Shots in the dark: what the boxing movie does for the Oscars, the film world's equivalent of a title fight

Interview, March, 2005 by Graham Fuller

Robert De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar for his savage performance as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980). According to Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, the world middleweight boxing champion from 1949 to 1951 was rendered inarticulate if he wasn't punishing someone in the ring or in his personal life (most of all himself). A quarter century has not lessened the film's masochistic ferocity, and it now seems unaccountable that Ordinary People won the Best Picture Oscar that year, or that Robert Redford eclipsed Scorsese as Best Director--which is not to denigrate Redford's aching domestic tragedy.

One of the actors on the Best Supporting Actor ballot with Raging Bull's Joe Pesci and Ordinary People's Timothy Hutton (the winner) was Jason Robards, nominated for his portrayal of a haggard, half-mad Howard Hughes in Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard. In a year in which another great boxing drama, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, is an Oscar frontrunner, so again is "Howard Hughes," via Scorsese's The Aviator. It would be especially ironic were Million Dollar Baby, the best American feature set in the fight milieu since Raging Bull, to earn Eastwood the Best Director prize--the big title that has so far eluded Scorsese.

My guess is the Academy will vote Eastwood Best Actor for his career performance in Million Dollar Baby, co-star Hilary Swank as Best Actress, and Scorsese, at last, as Best Director. The heavyweight contest--Best Picture--is a three-way bout between The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, and Alexander Payne's Sideways. Million Dollar Baby might edge it because it's really a love story, as embodied in the father-daughter relationship that evolves between trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) and the fighter (Swank) he reluctantly takes on. Potent, too, is his guilt-ridden affection, expressed in verbal jabs, for Morgan Freeman's one-eyed ex-fighter, who mops Frankie's gym.

Boxing movies have been much mediated (most recently in Charles McGrath's New York Times article "The Fight Game Lasts Another Round"), and we don't need another analysis of their cultural significance here. But it's worth noting that it was King Vidor's sentimental The Champ (1931)--a Best Picture and Director nominee and winner for Best Original Story and Best Actor (Wallace Beery)--that brought the fight melodrama into the Oscars ring without establishing its tenets: corruption, greed, hubris, and fraternal betrayal. Exploitation galvanized 1937's Kid Galahad, but Body and Soul (1947, three nominations, won for editing), Champion (1949, six nominations, won for editing), and The Set-Up (1949, no nominations) all made explicit connections between boxing and organized crime.

Body and Soul, the rags-to-riches story of John Garfield's Lower East Side fighter, influenced Raging Bull (particularly in its stunning black-and-white newsreel-like fight footage) and shares an affinity with Million Dollar Baby in its subplot of Garfield's character befriending a damaged black boxer for whom he feels responsible. Yet it was another Garfield film, the 1948 numbers-racket drama Force of Evil, directed by Abraham Polonsky (who wrote Body and Soul), that most inspired Scorsese and De Niro when they made Raging Bull. In The Set-Up, Robert Ryan, once a champion fighter at Dartmouth, nailed the existential plight of a washed-up boxer whose manager has bet on him taking a dive without telling him.

John Wayne played a fighter who kills his opponent in the ring in The Quiet Man (1952) and returns to Ireland to make peace with himself. It was John Ford's fourth Best Director win (for a feature), but Wayne should also have been nominated for going the distance with fiery Maureen O'Hara. Ex-fighter Terry Malloy fought union corruption by informing on the Mob in On the Waterfront (1954), winner of eight of its 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Actor (Marion Brando) and Best Picture, but the film now seems more like a thin justification for director Elia Kazan's informing on former fellow Communists.

When James Earl Jones was nominated for his portrayal of Jack Johnson in all but name in The Great White Hope (1970), he became the first black actor to be acknowledged for playing a fighter; Denzel Washington (The Hurricane, 1999) and Will Smith (Ali, 2001) have followed suit. The real Muhammad Ali, of course, was the star of the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings (1996), the story of his Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman. It's a film that makes me love boxing as much as Rocky, 1976's Best Picture Oscar winner, makes me deplore its triumphalism.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.