Body and Soul
I’ll admit I wasn’t looking forward to this movie; I put it off for a while. But actually it was really good.
What I liked about it was that it was a movie focused around boxing, but it wasn’t really like a cliched sports movie. Most of the boxing is only ever in montage. There are a couple of fights shown in more detail, but neither of those are ever about ‘will he win?’. They are tense for entirely different reasons, and that’s what I really liked about it.
This is more of a drama, about a local boy who makes it big and then gets seduced by money and fame. Nothing groundbreaking really, but done very well. There are definitely shades of Rocky and Raging Bull in this - or perhaps it would be fairer to say there are shades of Body and Soul in them. My favourite line in this is when Charley and his mother are poor and she doesn’t want him to fight, she tells him he might as well buy a gun and shoot himself and he replies, "You need money to buy a gun!"
Acting was good in this, especially from Anne Revere as Charley’s mother and Canada Lee as Ben. Charley himself was very well drawn - not an idealistic hero, but not really a narcissistic villain either. I do have to say I was more convinced by the way Peg’s relationship developed with Anna than her relationship with Charley, who comes across as a bit of a pest at first. All of the characters felt really distinct. They may have been types, but they were well-rounded ones.
The camerawork and editing were good too - not too flashy but the montages were done well and it really captured the immediacy and the state of mind in the fight scenes. (Poor job from the referees - both of those fights would have been stopped before the end these days! But that would have robbed it of some of the drama…). The score employed some fairly tiresome cliches but it didn't really impact too much on the movie.
I thought the ending would be more downbeat than it actually was - in fact it almost seemed to be trying too hard to give it a happy ending, it wasn’t quite convincing.
WARNING: "Ending" spoilers below
I don’t have a problem with Charley winning the fight after all, that made sense to me. He doesn’t go in intending to. He’s clearly not quite in a clear frame of mind by that point after so many blows to the head (and there’s a clear parallel with Ben in his final scene). It’s not hard to see why an impulsive character would, after the literal and metaphorical knocks he’s had, want to fight back at whoever’s in front of him. I have a bit more of a problem with the film presenting this as a victory, a plausible happy ending. He might not care if he dies, I can even see it as a plausible that it’s a suicide mission in a way - his last fight, going out still the champion. But him going off with Peg into happy retirement right under Roberts’ nose? I think if the film continued for another ten minutes we would have seen Peg dead in a ditch.
I don’t have a problem with Charley winning the fight after all, that made sense to me. He doesn’t go in intending to. He’s clearly not quite in a clear frame of mind by that point after so many blows to the head (and there’s a clear parallel with Ben in his final scene). It’s not hard to see why an impulsive character would, after the literal and metaphorical knocks he’s had, want to fight back at whoever’s in front of him. I have a bit more of a problem with the film presenting this as a victory, a plausible happy ending. He might not care if he dies, I can even see it as a plausible that it’s a suicide mission in a way - his last fight, going out still the champion. But him going off with Peg into happy retirement right under Roberts’ nose? I think if the film continued for another ten minutes we would have seen Peg dead in a ditch.
Altogether a good film, I liked it.