T hree of my greatest joys in life are watching sport, going to the theatre and playing violin. So it felt almost embarrassing to discover a classic play that combined all three, yet I’d never heard of it before. To be fair, Golden Boy has not been performed in the UK in more than 40 years and its curious premise may be one of the reasons.
Written in 1937, it’s about a gifted young violinist in Depression-era America who also has a talent for boxing and is lured away from music by the pursuit of fame and money in the ring. In the current London production he is played by Josh O’Connor, who Knives Out fans have seen with his fists up as a boxer turned priest in Wake Up Dead Man. O’Connor is no less convincing on stage than on film, attacking a heavy bag with the kind of power that does indeed make you worry for his precious hands. Nor is that ab definition entirely the work of a makeup artist.
A drama about a fatal choice between a future as struggling musician or stone-cold killer may seem unlikely, perhaps to the point of absurdity. It didn’t feel so in the room. For a start, playwright Clifford Odets, one of the foundational voices of American theatre, was reflecting a time when New York life was bleak, opportunities were few and boxing presented a mirage of escape from poverty. Equally, it was clear we were watching a kind of allegory. As our hero finds his feet inside the ropes, he is losing his more tender self and the chance of a quieter contentment.
Boxing has always provided rich material for stories on stage and screen. There are more Hollywood movies about boxing than any other sport. Writers, directors and performers are endlessly drawn to it, despite the common belief, as held in Odets’s play, that an artistic nature is in opposition to physical violence. Perhaps part of the appeal is the way a fighter in the ring resembles the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, a human figure stripped down to its rawest state – facing destiny and learning the limits of autonomy. Perhaps it’s the performance potential of the choreographed ballet across the canvas as bodies duck, dodge, dance and explosively collide.
Whatever the reason, it appears you can load a boxing narrative with any amount and variety of subtext, psychodrama or heavyweight (pun intended) themes. Thus it is possible to have an Odets play set in the grim exploitative fight-world of the 1930s that is an excoriating critique of capitalism and the dark dangers of the American Dream, but also to have Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man. The 2005 film, in which Russell Crowe portrays the real-life James J Braddock during his title fight against Max Baer, manages to turn the exact same environment into a feelgood fairytale of muscular Christianity.
Is it the fight game’s complex, even ambivalent, ethics that have kept dramatists coming back? Alfred Hitchcock, that master not just of suspense but of moral ambiguity, loved boxing: his only self-penned film, The Ring, came out 99 years ago this month. It is a silent black-and-white number, the kind where women wear cloche hats and circular eyeliner, and people’s limbs leap jankily about between frames. But it is still notable for its realistic fight scenes – the lead actor, Carl Brisson, had been a Danish and European champion – and for the director’s use of pioneering point-of-view camerawork to show a fighter sliding into a concussion.
Hitchcock’s protagonist was a wannabe adulterer. In the 1940s, a slew of noirs found the boxing world an ideal backdrop for tales of vice and viciousness – Body and Soul, Champion, The Set-Up. Stanley Kubrick’s second feature-length film, Killer’s Kiss, belongs to the same genre and the tagline on the original poster wasn’t pulling any punches either – “Her Soft Mouth Was The Road to Sin-Smeared Violence!”
Then there’s Martin Scorsese. His Raging Bull, generally considered the acme of boxing movies, remains a brutal watch, portraying its real-life subject, Jake LaMotta, as an abusive and pathological antihero. Scorsese hadn’t wanted to make the film – it was his friend Robert De Niro who was fascinated by LaMotta’s self-destructive story and the physical transformation he would have to take on to tell it.
There, too, lies a huge part of boxing’s longevity in drama – the ultimate challenge it presents for actors. It is almost impossible to fake a boxer’s physique, especially on the unforgiving cinema screen: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Will Smith and Hilary Swank, the big-names happily put themselves through months of training hell and daily sparring to prove their commitment to authenticity. Mark Wahlberg, a boxing nut, had a ring built in his home and honed his craft for five years before shooting The Fighter. You have got to feel sorry for the guy that it was his co-star Christian Bale who ended up with the Oscar.
Michael B Jordan, star of the Creed franchise, describes the process of making the films as like “therapy”, because he gets to immerse himself so completely in his role. “I like living like a fighter, training like a fighter,” he said. “I’ve broken my hand a few times doing this movie. Hands swollen. Like, I wanna feel it. I want to go home and ache.” Sylvester Stallone’s contribution to boxing, meanwhile, has earned him a place in its international hall of fame.
If you want proof of how circular the relationship between the sport and its fictional depiction has become, look no further. Stallone’s 1976 script for Rocky was inspired by the bout between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali the year before. In 2016, Liev Schreiber played Wepner in the arthouse biopic The Bleeder. Next month, we will see the fight onscreen in Stallone’s own biopic, I Play Rocky. It is an extraordinary truth that as boxing’s own popularity has declined, its appeal to audiences at one remove has never wavered.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
