Traditional film, but very well done

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2006)

"Cinderella Man" is in many ways a very traditional film. We see Jim Braddock go from being comfortable, to very down on his luck, to triumphant. Braddock's wife has many scenes in which she implores him not to fight any more, but he keeps going despite that.
These might seem like clichés, and to a certain degree they are. But they're extremely well done clichés. The feel of the movie was something out of a different era, but I mean that in a good way.
One criticism of the film is that the character of Max Baer is not entirely accurate. In the movie they portray him as a swaggering, cocksure jerk who had no remorse of the fact that he had killed men in the ring. In reality, or at least according to his son, Max Baer, Jr. (who was an actor himself, and you can look up his credits on IMDb), Baer was in fact haunted by the deaths of his opponents, to the point of having nightmares and weeping over it at times. What's more, Baer, while playful in public and the ring, gave Braddock his due after the bout, and wasn't nearly as arrogant in public as they portrayed him. But I realize this is a Hollywood movie and not a documentary, so I don't really blame the film for making those changes.
I imagine Baer's story would have been as interesting a subject for a film as Braddock's. At one point is his career, for instance, Baer went up against Max Schmeling, a fighter Adolf Hitler held up as a kind of Aryan Fighting superman. Baer, whose father was half Jewish (although Baer himself was raised Catholic), decided to wear a Star of David during the bout. (He then continued to wear it for the rest of his career, including during the Braddock fight.) Afterward he appeared in about 20 movies, and his son had a successful career in front of and behind the camera in several TV series.
(To make things even more complicated, Schmeling privately had no use for Hitler's racial nonsense, and even risked his own life by hiding the sons of a Jewish friend in his hotel room during Kristallnacht.)