| A WINNER NEVER QUITS, A QUITTER NEVER WINS |
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Rather late in life I’ve been morphing into a movie fan by watching Russell Crowe films. Two of them have appeared together on TV lately. One is “A Beautiful Mind” and the other is “The Cinderella Man.” “Mind” is about John Nash, a mathematician who loses his to schizophrenia, but recovers it in time to win the Nobel Prize. The other movie is about Jimmy Braddock, the1930’s fighter who lost fights but recovered well enough to win the heavyweight championship in 1935.
You can’t go wrong with upbeat movies and these two pictures belong with “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Gone With the Wind” in that category. We like to see a lead character win over adversity and here it happens. The two Crowe movies are more convincing than their prototypes about this because, unlike them, they’re not fiction, but fact.
I can confirm this because although I only just learned about Nash from the film, I have known the Braddock story all my life. When he lost to Joe Louis in 1937 I knew about it. The movie ends two years before this when he beat Max Baer for the heavyweight championship. I said it was upbeat.
Jim didn’t do badly after that during his two years as champ, He spent most of the time ducking a match with Max Schmeling, the leading contender. This was a matter of calculation on the part of Braddock and his manager Joe Gould. Schmeling may have deserved the shot, but the glamour boy of the heavyweight division was Joe Louis, and a fight with him would produce much more money than one with Max. In spite of the efforts of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels to force the Yankee chiselers to give Germany a chance at the title, Braddock and Gould held out and finally got the bout with Louis, which Braddock lost. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because the loser and his manager wound up with a cut of all the future earnings of Joe Louis, which had been their price for agreeing to the fight.
Jim Braddock went back to private life after that and lived prosperously ever after. The movie emphasizes his Irish extraction, but I don’t remember that that was dwelt on a great deal at the time. Possibly it was his name, not ostentatiously Irish, or his New Jersey background which made his breeding a little suspect as compared to someone coming from an Irish hotbed like Boston or New York. He may have worn a shamrock on his boxing trunks, but I don’t remember it. He didn’t sport one in the movie either, but then Max Baer’s Star of David also wasn’t shown. The reason could have been that Max wasn’t actually Jewish at all. He just chose to go with the flow.
Crowe makes the transition from the part of number cruncher in “Mind” to counterpuncher in “Cinderella” with the ease of a switch hitter. His New Jersey accent as Braddock seems more authentic than his Southern one as Nash, but he never goes Australian on us and shows no trace of Steve Irwin. He doesn’t seem to train as hard as Stallone did in “Rocky”, but his fight scenes are more realistic. Maybe he could be the next Rocky himself in Rocky IX or XIV or whatever installment is due. If we can have large numbers of James Bonds, why not a few more Rockys as well?
As usual, I got along without taking in more than half of the dialogue. My hearing isn’t as keen as it was when the only sounds I missed were the ones only dogs could hear, and I also tend to keep the sound down when viewing, but in spite of this, the main blame for my incomprehension has to go to the actors who have gotten so natural with their speech that a lot of the time I don’t know what they’re talking about. Old-time actors tried to be natural too, but somehow they still made every word heard and understood. There was one man, Roland Young, whose lips never seemed to move so that everything he said was mumbled, not spoken, but it was still crystal clear.
Brando changed all that. He mumbled for real. He didn’t care if anyone understood him or not. People found this so unusual and interesting that he got himself a huge following and soon other actors were slurring their words for all they were worth in their zeal to keep up with the Master. Things have never been the same since.
So we’ve got realism. Realism, not reality. The two ideas get confused with each other, often deliberately. This because “realists” want to convince people they’re presenting actuality, life as it really is with the bark off, that is, with the seamy side fully exposed, which boils down to a full helping of sexual exhibitionism. Not only does this qualify a producer or director as an unflinching witness to reality, it qualifies him as a pretty good hustler who knows how to draw a crowd.
Sex sells, in other words. As a realist who shows life as it is, you unfortunately have to include lots of it because reality demands it. The money is irrelevant. Revealing the truth is what counts and it must be done no matter who is “offended”
That’s the argument. I don’t buy it. “Realism” is supposed to differ from “romance” in that it exposes the underside of human life as well as the presentable side and therefore claims the right to describe illicit behavior fully and employ obscenity to do it. The so-called “romantic“ view of life doesn’t do this. It distorts the picture, giving us an overage of happy talk and a minimum of truth.
This is to say that those who take an optimistic view of things select the incidents they use to prove their case. But so do the “realists”, except they choose to emphasize negative ones. They have the right to do this, of course, but I deny that this gives them the right to describe debauchery and depravity in their full ugliness, with the associated language. I reserve this right to people engaged in presenting “reality” not “realism”, to scientists and educators and others whose business is to deal with fact without embellishments of any kind. “Realists” don’t do this. They take a profit from promoting a version of fact that oversteps the limits that society has created to save itself from brutalization and vulgarization stimulated by the circulation of such images. Today we see their results in sports stadiums full of yahoos screaming obscenities at the teams on the field and assaulting any women trapped in the crowd.
I want censorship, you say? Yeah, why not? We had it most of my life and it hurt no one. | |
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