One False Note

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2005)

Ron Howard's homage to boxer James J. Braddock is a good movie, well made with fine performances and its heart definitely in the right place. Some might criticize it for being full of Rocky-like clichés but this was a real-life Rocky and the story is told in an economical fashion that avoids the cartoonish nature of the Rocky series and thus becomes more moving- with one exception.
I'd read some boxing history in the past and I wondered if Max Baer, the fighter Braddock beats for the title, was really the nasty guy he's pictured as here. "The Encyclopedia of World Boxing Champions" by Jack McCallum, describes Baer in this manner: "Max was a man difficult to dislike. He possessed a lusty sense of humor, irresistible good nature and tremendous warmth for people. He chattered and charmed his way into the hearts of just about everybody." Somehow I didn't get that impression when Russell Crowe, as Braddock, asks Craig Bierko, as Max, to stop making comments about how he is going to kill Braddock in the ring because it was upsetting his family and Baer responds by saying, "Don't worry, I'll be there to comfort your widow." The final fight also seems to be misrepresented. McCallum reports "The Braddock fight was a dull, routine affair, a painful spectacle of an over-confident, silly kid losing to an aged, methodical club fighter." Baer himself is quoted as saying "I clowned away the title in 15 rounds." What we see in the movie is an exciting Pier 6 brawl with the fighters getting angry at each other, pummeling each other, the tide constantly turning. Exciting stuff but not the way it really happened.
Of course Baer was a dangerous man in the ring. He possessed perhaps the best right hand punch ever and Frankie Campbell and Ernie Schaaf lost their lives absorbing it, as the film points out, (although I don't understand the motivation for the selfish promoter to endlessly point this out to Braddock who has become his meal ticket with the "Cinderella Man" story). But those tragedies are more of a comment on boxing than on Baer. The real difference between Baer and Braddock seems not to have been their regard for their fellow human beings but rather their attitude toward their profession and that difference is what won the fight.
I think what happened here is that Ron Howard and the writer decided the audience would respond more to a "Clubber Lang" type "bad guy" than a clown who threw away his crown and to a "Hollywood" title fight rather than the semi-farcical event the real thing was.