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The boxing bell and the clock, the pugilist's purgatory. Fight night at the Paradise City Pavilion ("boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays"), blasting lights over the arena and outside a tenebrous boulevard. The prizefighter (Robert Ryan) is 35 going on 50, two decades and still "only one punch away" from the big time, just one tale in a dressing room of palookas. His record is so wobbly that his manager (George Tobias) takes gangland money for a dive and doesn't even bother telling him. When time comes for him to drop before the crooked upstart, he instead springs to life as the smirk slips from the lips of the capo (Alan Baxter). "Well, that's the way it is. You're a fighter, you gotta fight." The bruiser racket and its zombies, scanned from top to bottom and locked into a clenched real-time composition in Robert Wise's virtuosically squalid microcosm. Jumpy novices, seasoned losers with hamburger mugs, wiseguys clutching Bibles ("Hey, he's makin' book on the hereafter"), everybody has a tragic yarn, the irritable trainer listens and then thumbs through a pulp magazine titled Love. Meanwhile, the doleful wife (Audrey Totter) meanders through endless dance halls, railways and penny arcades in anticipation of Moreau in La Notte. The bout is an extended montage of fists and torsos slamming toward a severe close-up of Ryan's battered face against the blanched mat, like a Weegee flipbook punctuated by a Mantegna icon. (Savoring the spectacle is a riotously bloodthirsty audience, from the gleeful yowling of a hausfrau to the unholy gleam in a sightless patron's blank pupils.) The painstaking scraping of the sport's mystique builds to a back alley Calvary and wraps with a "Dreamland" sign flickering over a mangled figure. Kazan expands on it in On the Waterfront. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Wallace Ford, Percy Helton, Hal Baylor, James Edwards, and David Clarke. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |