I wasn’t a fan of Mystic River, which I found slack and rather obvious despite its chilling opening. But Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Million Dollar Baby, seems designed to exploit all the interesting things about Mature Eastwood.
As always these days, Eastwood’s character, a down-at-heel boxing trainer, is old and past it. He coughs a lot, he’s got dodgy knees, a bad back. He’s crankier than grandpa when you steal his crossword or hide his haemorrhoid cushion, and he and his equally grouchy gym manager Morgan Freeman together work up a nice line in crotchety-old-fartisms. Eastwood’s daughter no longer speaks to him, leaving him empty but for his guilt. And now he has to put up with a young female boxer of, as yet, no evident talent (Hilary Swank) who demands that he take her all the way to the world women’s title.
Although it’s a movie about boxing and contains any number of neatly staged fight scenes, Million Dollar Baby is about fathers and daughters, real or ersatz, and about emotional remoteness and proximity, and doing one last good-bad thing before you die. There is a horrifying twist in the last third of the movie that I won’t reveal, but it galvanises what has hitherto been a conventional sports pic, albeit one expertly confected by a talented, studio-trained classicist. The final reels are among the bleakest and tenderest Eastwood has ever shot.
Boxing is also the theme of one of the forthcoming big blockbusters, Cinderella Man, which tells the story of Jim Braddock, a white fighter who lost everything at the onset of the Depression, but came back to seize the heavyweight championship from Max Baer in 1935. Russell Crowe plays Braddock, and director Ron Howard, who seems personally invested in every clichéd, self-deluding American myth, has slathered on the against-all-odds Seabiscuit-isms for all he’s worth. It be all about the uplift. Until Joe Louis knocks Braddock out, that is.
A more interesting contrast is provided by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’s recent Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. The work is a gritty and dispiriting chronicle of Johnson, the first black man to win the heavyweight championship of the world.
Johnson was an achiever yet the white world couldn’t forgive him for his blackness. Even a century ago, when Johnson was active (he won the title in 1910), it wasn’t exactly a new phenomenon. The first great black boxer of the modern age, an ex-slave from Virginia named Tom Molyneaux, fought every white man in the United States to a standstill, but when he faced the white champ, Englishman Tom Cribb, on Copthall Common in Sussex in 1810, Cribb’s fans held their hero up for half of the 40 (40!) rounds, and aided him in battering Molyneaux, allowing Cribb to win in the end. Fair play and the fistic arts counted for nothing against the dread prospect of a white man being defeated by the representative of a race then deemed little better than livestock.
A century later, Jack Johnson walked into an arena in Reno, Nevada, on July 4 1910 to face former white champ Jim Jeffries. “Kill the nigger!” chanted the enormous all-white crowd, and that was about the kindest thing Johnson heard all day. From Jeffries’s corner the ex-champ James Corbett, played by Errol Flynn in Raoul Walsh’s 1940 Gentleman Jim, showed what kind of gentleman he was by screaming racist abuse at Johnson until he was hoarse. After Johnson won, good-naturedly and fairly, there were race riots in more than 20 US cities — the worst of their kind inspired by a single event until those following the death of Martin Luther King in 1968.
That Johnson was well-read, confident and proud of his race only made things worse for whitey. That he was fond of hookers and white women sealed his doom. They couldn’t beat him with fists, so they came after him with the law, specifically the Mann Act, and destroyed him that way, convicting him of imaginary crimes and forcing him, as was achieved later with uppity Paul Robeson, into years of exile, followed by prison on his return. Burns and many others are petitioning US President George W Bush for a posthumous pardon.
Johnson was a banner figure for artists of the great 1960s revival in black culture. Miles Davis’s best electric album bore Johnson’s name. James Earl Jones played him in a 1970 movie, and it’s time to see the story redone for our age.
Unfortunately, unlike the sugary uplift being sold to us by a movie like Cinderella Man, the rawest black boxing stories cut too closely to the US’s sense of itself to be likely hits. The Sonny Liston story would be an endless bummer, as would any Mike Tyson biopic. Johnson’s life was enthralling, but ended on a decades-long downward spiral into poverty and Ellisonian invisibility. Count on Hollywood to concern itself with white boys — or girls — on the make, and not with black men taking on the whole white world, and knocking it flat on its arse. — Â