Cinderella Man
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“Cinderella Man” is a stolid, old-fashioned but moving film directed by Ron Howard. It combines elements of “Rocky” and “Seabiscuit” as it tells the rags-to-riches true story of boxer James J. Braddock, played by Russell Crowe.
In the late 1920s Braddock was a highly ranked
light-heavyweight fighter, but fractured hands made him unable to compete
effectively. After losing a string of bouts, he was forced to take a job on the
So, after a brief introduction showing the up-and-coming Braddock, we find him living in a meager basement apartment with his wife Mae (Renée Zellweger) and three young children. Whenever Braddock fails to get selected by a straw boss in the demeaning morning shape up ritual, he is forced to go home without money to pay for food or other necessities. The film pulls no punches as it shows Mae Braddock mixing water with milk so that it will last longer. Apart from John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath,” this is the only movie that I can recall showing life as it was in the Great Depression. That is no small achievement.
In an article on the making of the film that appeared in the
In high school, Howard made a 30-minute documentary about the Depression, interviewing his father and others and using old photos.
He told the NY Times:
''What was really shocking to me were the images of poverty in big cities. Whenever you'd see poor straggling kids with the New York City skyline in the background, or you'd see these men, still dressed in their business suits but standing in a breadline, it was as least as devastating as the Okies with all their stuff packed on a Model T. I wanted to remind people that the working poor existed then, and we have it today. While the economy is mostly up and then sometimes down -- the Internet bubble bursting felt a little bit like '29, where people had overextended and fallen into that trap again -- we're anxious. Our population is anxious. We're not in a depression, thank God, but I think it's crossing our minds that something could happen, things could change, and not for the better, for the worse.”
In one memorable scene in “Cinderella Man,” Braddock goes to
In June of 1934, Braddock was thrown in as a last-minute
substitute for a bout with top heavyweight contender John “Corn”
When Braddock was at his most desperate, he was reduced to applying for relief payments at a government office. After he started making money again, he went back to the office and paid back exactly what he had received. In including this scene, Howard explained its importance to the NY Times: “As much as it [receiving government assistance] ate at him, it saved his family. It's this kind of harmony, in a way, between a governmental system that would offer support, and a population that wouldn't exploit it.”
Unfortunately, this feeds into a prevailing mythology about government hand-outs that grew up during the Reagan administrations and continues unabated. It views aid to the needy as a kind of favor that often goes unappreciated. Unlike the Irish-American Braddock who was anxious to get back on his own feet and pay off his debts to the government, there are ostensibly far less honest people who use such handouts as a way to buy booze or drugs.
In another key scene, Wilson and Braddock are seen
discussing the problems of finding work on the docks in a waterfront bar.
In a very real sense, Howard’s take on the Great Depression is in the tradition of Frank Capra. Although Capra obviously made movies calling attention to the plight of working people in the 1930s, he did not view political action as a means to redress these conditions. It was instead a kind of old-fashioned “roll up your sleeves” ethos that was championed in films such as “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
In order to get the audience to identify with an underdog like James J. Braddock, Howard felt it necessary to turn Max Baer into a stock villain. Baer is seen warning Braddock not to take on the fight unless he wanted to be killed like his previous victims. He also tells him that he might sleep with his wife after he is dead and buried.
In real life, Max Baer was nothing like this. He preferred
partying to fighting and only saw it as a necessary evil to make a living. In
other words, he was not that much different from any other fighter.
Furthermore, after Frankie Campbell died from the beating administered by Baer
in 1930, a traumatized Baer cried and had nightmares long afterwards. Baer was charged
with manslaughter, but was cleared of all charges. He gave purses from
succeeding bouts to
Although no attention is drawn to it in “Cinderella Man,” you can see a Star of David on Baer’s trunks during the fight with Braddock and in an earlier fight in the film with Primo Carnera. Baer first wore the Jewish Star in a bout with the German Max Schmeling in 1933. Although Schmeling was no Nazi by any stretch of the imagination, Hitler stated that his championship vindicated Aryan superiority. At this point Baer proclaimed his Jewish identity and turned the fight into a struggle for racial justice, just as Joe Louis would a few years later. There is some controversy whether Baer was Jewish, but some researchers are convinced that his father was probably half-Jewish. Whatever the case, he became a hero to Jews after beating Schmeling.
Primo Carnera was also a fascist
icon. This oversized but under-talented heavyweight was hailed by Mussolini as
a symbol of the new
In the 1950s, Budd Schulberg wrote a movie titled “The Harder They Fall” that was based on the Carnera-Baer fight. It was one of a legion of exposés about the fight game. It was no coincidence that Schulberg also wrote the screenplay for “On the Waterfront.” Schulberg was forced to become an informer against the Communist Party in the 1950s. As an ex-party member himself, he was given a choice of naming names or being blacklisted himself. Like other ex-CP’ers, Schulberg remained attracted to ‘social’ issues, but lost the radicalism of his youth. “The Harder They Fall” was a polemic against the corruption of the boxing industry, but stopped short of addressing the question of why capitalist society mounts such latter-day gladiator contests.
That question gets to the heart of how class society is
constructed. Professional sports in general, and boxing in particular,
expresses the cash nexus that is intrinsic to commodity production. The boxer
is simply super-exploited labor. Even though James J. Braddock left the
blue-collar world of the
It is doubtful that
One way the film might have realized a profit is if it had
selected a less costly actor than Russell Crowe. There other reasons to have
passed him over. One cannot think of anybody less suited to play the
self-effacing and likeable James J. Braddock. Crowe has been in the news lately
after pummeling a hotel desk clerk with a telephone in a moment of pique. Last March
he told an Australian magazine that Osama bin Laden
wanted to kidnap him as part of a “cultural destabilization plot.” In this
particular instance, one might have considered giving critical support to bin
Laden.