Bloodfist: Remembering “Body and Soul”

It’s hard to believe how many Hollywood films (and international films, for that matter) have focused on prizefighting. Such ring-set films seem to have a built-in audience: Wikipedia lists 50 boxing movies that over the years have grossed between $3 million and $300 million at the worldwide box office. At the very top of the list are five Rocky movies, as well as three Creed films that can be considered Rocky spinoffs with an African-American twist. A number of highly successful boxing movies are biopics: see Ali (2001), with “The Greatest” played by Will Smith; The Hurricane (1999), about the ringside and legal woes of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter; The Great White Hope (1970), the slightly fictionalizing story of early Black prizefighter Jack Johnson; and of course Martin Scorsese’s great Raging Bull (1980) in which Robert De Niro plays the deeply troubled Jake La Motta. (I could name a good many more boxing biopics, but enough is enough.)

 Then there are boxing-related films that qualify as comedies. See for instance, Danny Kaye in a musical called The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), about a neighborhood milkman who accidentally becomes a boxing sensation. The high-grossing Any Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980), both star no less than Clint Eastwood as a trucker who’s also a bare-knuckles brawler, and who roams the American West along with an orangutan named Clyde. In a more sentimental vein, a desperate Charlie Chaplin tries boxing in City Lights (1931), a film that many consider his masterpiece. Even more sentimental is another 1931 flick, The Champ, starring Wallace Beery as an over-the-hill prizefighter desperately trying to care for his young son. And let’s not forget Hilary Swank as a female boxer whose dreams are shattered, along with her body, in Clint Eastwood’s poignant Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004)

 My parents, who loathed John Wayne westerns as well as anything to do with boxing, made room in their hearts for John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). It’s the rollicking story of a former pro boxer with a guilty conscience who must reluctantly fight on behalf of the lass he loves. It’s a carefree Gaelic romp just right for St. Patrick’s Day.

 On the other hand, there’s 1947’s Body and Soul, which is a great deal more somber, but is often considered one of the best boxing films of all time. This designation is partly because it was shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, who later won Oscars for both The Rose Tattoo and Hud. If part of the attraction of boxing on film is that it allows for intense close-ups of two human bodies in motion, Howe’s in-tight camerawork beautifully conveys the sport’s intensity. Meanwhile director Robert Rossen’s strong cast, led by John Garfield, punches home a powerful story about a young would-be boxer, his girl, his worried mother, and the dangerous men who control him. The film was a critical and commercial hit, accruing three Oscar nominations (it won a statuette for its editing). But its cast and crew paid a high price. The story, which specifically pointed to Jews and African Americans as victimized by powerful WASP interests, was not a safe one to be telling in an era when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the rise. Star Garfield, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, and director Robert Rossen all found themselves called to testify before HUAC, and only Rossen (who eventually agreed to name names) emerged unscathed. Garfield continued to make films, but was deeply scarred by the HUAC experience. He died in 1952 at age 39. 

 

R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

Searching for . . . (“The Searchers”)

I admit it: westerns aren’t my favorite genre. And it’s taken me quite a while to like one of John Ford’s most admired westerns, The Searchers. But I could always see why the film was popular. Shot in 1956, it takes full advantage of color cinematography in showing off Ford’s all-time favorite locale, Monument Valley, with its stark red buttes pointing toward the bright blue sky. 

Anyone wanting to know more about The Searchers should seek out my colleague Glenn Frankel’s 2014 book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Suffice it to say here that this film has had a huge influence on other major filmmakers, including David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas, who applied some of Ford’s shooting techniques to his Star Wars films. As for me, I returned to The Searchers after many years because it was referenced in a new biography of the actress Vera Miles. Who knew she was credited as the film’s third lead, after John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter?  All I remembered was Natalie Wood as Debbie, the young white woman who’d spent nine long years as a Comanche captive: after all, she was what the search of the title was all about.

Vera Miles, I should explain, plays a major role in what Roger Ebert once called the film’s “silly romantic subplot.” The feisty daughter of settlers, Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen is in love with Martin Pawley, the earnest young man whom Wayne’s Ethan Edwards reluctantly allows to accompany him on his quest for the missing girl. What stands out about Wayne’s character is how thoroughly he detests anything to do with Native American life. His intrinsic racism extends particularly to captive women whom he views as defiled by Indian “bucks.” Given that Wayne is generally seen on film –by Ford and others—in a heroic light, it’s uncomfortable accepting him as a bigot who goes out of his way to be cruel. But there’s a tiny moment at film’s end that shows us a sliver of good will in his character, before he leaves the reunited family to enjoy some happy domesticity and heads out solo into the unknown.

Watching The Searchers again reminded me of how many films are structured around a quest for a missing person, usually a family member. Some examples include Missing (1982), Searching (2018) and what seem like a raft of Liam Neeson flicks, including Taken (2008). But  I was reminded of a very different search in an extremely arty 1999 movie called Three Seasons, the first film shot in Vietnam after President Clinton lifted a longtime embargo. Set in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it contains several plot lines that explore the changes in Vietnam since the infamous war of the Sixties and Seventies. In one  key subplot, Harvey Keitel plays a former American G.I.  who has returned to the country to find a daughter he’s never seen. 

I saw this film for a funny reason. At a favorite L.A. restaurant I got to know a waitress who was friendly and capable, with a faintly exotic look. It turns out she was Amerasian, and had just been cast as Keitel’s elusive daughter. I watched the film with excitement, waiting for Lola to come on screen. And at long last she did. At the very end of the film, we saw—through a window—the two sitting in a cafe, deep in conversation. What did father and daughter talk about? I have no idea. The movie ended there, leaving the viewer outside looking in. 

Whatever Happened to Vera Miles?

Vera Miles? Whatever happened to her? And who was she, anyway? Miles, who’s alive and well at 95, was an Oklahoma-born, Kansas-bred beauty pageant winner who found her way to Hollywood in 1949. She played key supporting parts in films directed by John Ford (The Searchers) and Alfred Hitchcock (The Wrong Man, in which she was the wife of Henry Fonda, playing a real-life jazz musician falsely accused of robbery). She also was several times cast by the Disney folks as a lovable wife and mom, often in tandem with Fred MacMurray or Brian Keith, perhaps reflecting her own real-life role as the mother of four children. She also regularly appeared in featured roles on television. Despite all this, in her forty-five year career she never truly moved beyond second-tier stardom. 

Things might have turned out differently in the late Fifties if Miles, who was then under personal contract to Alfred Hitchcock, had gone through with Hitchcock’s plan to star her as the female lead in Vertigo. Hitchcock favorite Grace Kelly had moved from the soundstages of L.A. to the throne of Monaco, and Miles was singled out as a suitable replacement. Said the Master of Suspense, “Miss Miles is going to be one of the biggest stars of Hollywood because she has understanding and depth and ability and lovely legs.”  To that end, he ordered a fabulous wardrobe for Miles, and cranked up the Hollywood publicity machine. But life intervened. Hitchcock’s need for gall bladder surgery delayed the production, as did time-off requested by the hard-working male lead James Stewart. And then Miles had the nerve to become pregnant with her third child, a move that Hitchcock considered something of a personal insult. (He was to say in later years, “I hate pregnant women because then they have children.”)  So Kim Novak got the plum dual role of Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton instead, though Hitchcock did feature Miles in his television dramas and in a key supporting part as Marion Crane’s sister in Psycho.

I know all the above because of Christopher McKittrick’s new biography, Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away, coming in March from University Press of Kentucky. There’s no question that McKittrick has done his homework. Though he never had the opportunity to speak to Miles directly, he seems to know everything there is to know about her life and times, and in passing fills us in on everyone with whom she ever connected. Though it’s interesting seeing her on the set of masterworks like Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I was most impressed with Miles’ evolution in later years into a woman who knew how to stand up for herself, one who clearly saw the lack of meaty roles for women and became determined to do something about it. (I’d love to know what she thinks about the current crop of films like Anora, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez—as well as last year’s Poor Things—whereby today’s actresses are coming to dominate the industry in which she once played a significant part. As someone always considered ladylike, she might not be pleased by the outrageous roles Hollywood’s women are now undertaking.) 

McKittrick considers it refreshing that Miles, far from becoming a burned-out Hollywood cautionary tale, largely ran her career on her own terms. As he puts it, “If opportunities like that of Vertigo passed her by because she chose other, more personally fulfilling paths for her life, those were decisions she was happy to make and has continued to stand by in her retirement.”  

 

Paul Newman Holds His Own: “Fort Apache, The Bronx”

Paul Newman was well known to most movie fans (as well as to Hollywood casting directors) as the epitome of the tough, sexy American male, sometimes an iconoclast and a loner but always the most attractive guy in the room. Fellow macho-man Steve McQueen lumped himself with Newman when worrying that, in the wake of The Graduate, “ugly” guys like Dustin Hoffman might threaten the careers of classically handsome types. The funny thing is that my first awareness of Paul Newman made me categorize him as the wimp who doesn’t get the girl.   

Newman made his Broadway debut in 1953, in a featured role in William Inge’s explosive play, Picnic. Set in a small midwestern burg, it’s about the local beauty who defies convention when a handsome drifter comes to town on the eve of the annual picnic. Left behind in her passionate connection with the drifter is her longtime beau, a good guy but one who bears the limitations of his small-town upbringing. Newman would seem to be obvious casting as the hunk (that role went to Ralph Meeker), but instead he played the rejected boyfriend. Since I—living thousands of miles from New York City—was an inveterate reader of Broadway plays I never saw on stage, I jumped to the conclusion that Newman came off as a weakling.

 Not hardly, as fans of such landmark films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy would be quick to point out. Newman’s signature character is not always smart in his behavior, but he’s crafty, highly physical, has a disarming sense of humor, and (whatever his weaknesses) you can’t help but love him. These movies were all made in the Sixties, but in 1981 a gracefully ageing Newman (age 56) brought some of those same qualities to a nice little cop thriller called Fort Apache, the Bronx.

 Fort Apache, The Bronx appropriates the name of a 1948 John Ford western to describe a much-beleaguered police precinct house in New York City. (A former Bronx cop had used that same name in his published memoir, leading to a lawsuit that plagued the production.) Newman plays Murphy, a veteran cop with an ex-wife and a drinking problem. His partner, played by Ken Wahl, is something of a newbie, but the two are devoted to one another. They have far less affection for their fellow law officers, some of whom are bottom-of-the-barrel discards from other precincts. The new precinct captain, played by Edward Asner, wants to run things by the book, but fails to understand the challenges of a neighborhood in which drugs, guns, and prostitution rackets are everywhere. (Really, he should have stuck to journalism!) Not only does he trigger a riot but his new policies lead to a heinous crime by one of the boys in blue.

 The action of Fort Apache, The Bronx, kicks off with the apparently senseless murder of two rookie cops sitting in a squad car. The police never solve the crime, though we in the audience know from the start who’s behind it and why the culprit will never be brought to justice. This is just one of the indications that the problems spelled out in this film will not be solved anytime soon. It’s a grim message, but Newman’s character (despite the bitterness that leads him to consider an abrupt retirement) is a cop through and through. I’m grateful to director Daniel Petrie and screenwriter Heywood Gould for leaving us in the coda with a glimpse of Newman and his partner joyously doing what they do best.

“Cheyenne Autumn”: John Ford’s Native American Elegy

In Hollywood westerns, you can always count on Indians getting the short end of the stick. They’ve traditionally been portrayed as blood-thirsty savages out to threaten heroic white men (and their women), or else as ignorant hangers-on who loaf on the fringes of western towns. Late in his career, the great John Ford sought to rectify that. Ford had directed such classic westerns as 1939’s Stagecoach, in which we root for an eclectic group of travelers who face the threat of Apaches on the warpath. Later Ford films, like those in his so-called Cavalry Trilogy, show more sympathy for the Native American perspective, yet all continue to focus chiefly on white characters who wrestle with military strategies and romantic entanglements. But Ford’s close personal ties to the Navajo Nation (he shot many of his films in Monument Valley, with full cooperation from the native residents) led him to seek to dramatize a story of the U.S. government’s failure to keep its promises to Native American populations.

 In Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Ford took on what’s been called the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-1879. Historically, following the Battle of Little Big Horn, a number of Cheyenne tribes were forced by the U.S. military to trek from their tribal lands in Wyoming to a dismal reservation in Oklahoma. Hungry and dispirited in their new surroundings, the Cheyenne set out to return home, with U.S. Army troops in hot pursuit. Ford’s version, which ended up playing fast and loose with the historical record, was not entirely the film he hoped to make.

 I’m relying here on the words of my colleague, film historian Joseph McBride, who knew Ford and wrote the highly regarded Searching for John Ford: A Life. In an invaluable collection called Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies, Joe broaches Ford’s attitudes toward Native American culture. Ford attributed much of his warmth toward native tribes to his own proud Irish heritage: “My sympathy is all with the Indians. . . .  More than having received Oscars, what counts for me is having been made a blood brother of various Indian tribes. . . . Who better than an Irishman could understand the Indians, while still being stirred by the tales of the U.S. Cavalry? We were on both sides of the epic.”

 In making Cheyenne Autumn, Ford aimed to shoot in sober black & white, using subtitles for authentic Native American dialogue, and casting actors of genuine Indian descent. But to get financing, he had to agree to a full-color wide-screen epic full of stars like Edward G. Robinson and (in an odd comic detour from the main plotline) James Stewart as Wyatt Earp. The major Indian roles were played by Anglos and Mexicans (Ricardo Montalban, Dolores del Rio), with Italian-American Sal Mineo in a prominent part. The $6.6 million budget was the highest of Ford’s career, and led to a box-office flop.

 McBride, well aware of the movie’s failings, admits that Ford, for all his emotional connection to the Native American tribal lifestyle, was never able to truly get inside his Indian characters. In this film, says McBride, “Ford views the Cheyenne as symbols rather than people.” Still, he makes a good case for Cheyenne Autumn as “a work of visual poetry,” majestically evoking a tragedy of  the Old West. For me, this is best seen very early in the film, as the  Cheyenne quietly assemble at a military outpost, then stand stock-still to wait – for hours –to plead their case before a Congressional delegation that never arrives Their dignity in this ordeal never fails them. Visual poetry indeed.