boxers have the potential to attain true success promised by the American Dream.

The metaphor gets spun a bit to bring out the redemptive qualities of boxing, especially with female boxers confronting the gender-based barriers in society. Life continues to be a struggle, though, even for the boxers who occasionally survive better than others from their neighborhoods.

Yoh, nobody said life would be easy.

CHECK OUT OTC50 ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 FOR THE REVIEW OF THE BIOPIC FILM, I PLAY ROCKY

SERIES IN REVIEW

GREATEST STORY WITH THE DETAILS ALL-IN

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The Greatest explores the rising boxing career of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali between his Olympic gold medal match in Rome and the championship bout with Sonny Liston.

Creator Ben Watkins spends more time outside of the training gym going through the details in the background among the family and management team.

Jaalen Best plays Muhammad Ali during these years as he also transitions from a devout Christian family to a practicing Muslim. Ali’s birth name is eventually discarded as a slave name.

The eight episodes go deeper into the family dynamics and the interplay between family and potential sponsors hoping to profit from the greatest professional boxing career.

Ali must earn a spot at the championship by defeating all the current contenders. But before Ali can get to the championship bout against Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston becomes heavyweight champion of the world.

Giovanni Ribisi plays Angelo Dundee, the trainer Ali eventually finds to take him to the championship. Dundee is less interested in creating a boxer than letting a gifted boxer excel with what he already has going for him.

The deep background of what and who shaped the public personality is brought forward into the narrative. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali in little increments from 1960 to 1964.

Best shows how Ali worked hard every day in the gym, but then he also had some luck while facing several confrontations that could have derailed his professional boxing career.

The Greatest is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.