The Boxing Film

The Boxing Film
Author: Travis Vogan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-10-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1978801378

As one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.

The Boxing Filmography

The Boxing Filmography
Author: Frederick V. Romano
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2004-09-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786417935

The love affair between boxing and Hollywood began with the dawn of film. As early as the days of Chaplin, the "boxing film" had assumed its place as a subgenre, and over the decades it has taken the forms of biographies, dramas, romances, comedies, and even musicals and westerns. Such well known pictures as The Champ, Body and Soul, Don King: Only in America, Girl Fight, The Irish in Us, The Kid from Brooklyn, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Raging Bull, each of the Rocky movies and When We Were Kings are just a few examples of the feature films included in this filmography. Thoroughly researched, this work examines 98 boxing films from the 1920s through 2003. Each entry provides basic filmographic data (the film's studio, its genre, its length, cast and credits); a detailed synopsis of the film; illuminating commentary on the boxing sequences; and excerpts from contemporary reviews. Most entries also summarize the making of the film, with particular attention to the training of the actors for the boxing scenes. The filmography also includes information on studio publicity releases and advertisements, press books and exhibitor campaign materials for each film.

Fight Pictures

Fight Pictures
Author: Dan Streible
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2008-04-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520250753

In 1897 a filmed prize-fight became one of cinema's first major attractions, and such films continued to enjoy great popularity for many years to come. This work chronicles the story of how legitimate bouts, fake fights, comic sparring matches, and other forms of boxing came to dominate the screens of the silent-era.

Knockout

Knockout
Author: Leger Grindon
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2011-05-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1604739894

Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema is the first book-length study of the Hollywood boxing film, a popular movie entertainment since the 1930s, that includes such classics as Million Dollar Baby, Rocky, and Raging Bull. The boxer stands alongside the cowboy, the gangster, and the detective as a character that shaped America’s ideas of manhood. Leger Grindon relates the Hollywood boxing film to the literature of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Clifford Odets; the influence of ring champions, particularly Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; and controversies surrounding masculinity, race, and sports. Knockout breaks new ground in film genre study by focusing on the fundamental dramatic conflicts uniting both documentary and fictional films with compelling social concerns. The boxing film portrays more than the rise and fall of a champion; it exposes the body to reveal the spirit. Not simply a brute, the screen boxer dramatizes conflicts and aspirations central to an American audience’s experience. This book features chapters on the conventions of the boxing film, the history of the genre and its relationship to famous ring champions, and self-contained treatments of thirty-two individual films including a chapter devoted to Raging Bull.

The British Boxing Film

The British Boxing Film
Author: Stephen Glynn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-08-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030742105

This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of the sport of boxing as depicted in British film. Through close textual analysis, production and reception histories and readings that establish social, cultural and political contexts, the book explores the ways in which prizefighters, amateur boxers, managers and supporters (from Regency gentry to East End gangsters) are represented on the British screen. Exploring a complex and controversial sport, it addresses not only the pain-versus-reward dilemma that boxing necessarily engenders, but also the frequently censorious attitude of those in authority, with boxing’s social development facilitating a wider study around issues of class, gender and race, latterly contesting the whole notion of ‘Britishness’. Varying in scope from Northern circuit comedies to London-based ‘ladsploitation’ films, from auteur entries by Alfred Hitchcock to programme fillers by E.J. Fancey, the boxing film also serves as a prism through which one can trace major historical shifts in the British film industry.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch
Author: Amanda J Field
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2023-10-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1911105701

The 1930s, 40s and 50s were the heyday of the boxing film, attracting some of the biggest stars of the time - including Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman - and some of the best directors. Yet it is a genre that has received little critical attention apart from a few films singled out because they can be categorised as ‘film noir’. It would be easy to assume, therefore, that the typical boxing film of this period was a dark melodrama with the tragic and doomed figure of the boxer at its centre, but that gives a false picture of a genre that included comedies and costume dramas among its 130-plus films. Sucker Punch invites the reader to take a wider look at the scope and breadth of the genre by providing a detailed discussion of 20 boxing films - a selection from each decade - from Hollywood and British studios. Some, such as Body and Soul, have become part of the established 'canon' of Film Studies, while lighter fare, such as Ringside Maisie or Gentleman Jim, have been overlooked by the critics but are worthy of re-examination - not simply because they are enjoyable films in their own right, but also because they offer insights into social attitudes of the times. The book draws on contemporary sources, such as trade-paper film reviews, as well as modern academic criticism, to build a highly readable account of the development of the boxing genre and its narrative conventions.

The Great White Hope

The Great White Hope
Author: Howard Sackler
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1968
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780573609602

"[The dramatist] has used his hero, a fighter based on the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson ... as a symbol in part of Black aspiration"--Back cover.

Fight Club: A Novel

Fight Club: A Novel
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2005-10-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393066398

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.

The Fight That Started the Movies

The Fight That Started the Movies
Author: Samuel Jay Hawley
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Boxing
ISBN: 9780992078683

The story of how boxing played a key role in the birth of the movies and how the first feature-length film in cinema history, "The Corbett-Fitzsimmons" Fight (1897), came to be made.

Ringside Seat

Ringside Seat
Author: Michael Kronenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2020-01-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9781660850211

Our fans asked for it...RINGSIDE SEAT is back in PRINT! A brand new compendium of essays, profiles and analysis from the 2018-19 issues of RINGSIDE SEAT, the quarterly e-magazine exploring all aspects of the Fight Game. Boxing's best writers at the top of their form tackling a wide variety of subjects: Jack London & Jack Johnson Boxing's greatest fight card Max & Buddy Baer The death of the fight clubs In search of Panchito Bojado REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT THE SET-UP Right fights...wrong time Billy Conn vs Tony Zale W.C. Heinz's THE PROFESSIONAL Jack Dempsey Canelo Alvarez Gennady Golovkin James Braddock Chris Byrd Roman "Chocolatito" Gonzalez Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder And MUCH MORE! RINGSIDE SEAT: Review 2019 belongs on every boxing fan's bookshelf with pieces by Nigel Collins (Boxing Hall of Fame inductee), Don Stradley, Eric Raskin, Jason Langendorf, Steve Kronenberg, Roberto José Andrade Franco, Ed Gruver, Robert Cassidy, Ronnie McCluskey and William Dettloff (RINGSIDE SEAT's editor-in-chief). Loaded with stunning graphics and countless photos designed by Michael Kronenberg. This is a book you will read and enjoy cover to cover. RINGSIDE SEAT is the critically acclaimed e-magazine that brings together people from the worlds of boxing, film, television, graphic arts and publishing. It provides boxing fans with a product unlike any other. RINGSIDE SEAT combines erudite prose, evocative graphics and interactive video links. Whether it's current fighters and trends, chronicling the past, or boxing in literature and the arts, RINGSIDE SEAT is "The Art of the Sweet Science." ringsideseatmag.com