Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: With Southpaw stepping into the ring next week, and the Rocky spinoff Creed on its way this autumn, let’s cheer on some of the great boxing movies of yesteryear.
Body And Soul (1947)
The dawn of modern film acting—in which exponents of several different varieties of the Stanislavskian Moscow Art Theatre style, all loosely grouped together as “Method,” became prevalent in American film—is usually dated to the early/mid-1950s advent of Marlon Brando and James Dean, two of the most romanticized and influential actors ever to live. But Brando and Dean had precedent, in an actor with every bit of their talent and pure physical force of being, who like Dean died far too young, but unlike Dean failed to die under as appealingly poetic circumstances. That actor was John Garfield.
Body And Soul is Garfield’s apex as a performer, in which his character, boxing champion Charley Davis, embodies a kind of reified experience of the working classes under capitalism. He comes from humble beginnings, and is driven by ambition and a naïve sense of the glamour of wealth to risk his very physical body to make as much money as he can. Eventually, he realizes that the part that’s been written for him to play is a man who punches other men, and who is punched by them—someone who sheds blood for the entertainment of others. Body And Soul is a fairly progressive movie even by the standards of nearly 70 years later; for 1947, it was far out enough that its star, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, and director Robert Rossen (as well as supporting player Anna Revere) were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Garfield, Polonsky, and Revere were all blacklisted, with only Rossen able to escape permanent sanction by naming names.