How box­ing movies put black heroes in the frame

Last Novem­ber, the New York Times ran a think piece call­ing for the abo­li­tion of box­ing, refer­ring to it as a ​‘bru­tal, fad­ing sport.’ But if the mys­tique of prize-fight­ing has dis­si­pat­ed in recent years, the lat­est trick­le of Hol­ly­wood releas­es on the sub­ject haven’t acknowl­edged it. In fact, last year’s trick­le looks to be this year’s wave, with biopics of fight­ers Emile Grif­fith and Rober­to Duran set for release in 2016.

The top­ic gets an invig­o­rat­ing treat­ment in Ryan Coogler’s Creed, the sev­enth instal­ment in the ever­green Rocky series. The director’s debut film, Fruit­vale Sta­tion, clear­ly fore­ground­ed con­cerns around race and social divi­sion. Although Creed resists a sim­i­lar label, Coogler’s social­ly con­scious back­ground offers a sur­pris­ing­ly strong foun­da­tion for the box­ing genre – a cin­e­mat­ic sport­ing tra­di­tion that has con­sis­tent­ly been the domain of America’s minor­i­ty working-class.

As ear­ly as 1910, box­ing has played an impor­tant role in both race rela­tions and film his­to­ry. When first-ever black heavy­weight champ Jack John­son KO’d ​‘great white hope’ Jim Jef­fries in the so-called ​‘Fight of the Cen­tu­ry’ – expos­ing the lie of white supe­ri­or­i­ty – race riots broke out across the nation. The imme­di­ate response in sev­er­al states was an out­right ban on prize­fight films; one of the ear­li­est instances of Amer­i­can film cen­sor­ship. Such was the pow­er of the fledg­ling medi­um. Motion pic­tures were per­fect­ly suit­ed to cap­ture the sport’s dynam­ic move­ment – and its poten­tial­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary impact.

Prize­fight­ing had its on-screen hey­day in the ​’30s and ​’40s. Among the many cat­a­lysts for the ​‘pro­gres­sive’ box­ing film were the respec­tive surges in pop­u­lar­i­ty of pugilism and moviego­ing dur­ing the first half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, fight­ers came from urban immi­grant back­grounds, mak­ing them per­fect salt of the earth heroes for Warn­er Broth­ers’ Depres­sion-era out­put. This aligned with oth­er pro­gres­sive influ­ences in Tin­sel­town at the time – the incip­i­ent rise of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty and left-wing activism came to have a sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ship with the prize­fight film. Famil­iar rags-to-rich­es plots became cau­tion­ary tales about the pit­falls of cap­i­tal­ism; hero­ic sports fig­ures became dopes and heels, exploit­ed by gang­sters and cor­rupt man­agers. Through­out the ​’40s, box­ing films swelled the film noir ranks, offer­ing an even more pes­simistic inter­pre­ta­tion of what had come before.

When it came to pro­mot­ing white heroes, Hol­ly­wood had cat­a­pult­ed champs like Jack Dempsey and Max Baer onto the big screen in walk-on roles. But by 1937 the leg­endary Joe Louis was heavy­weight champ, open­ing the door for African-Amer­i­can fight­ers that would soon dom­i­nate the sport over eth­nic Jews, Irish, and Ital­ians. Yet in the unri­valled 11 years that Louis was champ, not a sin­gle box­ing film pro­duced by a major stu­dio fea­tured a promi­nent black protagonist.

In terms of both race and class, a look at the out­put of two Hol­ly­wood screen­writ­ers dur­ing this por­tion of the stu­dio era – both active CPUSA mem­bers and lat­er vic­tims of the McCarthy black­list – proves illu­mi­nat­ing. Carl Fore­man is per­haps best known for pen­ning High Noon, but did equal­ly sub­ver­sive work with his 1949 Kirk Dou­glas vehi­cle, Cham­pi­on. Dou­glas stars as a champ with dubi­ous morals; his all-Amer­i­can suc­cess sto­ry is impli­cat­ed as a rack­et where only the ruth­less tru­ly succeed.

Screen­writer Abra­ham Polon­sky made an even greater impact on the genre, first with 1947’s evoca­tive and fierce­ly felt Body and Soul, star­ring John Garfield as fic­tion­al Jew­ish fight­er Charley Davis. Davis is a man torn between the wealth of the big-time fight game and sol­i­dar­i­ty with his old world Brook­lyn com­mu­ni­ty. In the cli­mac­tic final fight, Charley plans to take a fall for the short-term mon­ey, even though his neigh­bour­hood has ral­lied around him and is gam­bling on his win.

Cana­da Lee co-stars as Ben, an African-Amer­i­can fight­er forced to retire and work in Charley’s cor­ner after the ring doc­tor warns that he has a poten­tial­ly fatal blood clot on the brain. His friend­ship with Garfield’s Charley is a rare occur­rence in Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma of the 1940’s; the nar­ra­tive hinges on the broth­er­hood and sol­i­dar­i­ty between a black and a Jew­ish fight­er. Once again, race in box­ing had man­aged to raise the ire of Amer­i­can film cen­sors – the Pro­duc­tion Code Admin­is­tra­tion moved to have Lee’s char­ac­ter com­plete­ly excised from the script.

They man­aged only to remove one sequence, in which black and white box­ers fight, cit­ing the PCA’s refusal to show ​‘inter­min­gling’ of the races. In spite of Jack John­son and Joe Louis’ achieve­ments, Body and Soul was forced to rel­e­gate Ben to a sup­port­ing role – and yet his sym­pa­thet­ic on-screen appear­ance amount­ed to some­thing more pre­scient. Polon­sky lat­er spoke about the pro­duc­tion team’s refusal to remove Ben from their script: ​“There is an obvi­ous deep rela­tion­ship between peo­ple held not so much in con­tempt but in antipa­thy by society.”

Lat­er films, such as 1962’s Requiem for a Heavy­weight, deal less in alle­go­ry, express­ing more lit­er­al ambiva­lence about boxing’s oppos­ing qual­i­ties. There is poten­tial glo­ry for the work­ing-class man on one hand, untold treach­ery on the oth­er. Ralph Nel­son directs a fault­less cast, fea­tur­ing Antho­ny Quinn as a big, sweet lout who has reached the end of his pro­fes­sion­al career as a heavy­weight jour­ney­man. He’s punch-drunk and lone­ly, with few future prospects.

His pro­mot­er, played by Jack­ie Glea­son, is being pres­sured by the mob to keep earn­ing. Quinn’s fight­er seems loose­ly based on Pri­mo Carn­era – a freak­ish­ly tall fight­er who briefly held the heavy­weight title. He was wheeled out as an attrac­tion (‘the man moun­tain’) and lat­er put out to pas­ture on a humil­i­at­ing wrestling cir­cuit. It’s a fate that Quinn shares onscreen, mak­ing Requiem trag­ic enough to bor­der on the maudlin. But Nel­son and writer Rod Ser­ling make their case vehe­ment­ly. The ring and its mobbed-up pro­mot­ers will always need hap­less, une­d­u­cat­ed fight­ers as grist for their mill. Nonethe­less, the ring gives some­thing back to these men, too.

One thing that most stu­dio-era film­mak­ers seem to agree on is the crooked­ness and bru­tal­i­ty of the endeav­our itself. Giv­en the fate of so many real-life fight­ers, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that rel­a­tive­ly few box­ing films trade in hap­py end­ings. And yet social­ly con­scious film­mak­ers con­tin­ue to return to the box­ing genre, offer­ing glo­ry and upward mobil­i­ty as a gen­uine­ly attrac­tive avenue for work­ing-class men. This presents a conun­drum; box­ing might be the ulti­mate sym­bol for the exploita­tion of the pro­le­tari­at – both phys­i­cal­ly and finan­cial­ly – but in the lim­it­ed realms of the exist­ing sys­tem, the sport is also be a pow­er­ful sym­bol of achieve­ment and discipline.

This idea is exem­pli­fied in Robert Wise’s 1956 film, Some­body Up There Likes Me, a celebri­ty-endorsed biopic of Rocky Graziano. It’s this that the Rocky fran­chise pass­ing­ly resem­bles; beyond the shared name, both Graziano and Bal­boa are lov­able Ital­ian rough­necks fight­ing against the odds. Both have a degree of opti­mism that Creed dou­bles down on.

Some crit­ics back in 1976 felt that Rocky’s opti­mism came at Apol­lo Creed’s expense. A few even saw the blue-col­lar Rocky as a sym­bol of ​‘white work­ing-class resent­ment’ of black advance­ment, at a time when African-Amer­i­cans had long ruled the heavy­weight divi­sion. If Rocky answered late ​’70s dis­il­lu­sion­ment with a cham­pi­on the white work­ing-class could call ​‘their own’, then Creed flips the script com­plete­ly. Ado­nis Creed (Michael B Jor­dan) is the inverse of his old pug train­er – a fab­u­lous­ly wealthy African-Amer­i­can, for whom, per­verse­ly enough in tra­di­tion­al genre terms, nei­ther class nor race are a point of contention.

Though Ado­nis spends much of his child­hood in a care home and seems to eschew the trap­pings of his inher­it­ed wealth when he moves to Philly, the fact remains that he’s far from the stereo­type of the down­trod­den fight­er. If any­thing, Ado­nis’ wealth is paint­ed as an obsta­cle. Coogler isn’t mak­ing a pic­ture of social­ly con­scious intent here. He’s expand­ing on the spir­it of the Rocky movies – tri­umph in the face of adver­si­ty. There’s an under­stand­ing shared by Body and Soul’s ambigu­ous con­clu­sion; you can lose the bat­tle but win the war, whether that war be waged in the name of work­ing-class sol­i­dar­i­ty, racial equal­i­ty, or some­thing less lofty.

In Creed, those bat­tles are with old age, or the shad­ow of a titan­i­cal­ly famous father. In fact, it’s the film’s implic­it aware­ness of the rel­a­tive com­fort of its char­ac­ters that gives new mileage to the sto­ry. There are no crooked man­agers or shad­owy mob­sters – just Stal­lone giv­ing a poignant, mod­est per­for­mance as Creed’s train­er. Stal­lone and Jordan’s cross-gen­er­a­tional rela­tion­ship is por­trayed with ease and grace. It’s almost Creed’s lack of acknowl­edge­ment of how it fit­ting­ly pass­es the baton that makes it feel so progressive.

From the music to the icon­ic ​‘Rocky steps’, Creed is a film that embraces its her­itage. Per­haps this is fit­ting, giv­en that the box­ing genre has always been sus­cep­ti­ble to cliché. But as with oth­er genre fare – the west­ern, for exam­ple – the best box­ing films use their famil­iar arche­types and stock char­ac­ters as a tool for social change. It’s why box­ing films, like west­erns, can be myth­ic and glad­i­a­to­r­i­al, and how they are able to respond to and crit­i­cise Amer­i­can cul­tur­al val­ues. On mas­culin­i­ty, race, class, and vio­lence – they’ve long had some­thing of val­ue to add to the cul­tur­al conversation.

Tweak­ing the for­mu­la with­out com­plete­ly rein­vent­ing it while avoid­ing any overt polit­i­cal mes­sage, Coogler offers Creed as a feel-good fight yarn with cred­i­bil­i­ty and bite. But its qui­et­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary inver­sion of old tropes also make it a wor­thy inher­i­tor of the box­ing genre’s great tradition.