And when boxing was the biggest sport in the world, when the heavyweight champion was the biggest star in the world, his unlikely upset made Braddock the most popular champion boxing has ever seen.Īgainst the gritty backdrop of the Depression, Cinderella Man brings this dramatic all-American story to life, evoking a time when the sport of boxing resonated with a country trying desperately to get back on its feet. A ten-to-one underdog, Braddock carried the hopes and dreams of the working class on his shoulders. In less than twelve months Braddock went from the relief rolls to face heavyweight champion Max Baer, the Livermore Butcher Boy, renowned for having allegedly killed two men in the ring. Only his manager, Joe Gould, still believed in him, finding fights for Braddock to help feed his wife and children. With one good hand, Braddock was forced to labor on the docks of Hoboken. Braddock, dubbed “Cinderella Man” by Damon Runyon, was a once promising light heavyweight for whom a string of losses in the ring and a broken right hand happened to coincide with the Great Crash. Schulberg slammed The Harder They Fall as naively sensationalistic, singling out the film’s use of Baer: “Maxie Baer, who queens through this incredible part, may have been a tamed tiger but he wasn’t a monster.James J. While the justifiably aggrieved Carnera sued Columbia Pictures and Schulberg, Baer gamely played a vicious caricature of himself, a portrait not unlike the Baer we see in Cinderella Man. The film is a virtually undisguised scandal-mongering account of events leading up to the Baer-Carnera fight of 1934. But his most enduring film is the 1956 anti-boxing exposé The Harder They Fall, adapted from a Budd Schulberg novel. It played for a while in Germany, until Goebbels banned the film because Baer was in the cast. The film was a success and Baer received good reviews for a role that included singing and dancing. In 1933 he starred with Myrna Loy and his upcoming opponent Primo Carnera in The Prizefighter and the Lady, in which he played an all-American underdog who challenges Carnera for the championship. Stepping back, Baer’s “Jewishness” was only one aspect of his elaborate self-invention. Then, presumably, a scientific boxer will beat him. More presciently, Pegler also wrote, “Baer is a fast swinger and he probably will keep the title until frivolity, late hours and cigars abate his speed by the fraction of an instant. In a 1934 Vanity Fair profile, Baer is described by a bemused Westbrook Pegler in strikingly Gatsby-like terms, a striver taking “dago-singing” lessons and “long-wording people into a daze” from a pocket dictionary. The heavyweight title now belonged to Baer, who would hold it for 364 days of nightclub carousing and adoring magazine articles. This 1934 fight-briefly but vividly re-enacted in Cinderella Man-was a frightful affair in which Baer knocked down the clumsy giant 11 (or 12) times, despite being outweighed by 53 pounds. By disposing of Schmeling, Baer earned his title shot against another unfortunate show horse for European political fashion, Primo “the Ambling Alp” Carnera, a 6-foot-6-inch, 263-pound former circus strongman and a mobbed-up mascot for Benito Mussolini.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |