The Harder They Fall (1956)

It's in b&w, it's about boxing, and it was Humphrey Bogart's last film. Though he would die of cancer about a year after it came out, Bogart smokes 2 cigarettes within the film's opening five minutes. That's what men used to be like, Dr. Phil: they woke up, yanged blood into a handkerchief, and then lit a smoooooth Carolina coffin nail.

This film has a revolutionary premise: the fight game is crooked.

In 2007, it's hard for us to remember that there was a time, in the way-back machine we call "the 20th century," when young men of the blacker hues were drawn to their urban boxing gyms, just as their miscegenous Irish and German forefathers had been.

And, after a decade--or far less--of dealing brain damage with their fists, and receiving same, they wound up under bridges or in flop houses, in the Army or in jail. As the movie repeats time and again, "promoters are forever, but fighters only last a short time."

Bogart plays a sportswriter who worked at the same paper for 17 years, until it folded. He takes a job out of necessity as fight publicist for promoter Bob Arum--I mean, "Nick Benko" (Rod Steiger), who has a monstrous Argentinian, "Toro Moreno," who's just off the boat and who, with the right amount of fawning press and smoke and mirrors, could make it to the heavyweight title fight based on his freakish size alone.

Benko is a millionaire and a fixer; all of Toro Moreno's opponents are paid to take a dive. Incredibly, Moreno actually gets his title shot within a year. This is, of course, utter lunacy to us today, as our press corps has never once in living memory bought a pre-packaged celebrity and boosted him to the front of his field. I can't think of a single President, Governor, or screen star who is the product of such crass manipulative practices by his or her handlers and the cooperative press.

The Harder They Fall is based upon the career of 6'-7", 275 lb. Primo Carnera, an Italian who compiled a stellar record on the way to a title shot, despite the opinion of many that his opponents were B-list and often seemed to get knocked out by phantom punches. After actually winning the title amidst questionable circumstances, Carnera eventually found himself opposite Max Baer, who knocked Carnera down 12 times and won easily.

Carnera then became a traveling freak show of sorts, eventually forced to retire after his kidneys gave out. His management stole all the money. Today, some have revisited his tale and decided that his fights weren't fixed, but in fact that doubts about his abilities can be attributed to "racism" and "fear of the Other." Not his mob backing or the fact that several opponents admitted to being paid off. Nope. Racism. It's more prevalent than gravity, with twice the staying power.

The film features the same Baer, as the heavyweight champ who demolishes Toro, and former fighter Jersey Joe Walcott (real name, Arnold Cream), as the trainer who tries to keep Toro from being hurt too badly by serious opponents.

Baer, it is interesting to note, plays an Irish champ. Apparently true to his actual character, Baer's "Buddy Brannen" takes great pride in butchering his opponents and declares as much to Bogart's character in the lead-up to the title fight. Baer spoke perfect English, which one could hope gives pause to viewers who also saw Ron Howard's Cinderella Man, in which Baer is portrayed as a Teutonic proto-Nazi who should have just gone up to Jim Braddock and said "I must break you" before the fight. It was so much easier to cast it as America-versus-Europe, I guess, or perhaps just "America!" and any opponent would have been made the heavy since, as history has shown, America is like an eternal truth and needs no context. Ron Howard does not like subtlety. If you asked him whether he wanted mustard or honey mustard on a sandwich, the difference would be too slight for him and he'd yell, "BUTTER!"

Jersey Joe Walcott, the other ex-fighter in the film, who fought over 70 times and finished up 53-18-1, became a referee and many suspected he was also in on fixed fights. In any case, he was a terrible referee; many will recall that he was the referee for Ali-Liston II and failed to begin the count after Ali's "phantom punch" dropped Liston. Consequently, Liston was down for more than 10 seconds while Walcott was wrangling Ali into a neutral corner, and when Liston got up, Walcott was going to let the fight continue. However, somebody got Walcott's attention at ringside--it's unclear whom or how--and he suddenly stepped between the fighters and stopped the bout in Ali's favor. This is the equivalent of calling a 9th-inning homerun a foul ball and then, two innings later, deciding it was a homerun, after all, and ending the game. Except that the umpire never saw the homerun and a fan told him about it between innings.

Because of the phantom punch (which replays show was actually a very fast punch that did land square on Liston's jaw) and Walcott's absurd conduct (he was never again a referee), the fight is considered a likely dirty deal.

But back to the film. As the dork who introduced it on Turner Classic Movies said, Bogart played very quiet, for a couple of reasons: first, he was actually dying while filming it. Second, Rod Steiger is a triple-glazed ham and it's a fucking buffet everytime he's on screen. Third, Bogart is playing a man who has no love of either the fighters or the mob entourage surrounding them--he doesn't care about fame for its own sake, something we as a culture have utterly forgotten. Being a bag man or a hanger-on to a famous friend is now the #1 aspiration of American youth. Our peers and children are dreaming of being crumbums and third-tier losers. What is true today rings false for 1956, however, for the simple reason that Bogart's character needs the money to support his modest and devoted wife (Jan Sterling). Today's crop of human detritus, the barnacles attached to the empty vessels known as celebrities, have no reason for what they do. Hollow existence is enough.

In the end, you can't buy off a good man--or even an indifferent one. When Toro gets into the ring with the real champ, who won't be bought, the South American is dismantled in three rounds and winds up out of the fight game forever. Disgusted, Bogart goes back to writing columns, vowing to clean up boxing by exposing the fraud, the systematic cheating of fighters by their trainers, and the theft of their pay by crooked management. When Benko confronts him with the twin promises that nobody will read his columns and that Bogart himself will be silenced by the mob, the viewer can be sure that it's just a hood realizing his time upon the stage is short, and he's railing one last time at the injustices of temporality.

That last sentence was bullshit, of course. Mike Tyson filed for bankruptcy, and not because he blew it all himself. Larry Holmes had to come out of retirement to fight at age 38 for a $3 million purse--and he was knocked out by Tyson. His final fight was at age 52, not because he wanted it that way, I assure you. Sugar Ray Leonard has money problems; Marvin Hagler quit the sport--too late to avoid the slowdown of his mind--because he couldn't get a seat at the table in the backrooms where the fights are made and won and lost.

No, the public doesn't read columns about real people with real problems. It reads the gossip column, which is about invented personas with fake problems. Even if it was passionate about cleaning up the sport, shouldn't the public's attention be focused elsewhere, on bigger issues that affect us all? Look at it the other way: If there is no interest in preventing wrongdoing in a sport, for Christ's sake, what chance do any of us have with global warming?