Cinderella Man

I saw Cinderella Man at the dollar theater last night.

I'm terrible at writing movie reviews, so I'm just going to give you a disjointed list of bullet point impressions.

• The boxing scenes were amazing, especially the sound effects. Rocky (the original one) has always been the gold standard of fight choreography for me, but this was better.
• It was interesting looking at Max Baer, and thinking "That's Jethro Bodine's father".
• Baer's character was played as sort of the Mr. T or Ivan Drago of the 1930's. He was portrayed as a star-tripping thug, with very little conscience over the fact that he'd killed "Two men" in the ring. One of the movie's key scenes shows Crowe's Jim Braddock watching film of Baer knocking out Frankie Campbell, who died of a brain hemorrhage later on. Baer is shown as having very little conscience about the event - even taunting Braddock with the possibility before their title bout.

  But the truth may have been very different:

  Baer fought Frankie Campbell (brother of Brooklyn Dodgers Hall Of Famer Adolph Camilli) on August 25, 1930 in San Francisco and knocked him out. Campbell never regained consciousness. After lying on the canvas for nearly an hour, an ambulance finally transported Campbell to a nearby hospital where he eventually died of extensive brain hemorrages. An autopsy revealed that Baer's devastating blows had knocked Campbell's entire brain loose from the connective tissue holding it in place within his cranium. This fatality shocked Baer; according to his son, Max Baer, Jr., he cried and had nightmares over the incident for decades afterwards. He was charged with manslaughter. Although he was eventually acquitted of all charges, the California State Boxing Commission still banned him from any in-ring activity within their state for the next year. He gave purses from succeeding bouts to Campbell's family, but lost four of his next six fights. He fared better when Jack Dempsey took him under his wing, and Baer put Campbell's children through college.

  And while I've been hearing about the Lewis/Schmeling bouts for most of my life, I had no idea that Baer had some history in the area:

  Baer beat the likes of Walter Cobb and Kingfish Levinsky. In 1933, he boxed Max Schmeling (with a Star of David embroidered on his trunks [1], which he swore to wear in every bout thereafter) at Yankee Stadium, dominating the rugged German fighter into the tenth round when the referee stopped the match.

  Because he defeated Hitler's favorite, and had some Jewish ancestry, he became a hero to the Jewish people.

• Dramatic license aside, the depiction of the Great Depression was outstanding - Braddock's scenes of waiting to try to find jobs on the docks, waiting in the relief line, heating their awful apartment with candles and sending their kids to live with relatives when they got sick and the power got shut off...I'm very tempted to make my kids go later this week.
• The depiction of '30s New York (and Bergen, New Jersey) were also fascinating. I can see why the likes of Lileks are so fascinated with urban architecture - the way cities looked and felt and smelled back then, and their slow but steady evolution, is something that fascinates me more and more. The atmospherics are fantasic.

I give it three shots in the dark...

Posted by Mitch at August 11, 2005 06:34 AM | TrackBack