Boxer movie

A boxer film or boxing film is a film that has its main theme in the field of the boxing match . As a biopic it can trace the life of famous boxers, as a sports film it can focus on the fascination of fighting or use boxing as a dramatic bracket for crime or melodrama .

history

The aggressiveness and physicality of boxing had a strong attraction even before its cinematic attention, which made it an attraction at fairgrounds . The forerunners of the film also found their first audience between show booths and carousels.

Boxing was already used in the early slapstick films to create comical situations for the hero out of a battle, for example for Charles Chaplin as the prancing underdog in the city lights (1931) or for Buster Keaton as the sissy proving his masculinity in The Killer of Alabama (1926). Boxing, connoted with motifs of demimonde and hard city life, served as a plot element in many gangster films and in film noir , for example in Robert Siodmak's Avengers of the Underworld (1946) or Stanley Kubrick's The Tiger of New York (1955).

Serious attempts to establish the boxer film as an independent genre were made at the end of the 1940s. These mostly cheaply produced films such as Killer McCoy ( Roy Rowland , 1947) or The Lonely Champion ( John Sturges , 1950) took over motifs from crime films and westerns , but without achieving their viewing values. In 1942 Raoul Walsh made the film The Cheeky Cavalier about the life of James J. Corbett and, analogous to Corbett's fighting style, staged the film as a light-footed and elegant study of the gentleman boxer.

The media penetration of boxing in the second half of the 20th century turned boxers into stars in the public eye and into cash-worthy objects of cinematic observation. In 1956 , Paul Newman portrayed the popular boxer Rocky Graziano in The Hell Is Inside Me , directed by Robert Wise . In addition to television, Muhammad Ali was particularly well received by the documentary films Muhammad Ali, the Greatest ( William Klein , 1969 ) and When We Were Kings ( Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford , 1996). In the biopic Ali ( Michael Mann , 2002) Will Smith portrayed the boxer. Muhammad Ali himself was aware of the interaction between sport and media processing and titled his fights in the style of Hollywood blockbusters ( Thrilla in Manila and Rumble in the Jungle ).

Explicit reference to Ali's career is made in Rocky ( John G. Avildsen , 1976), caricatured in the character of Apollo Creed ( Carl Weathers ). Sylvester Stallone embodied his adversary and led the character of Rocky Balboa to great popularity in the following films by pairing sincerity and perseverance with sensitivity. An entirely different approach than Avildsen with its largely realistic representation and his color dramaturgy in the American national colors followed Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull (1980). Scorsese stages the life story of Jake LaMotta as a Passion Path in stylized black and white images, often alienated by filmic means such as backlit shots, slow motion and exaggerated sound.

Recently there has been a tendency in boxer films to break with their conventions as a male-dominated species and to put female boxers in the foreground, for example in Karyn Kusama's Girlfight - On Your Own Fist (2000) and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004) .

Content and motifs

As an opportunity to earn money quickly, boxing in films often serves as an impetus for heroes from the lower classes to improve their social situation. The fight of a physically inferior hero against an opponent who at first appears to be invincible serves as an identification structure for the audience. Standard situations in the boxer film are, for example, forbidden agreements about the outcome of the fight or the staging of long preparation phases for boxing matches. The final title fight at the end of the film then often serves as the dramatic climax for boxer films, comparable to the showdown in a western.

literature

• Michael Gruteser: "Boxer film". In: Reclams Sachlexikon des Films, pp. 98ff., Reclam, 2007, ISBN 978-3150106259
• Günter Helmes , Jürgen Schwier : "Flying fists, moving pictures. The boxing film between blockbusters and arthouse cinema ", In: Robert Gugutzer , Barbara Englert (ed.): "Sport in film - the scientific discovery of a misunderstood genre", p. 161– 178, UVK, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86764-483-9
• Leger Grindon: "Knockout. The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema", Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2013, ISBN 978-1617038297
• Stephan May: "Faust meets eye. Mythology and aesthetics of the American boxing film", transcript, 2004, ISBN 978-3899421910

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Gruteser: Boxer film . In: Reclam's dictionary of films . 2007, ISBN 978-3-15-010625-9 , pp. 98 ff .