Smash Hit, the excellent essay assortment from web site contributor David Curcio, garnered nothing however enthusiastic evaluations when it was printed final yr and we’re proud to re-feature right here an excerpt, a part of Curcio’s insightful tackle a timeless addition to the combat movie canon, The Tougher They Fall. That includes Humphrey Bogart’s ultimate starring position, the Oscar nominated film garnered widespread important acclaim as a brutal and unflinching portrayal of the darkish facet of prizefighting. As at all times, Curcio is erudite and entertaining as he revisits a real movie noir basic. Test it out:
Nothing in need of a wholesale indictment of corruption within the combat recreation, Mark Robson’s The Tougher They Fall addressed boxing’s prison ties with extra antipathy than any movie earlier than or since. Writing in The Unbiased, Ken Jones noticed that the movie was “launched when the newspapers had been stuffed with investigations into boxing.” However the sport’s prison ties had been splashing the highest folds for over twenty years. Child Galahad had been launched a full nineteen years prior, and Robson had directed Champion in 1949. In 1950, mob management had come to a head when Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver launched his televised investigations into organized crime. Whereas boxing wasn’t the point of interest of what got here to be often known as “the Hearings,” it figured largely.
Budd Schulburg wrote the movie’s supply novel of the identical identify in 1947, the identical yr “The Bronx Bull,” Jake LaMotta, botched a dive in opposition to Billy Fox for which he was to reply 13 years later earlier than a televised Committee listening to. Schulburg, who additionally penned the screenplay for the 1954 redemption story of Marlon Brando’s coulda’ been contender-cum-dock employee On the Waterfront, referred to as The Tougher They Fall, his “black valentine to the candy science of boxing.” Each guide and movie (the latter tailored for the display by Philip Yordan, a potential entrance for the blacklisted Schulburg) are equal to lifting a rock of corruption to disclose the squirming colony beneath: shifty vermin in double-breasted fits and money containers which are by no means fairly full sufficient.
The archetypal strong-armed boxer Primo Carnera is blatantly referenced within the gawkish Argentinian Toro Moreno (performed by skilled wrestler Mike Lane). It’s comprehensible why the ex-champion was saddened by this story of a towering, half-witted pawn for the Syndicate (a skinny euphemism that lent an air of company legitimacy to the mob), for nobody might fail to acknowledge the “Ambling Alp” within the gullible Moreno.
Upon The Tougher They Fall‘s launch, Carnera sued Schulburg and Columbia Footage for $1.5 million. A choose dismissed the costs with the apologia that, as a celeb, the fighter had relinquished “the suitable to privateness and [did] not regain it by altering his occupation from boxing to wrestling.” Carnera merely expressed remorse over by no means having had the chance to talk with Schulberg instantly. “It’s all true,” the fighter mentioned, “however I want he had come to me. I’d inform him a lot extra.”
The Humphrey Bogart-Rod Steiger combo drew audiences craving additional exposés of fictional gangsters as stand-ins for the true deal: tight-lipped sensible guys who’d graced their tv units each night time amid the Hearings. Eddie Muller writes that the prototypical noir prison is characterised as having “discovered methods to fold [his] rackets into the straining streams of the capitalist financial system.” This being the case, Owney Madden, together with his possession of Carnera (amongst others), was a first-rate skilled. So too is Steiger’s Nick Benko, a unfastened avatar of the prison who, Carnera biographer Joseph Web page writes, “had bled [Carnera] dry.”
By 1956, Humphrey Bogart’s world-weary cynicism had bottomed out. The actor’s bodily decline was conspicuous as he vented belligerence over the Hollywood blacklist. His pores and skin and hair had turned gray. His enamel had been yellow. These debauched, alcoholic nights had taken their toll, and the icon recognized to mildew his characters to accommodate his personal taut charisma might now not disguise the misanthropy he carried below the burden of the Home Un-American Actions Committee. The Tougher They Fall was to be Bogart’s ultimate movie. 9 months after its launch, the actor died at fifty-seven.
HUAC stored a pointy eye on Bogart from the second it turned its consideration to Hollywood in 1947, and the heading “THE BOGART SITUATION” appeared repeatedly in authorities wires and memos. In a remark that earned him “Marxist standing” with the conservative press, the fiercely liberal actor griped that HUAC would “nail anybody who even scratched his ass through the Nationwide Anthem.”
Though he advised the press, “I’ve completely no use for communism, or anybody who serves that philosophy,” Bogart nonetheless adhered to the tenet that freedom of faith and occasion affiliation was an American birthright. His spouse, Lauren Bacall, spearheaded the Committee for the First Modification (CFA). Consisting of twenty-five Hollywood notables, together with Bette Davis, John Garfield, John Huston, Ring Lardner, Burgess Meredith, Edward G. Robinson, and Robert Ryan, the Committee shaped the identical yr HUAC set its sights on Tinseltown. Formidable in its membership, Bogart served because the Committee’s public face solely to develop more and more disheartened as he watched once-trusted colleagues and leftist luminaries (notably the staunch Democrat Jack Warner) squeal below HUAC questioning. As the general public face of the CFA, Bogart was drained. He was additionally ornery, with a button he wore on his lapel at events that learn, “No causes, politics, or faith mentioned right here.”
Steiger’s Nick Benko, his cadre of goons, and Moreno’s handler, Luís (primarily based on Carnera’s French supervisor Leon See) stand round a hoop. Exterior the fitness center, a washed-out ex-sportswriter Eddie Willis (a washed-out Bogart) climbs from a taxi and ascends the steps. He’s come to listen to out a proposition Benko has for him: how would Eddie wish to make a couple of bucks by popping out of retirement to ingratiate the general public to this behemoth who, like Carnera, was found in a touring circus?
A wolf in lamb’s garments, Benko is characterised by Schulberg as having clawed his technique to the highest by the “fixed software of the principal Do Unto Others As You Would Not Have Them Do Unto You.” Benko’s outer mien of altruism belies the greed and cruelty with which fighters needed to contend in members of the mob—notably people who operated below the auspices of the group aptly titled Homicide, Inc. As their prison exercise got here to gentle, public suspicion over doubtful combat outcomes—nonetheless integral to the last decade’s social, cultural, and ethnical zeitgeist—was confirmed.
Toro Moreno is sparring with the fitness center hand, George (the real-life ex-heavyweight champ Jersey Joe Walcott), as Eddie appears to be like on with the identical bemusement Schulberg makes use of to explain the reporter’s preliminary response: “His arms had been monstrous, the scale of his toes was monstrous and his outsized head immediately grew to become my conception of the Neanderthal Man who roamed the world some forty thousand years in the past.”
The sportswriter laughs mirthlessly at Benko’s provide of $250 every week as he pulls on a Chesterfield, the steadfast prop that Bogart wielded with extra authority than most males might muster with a Smith and Wesson. Off-screen, Bogart’s well being was so diminished by nicotine consumption that he required common breaks whereas filming to take care of the wracking coughs that may seize him for upward of 5 minutes.
“An previous fighter who’s been punched round, spilled his blood freely for the followers’ amusement solely to wind up broke, battered, and forgotten has received the stuff of tragedy for me,” Eddie muses within the supply novel. He has no real interest in this lurching Argentine yokel swatting powder puffs, however Benko has a plan. All Eddie has to do is construct the child up with some ink within the sports activities part, and the Syndicate will handle the remainder.
Eddie’s eyes slender. This should be a joke. But when it isn’t, 5 hundred might work. 5 hundred bucks every week to persuade the general public that this human punching bag is the true deal. It gained’t be simple, it gained’t be trustworthy, and dealing with a prison is at all times a shady prospect. However for Eddie, it’s additionally cash within the financial institution. To Benko, it’s fairly easy: “Overlook your self-respect.” Cash’s cash, and Eddie has no motive to concern himself with what Schulberg calls “such mathematical issues as methods to minimize a pie into 5 quarters.”
In Shadow Field: An Novice within the Ring, George Plimpton wrote how a “combat may be over in a couple of seconds… [and] a few thousand phrases should be composed out of an act which very probably came about when the reporter was trying down.” The prospect of a return to sports activities writing holds no attraction to Eddie. The love is gone, however he’s good at what he does. That’s why he was employed.
Following a string of pre-arranged bouts, Moreno begins to consider that he can combat. However Benko’s not prepared to offer the child any money simply but. He’s received a couple of issues of his personal, particularly an investigation into the egregious dive throughout Moreno’s first combat. Eddie wonders if it’s time to stroll away, so Benko ups his charge. In any case, somebody has to easy issues over, and it may’t be a distinguished gangster.
Regardless of the bathe drain that runs pink with the blood of the boxer who flubbed the dive (courtesy of Benko’s goons), the Boxing Commissioner appears amenable to wiping the slate. He can see Moreno’s lack of prowess in addition to anybody. Nonetheless, by the use of discreet warning, he has Eddie watch a filmed interview with a punch-drunk ex-pug performed with well-earned credibility by a real-life retired membership fighter whose voice resonates with the smack of damaged enamel and whose nostril has seen extra breaks than a gallery of Greek sculpture.
Dwelling in his automobile after a profession of 220 fights, the once-noble pugilist bemoans the dearth of retirement plans for fighters. However it’s the one commerce he’s ever recognized. When the interviewer asks about his future plans, he thinks for a second. “What future?” The message was not misplaced on up to date audiences, fueling furor over the within mechanisms of the sport that they had come to find was a racket that destroyed its practitioners. “Only a few fighters get the consideration of racehorses,” wrote Schulberg, “that are put out to pasture to develop previous with dignity and luxury after they haven’t received it anymore.”
A bunch of managers visits Bento to gripe about all these dives their fighters have been taking for Moreno. Certain, they’re well-compensated, however the losses are sapping their very own guys’ incomes potential, they usually respectfully ask for compensation. Whereas the gangster hears them out, Eddie synopsizes the crux of their predicament through Bogart’s attribute, punctuation-free elocution: “All you do is spot a robust child, purchase him a license for ten {dollars}, hire him a towel for a dime and throw him within the ring. For that you simply seize a 3rd of his purse, seize one other third by padding the expense account, then cheat him out of half of what’s left. You’re the managers, that’s for certain.”
The reproach is among the many most concise summaries of the operations and shoddy {qualifications} the vast majority of managers held through the fifties. Much more telling is the rejoinder from one of many managers: “Fighters come and go. Managers are right here eternally. Fighters are dust.” Perhaps, however not whereas they’re incomes.
Benko affords a $25,000 donation to a charitable group to host a combat that includes Moreno as a contender for the heavyweight title. When a priest on the board objects to taking cash from a hood, Eddie mollifies him with a little bit of philosophy even the padre can get behind: “Cash’s not evil in and of itself. It’s the best way it’s used that’s the figuring out issue.”
Life-size picket cutouts in Moreno’s likeness adorn the tops of buses as if able to punch by means of tunnels—or get their heads ripped to shreds inside them. The fighter has formally “invaded” Chicago, and Louís once more asks Benko for cash for his boy. If Moreno’s being groomed as contender, why can’t he get a style of the motion, too? As with Leon See, who maintained what was euphemistically referred to as a “partnership” with Owney Madden’s affiliate “Broadway” Invoice Duffy, Benko tells Luis it’s nonetheless a no-go. They’re nonetheless within the pink. The supervisor balks, and Benko has his goons throw him out. Fairly easy enterprise. As for See, Paul Gallico gingerly recounts the supervisor as having been despatched again to France “for his well being.”
On the rooftop backyard of a Chicago lodge, Eddie skulks behind Benko and his boys, who convene with Moreno’s upcoming opponent, Gus Dundee. Performed by ex-heavyweight Pat Comiskey (whose flawless document was damaged by a loss to Max Baer in 1940), Dundee’s sort is epitomized within the damaged, getting old fighter of James T. Farrell’s grim 1930 quick story Twenty-5 Bucks. “His face had been punched into hash: cauliflower ears, a flattened nostril… shifty with the fleeting nervous cowardice of a scared and damaged man.”
Dundee’s neurodegeneration is woven into his motion, his speech, and, apparently, his reminiscence. His complications have worsened since his final combat, and he begs out of the Moreno bout. Physician’s orders. However a steely glare from Benko prompts a fast re-diagnosis: Perhaps it isn’t complications in any case. “Oh yeah,” Dundee scrambles to alter his story. “I’m allergic to Penicillin!” Benko doesn’t give a rat’s ass what it was as long as Dundee goes down, and the envelope containing $10,000 he arms him needs to be greater than sufficient incentive. With a gate certain to herald over 1,000,000 bucks, what’s a bit chump change to offer the previous pug a heat send-off? For starters, it’s a hell of much more than Madden or Broadway Invoice Duffy would have finished.
Eddie’s apathy qualifies him as certainly one of a small, choose few who can berate Nick Benko with out getting his ribs damaged within the again room by 5 thugs and ten sneakers. He tells the gangster that Luís must be purchased off if he’s being despatched again, and it’s not a request. Benko isn’t snug being spoken to this fashion and darkly reminds Eddie that nobody right here is indispensable. “Then fireplace me.” However Benko needs to maintain all people joyful, so he throws the supervisor on a airplane with 5 Gs. Perhaps he wants Eddie greater than he’d care to confess. –David Curcio
For the remainder of Curcio’s glorious ruminations on The Tougher They Fall, alongside together with his insights on nineteen different important films within the combat movie canon, get your arms on Smash Hit from Armin Lear Press; you gained’t be disillusioned. As writer Bob Batchelor declares: “Smash Hit is a primary spherical knockout stuffed with robust writing and deep perception.”
