CHAMPION (1949)

Champion is usually described as a cautionary tale about the bitter price of ruthless ambition. Rubbish. The character of Midge Kelly is heroic, admirable, and downright glorious. A rotten son of a bitch? Certainly. But I envy him, and you should too.

Champion airs from time to time on TCM and has been available on DVD for ages, so this essay assumes that you know the film. Besides, you just can’t dig into this thing without considering the ending — proceed knowing that spoilers await. For those who need a refresher, the story goes like this: Michael “Midge” Kelly (Kirk Douglas) and his brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are heading west in search of their fortune when they get rolled and are forced to thumb it. They cadge a ride from a palooka (John Day) on his way to fight a main event in Kansas City. Hoping to earn a quick buck, Midge takes a fill-in spot on the undercard. He’s beaten badly but catches the eye of manager Tommy Haley (that noir-iest of actors, Paul Stewart), who offers to Mickey him into a real fighter. When Midge and Connie reach Cali and discover their prospects vanished they are compelled to find scut work in a roadhouse. Both are attracted to a waitress, Emma (Ruth Roman), who Midge is forced to marry in the wake of a tryst. Feeling trapped, Midge eighty-sixes Emma and scrams for L.A., where he takes Haley up on his offer. Midge’s toughness and ambition make him a natural in the ring, and soon he rates a bout with number one contender Johnny Dunne, the same cat who taxied him into Kansas City. Midge is ordered to take a dive in trade for a legit title shot down the line, but he stuns everyone when he batters an unsuspecting Dunne. Although irate gamblers get their revenge, Midge’s refusal to cheat makes him appear heroic and he gets a title shot anyway, which he wins. Now standing on top of the heap, Midge alienates everyone around him. When he gives Dunne a rematch, he takes a terrific beating — until the jeering crowd and the ringside announcers spur him to final victory. Staggered, leering, and triumphant, Midge returns to his dressing room where he collapses and dies.


Everyone involved scores points for making a great picture about an asshole, but Kirk Douglas deserves the lion’s share of the credit. His Midge Kelly is one the most interesting and complicated boxers in screen history, which is a significant accomplishment considering how droll the character likely would have been in the hands (gloves?) of a lesser talent. Champion was a landmark early Douglas landmark film and justly earned him an Academy Award nomination. Most of what has been written about the movie praises his virtuoso performance or affirms the film’s status as a morality tale. While Douglas is indeed the stuff of legend, the “What Price Fame?” angle just doesn’t wash. Champion is a coldly cynical movie about a hard-as-nails tough guy; made during an era when all the little kids didn’t get a trophy. If it were merely a cautionary tale it would have ended differently: with Midge dead and defeated in the center of the ring. Redemption? No, thanks. An apology tour? Piss off. Midge Kelly isn’t redeemed at the end of Champion — he’s validated. Let’s come back to this later, first Douglas deserves his due.

Kirk Douglas was a great performer who, if nothing else, understood what made him a movie star. He was blessed and cursed with a hyper-magnetic screen presence. Everything about him was just...exaggerated. No actress could wrest the spotlight from him, which is why he isn’t remembered as one of the great romantic leads. Don’t buy it? Next time you watch him in a love scene and things start to heat up, take note of who grabs your attention. It’ll be Douglas. That was his great gift: he was bigger than the story, bigger than his cast, bigger than his directors. His innate arrogance was his greatest asset. He’s cast perfectly here. 

Let’s get back to Midge. Here’s a Depression-era kid who came up tough. His father took a powder in the first round of Midge’s life. And his mother, unable to keep both her sons, sent Midge to the orphanage and kept Connie at home. Midge grew up abandoned and institutionalized, on the losing end of a low-rent Sophie’s choice. Then with adulthood came the war and the bloody hell of combat. This is a guy who’d been rolled, robbed, cheated, chastised, red-taped, taken for granted, swindled, and sent to war. How would you handle it? After Midge mustered out he took on the thankless role of provider for his mother and little brother, and bore no grudge. Sure, he stepped on people along the way, but didn’t he get stepped on first? In spite of it all, he’s probably the most upbeat character in the film. He raised himself out of a hellish upbringing through his own grit to become the champion of the world. All he wanted out of life was the respect of other men offered by success in the ring. Boxing exacts a steep price in exchange for that success, and Midge saw clearer more plainly those around him that he’d ultimately have to pay it. If success left Midge feeling entitled yet emotionally crippled, who can blame him? 

Who does he hurt? The story places Midge in the arms of three different women. First with Emma, the wife/waitress whom he deserts. Of the film’s women, she’s the most deserving of happiness, which she ultimately finds with Connie. Although she married Midge, she understood going in that he didn’t love her. Their mistake causes her much short-term distress, but it was through him that she met Connie and eventually found what she was looking for.* Midge’s second tryst was with the aptly named Grace Diamond (Marilyn Maxwell), a good-timer who treats fighters like Kleenex. She’s an opportunistic user who meets her match. The idea that Midge could hurt someone so despicable is silly. His final girlfriend is Palmer Harris (Lola Maxwell), the spoiled and slumming wife of the crooked fight promoter. Their affair is brief, and ends when Midge agrees to cut ties in exchange for a bigger percentage of the gate. Undoubtedly a cold-blooded choice, but it bears repeating Midge has no idea how to make himself or anyone else happy, especially not a married woman. Midge is a pig, but he never tries to hide it. All the women in the story are well rid of him, but none suffer lasting harm.


That leaves the brother and the trainer. Connie is supposedly the sympathetic conscience of the film, constantly exasperated with his brother, yet he seems to have forgotten who pays the bills—and, for that matter, who grew up in the orphanage. Hell, Connie even gets the girl; what does he have to grouse about? As for the trainer, Haley is the only guy in the picture who knows the score all along. In quintessential noir fashion, he knows that he’ll be dropped him when the bigger purses come, yet he returns to train Midge for his climactic title fight anyway. As he repeats time and again, “I can’t keep away from it, I like to watch a good boy in action.” The idea of a fighter leaving one trainer for another happens as often on screen as it does in real life, a cliché in both worlds. It’s important to realize that Champion is a noir film in which none of the characters come away clean. Dig this most of all: when Midge finally lands that first big fight with Johnny Dunne, both Connie and Tommy want him to take the dive—they want him to cheat. 

If the movie has a flaw it’s that it doesn’t fully depict the grueling physical realities of the prizefighter’s life. The ring scenes (directed by Stanley Kramer rather than Mark Robson, who Kramer said didn’t know enough about boxing) are exquisite, but the narrative’s preoccupation with fight-fixing doesn’t afford any screen time to the everyday sacrifices made by fighters. Midge stacks knockouts way too fast and scores a title shot in no time at all, while in reality the achievement of a world’s championship, or even a spot on the undercard of a championship bout, was a pipe dream for most pugs. The film does include a Rocky-style training sequence, though nowadays it plays for laffs. 

Douglas is miraculous in his final scene. Bloody and victorious, having returned to his dressing room after ferociously pummeling Dunne, he leers and gesticulates at the camera, his battered face a desperate reflection of his maimed but resilient soul. Midge’s life comes full circle with his defeat of the man who opened the door to a life in the ring—a dichotomous life that offered not only the illusory pleasures of fame, fortune, and women; but more importantly, the respect and legacy he craved. Cinematic convention keeps us expecting that he’ll see the light and turn an improbable Ebenezer Scrooge-like corner at the end, yet he never does. Midge’s refusal to compromise or live on anything but his own terms is a worthy valediction. It imbues his life with a strange and moving integrity. It also makes him an iconic hero of film noir. It’s fitting that he should die after he wins the final fight; he has nothing in the world left to prove. Some men are not meant to suffer old age.

Champion (1949)

Director: Mark Robson.

Cinematographer: Franz Planer
Screenplay: Carl Foreman, based on a story by Ring Lardner.
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Arthur Kennedy, Marilyn Maxwell, Ruth Roman, and Paul Stewart.
Released by: United Artists
Running time: 99 minutes

* (Some viewers/reviewers of Champion suggest that Midge rapes Emma late in the film. For the record, after numerous viewings I still don’t read the code in that way, but I’d certainly change my tune (and, of course, my review) if someone were to convince me. This essay is something of a justification Midge’s bad behavior, but certainly not for rape. 

BODYGUARD (1948)

Lawrence Tierney’s hallowed reputation as the real-life embodiment of a film noir tough guy endears him to most movie fans and generally insulates him from criticism. Hard core enthusiasts often establish their noir bona fides by slinging stories of his off-screen exploits. He’s the cinematic equivalent of a made guy. If you can’t get with Tierney, it seems at times, you might as well leave film noir well enough alone — it probably ain’t for you. In spite of all that, beyond Tierney’s unique one-two punch — leading man good looks and his spectacular ability to project menace — he wasn’t much of an actor. When a role came along that he couldn’t charge into with his head down and his fists up, as was the case with director Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard, his performance comes up a few shells short of a stacked clip.

There’s little to care about here by way of story: Tierney plays a detective who gets pink-slipped on account of his strong-arm tactics, then framed for the murder of his lieutenant. That’s the extent of Bodyguard’s noir statement: wrongly accused ex-copper has to get out from under on his own steam. The rest is just running time. Along the way Tierney gets mixed up in some intrigue surrounding a murder cover-up at a meat-packing plant, and the wealthy owners who may or may not have had something to do with it.

Nevertheless, the critical mass surrounding Bodyguard is generally favorable, owing to some slick dialog and several deft directorial touches by Fleischer, just beginning his career. As far as Tierney is concerned, most other reviewers rehash the same tough mug platitudes that one bumps into when reading about Dillinger, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, or Born to Kill. In this case the praise isn’t merited. Tierney is miscast; and Bodyguard would have been a better movie with a more capable leading man. Woe is us that Paramount had Alan Ladd locked up at the time, because this is the kind of part that he was made for. Tierney is one-dimensional and flat; Ladd had something else. I’ll stop — I know the comparison is unfair.

Tierney had more in common with film noir’s iteration of Raymond Burr, and maybe even a leg up on him. Admittedly, this comparison is also unfair because Burr, in spite of his wide range and other special gifts as an actor, didn’t look like Ben Affleck. But can you imagine Tierney instead of Burr in Pickup? It’s at the very least intriguing. His air of corruption, the rough edges, the cheapness, and that hair trigger? Bodyguard asks him to holster all of these things, to sit on his hands, and one wonders if Priscilla Lane — she’s too perky not to like — wasn’t cast as the girl Friday in order to soften Tierney. After all, if we like her, and she likes him, we ought to as well, right? The hard sell goes even further: Tierney plays big brother to some neighborhood kids, tosses a ball back and forth with another, and drinks his milk like a good boy. But we’re unmoved; as an actor Tierney just wasn’t meant to be liked. Perhaps it took this movie to make sure of it.

* A note or two about the poster: In spite of the artwork, Tierney doesn’t rough up any women in the film. (For that matter, he never actually works as a bodyguard either.) Certainly the RKO brass were hoping the artwork would pull in the audience from his successful turn the previous year’s Born to Kill. And the image of Lane — it couldn't be less flattering. 

Bodyguard (1948)

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Screenplay by Fred Niblo Jr. and Harry Essex, based on a story by George W. George and Robert Altman.

Starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane

Produced by Sid Rogell

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 62 minutes

TWO OF A KIND (1951)

Talk about a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Two of a Kind, released by Columbia in 1951, is a perfect example of how a Hollywood ending can derail a promising noir. The premise is enticing: three grifters try to work an inheritance scam on an elderly California couple. They plan to pass off a fellow con-artist as the couple’s long-lost son and claim a huge inheritance when the aged millionaires finally kick over. The cast is rock-solid, and includes noir icons Edmond O’Brien and Lizabeth Scott, as well as President Woodrow Wilson himself, Alexander Knox. 

Two of a Kind moves with verve and is characterized by tough talk and slick Burnett Guffey photography. It establishes itself as a noir early on, with a wonderfully memorable scene involving the two leads, a car door, and some great banter. Two of a Kind also foreshadows doom in half a dozen different ways, including a slew of references to the game of craps, yet in the end it fails to deliver on its dark promises — instead wrapping up like an MGM musical, where boy and girl hop into a ragtop and ride off into the setting Pacific sun, leaving the audience jilted and angry.

The opening finds Brandy (Lizabeth Scott), searching for a man she’s never met, a very specific kind of a man who fits the requirements that she and her accomplice Vincent (Alexander Knox) require to orchestrate a swindle of gigantic proportions. It seems that many years ago, a wealthy California couple, the McIntyres, lost their son during a trip to Chicago. Mrs. McIntyre had a dizzy spell and cracked her head on the sidewalk outside Marshall Fields. When she woke up her toddler son was gone. She wasn’t without hope though — the tip of little fellow’s left little finger is missing, making him easy to recognize. Yet despite this unusual telltale, after more than three decades the McIntyres have never been able to locate their son.

The McIntyre family attorney, who turns out to be none other than Brandy’s partner Vincent, has long been in charge of the search for the boy. And it’s Vincent who first sees the opportunity to make a grab at the McIntyre family millions; he and Brandy just need to find the right man to play the part of the prodigal son: white male, early thirties, from the Chicagoland area, raised in an orphanage, and finally: willing to pare his pinky for a big payoff. Enter Mike ‘Lefty’ Farrell (Edmond O’Brien).


Throughout film history there have been countless scenes when a character loses some limb or another, and most such films exploit the suspense-filled moments before the axe falls, the knife slashes, or the chainsaw rattles to life. In this case the exchange between Brandy and Mike leading up to the “ouch” is just as compelling. The scene occurs early on, just after Brandy discovers Mike drearily checking cards at an L.A. bingo joint. In a brief sequence of impressive narrative economy, Brandy manages to catch Mike’s eye, test his mettle against a hired thug, get him arrested and bailed out, clue him in on the potential scam, and convince him to put his little finger in the path of a car door. Considering the pair just met, Mike seems too eager to go along with her plan. It’s a weak point in the story that relies on the seductive power of the femme fatale to make believable — after all, how many men will maim themselves for a woman they’ve just met? It’s a hard pill to swallow, and Liz Scott isn’t the girl to help it go down any easier. Scott was certainly a wonderful actress — she could outperform most fifties crime pic ingénues with her eyes alone, but she lacked that Rita-esque brand of raw sexuality necessary to close this deal. 

Nevertheless the sequence is Two of a Kind’s best — though it’s the doom and gloom dialogue which brings the whole thing off. The outcome is never in doubt; we know the finger has to come off for the story to move forward, but the film carves out mucho character development before the big moment. Brandi pulls up to a shadowy curb, the emergency hospital quietly looming a block ahead. She cuts to the chase: “It has to look like an accident — you walk in with a smashed finger and tell them you caught it in a car door.” “And how does it really get smashed?” Mike asks, to which she deadpans, “In a car door.” Brandi leans across Mike’s chest and pushes open his door, while he eyes her warily for the first time. She removes the lipstick from her handbag and paints an aiming line on his little finger before announcing, “You’d better have a cigarette.” Still gregarious, Mike asks, “Who gets to make with the door?” To which Brandy’s curt “I do” not only establishes her clear control of the situation but also that Mike (like other noir protagonists) is in way over his head. Her final admonition, “Look the other way” comes just a second before she crushes his finger. The scene is certainly the most noirish in the film, particularly in how it parallels Mike’s predicament with that of a man about to be executed. The cigarette, the turning of the head, the willing submission, and finally, the moment’s sexually-charged, emasculating violence are quintessentially noirish, and ensure that Two of a Kind would be much better-remembered if only it didn’t shoot itself in the foot so soon after chopping off Mike’s finger.

But the stakes are so low! One of the reasons the car door scene resonates is because it’s the only exciting moment in the movie — and all it involves is a busted up little finger! The film is otherwise light on crime, and the inheritance scheme fails miserably. No one gets killed, and when the plan is unraveled Mr. McIntyre doesn’t even press charges, even knowing that Vincent secretly hoped to kill him in order to get rich even quicker. McIntyre simply demands that the larcenous lawyer close up shop and leave town, while he actually invites the repentant Mike to perpetuate the ruse for the sake of the forlorn Mrs. McIntyre’s newfound happiness. As a matter of fact, the stakes are so low that everyone would likely have been better off if the hustle had succeeded: The McIntyres would have lived out their final years in the happy knowledge that their son had returned, while the already-rich Vincent and Brandi would have just gotten richer and Mike would have endured a guilty inheritance. Considering that the McIntyres had no other potential heirs, perhaps the only real losers would have been the charitable organizations that would have otherwise inherited the funds.

Yet if a deeper reading is made, an important question comes to mind, though it’s one that potentially destroys the film, or at least makes it awfully difficult to like: What about the McIntyre’s real son? It’s not that viewers would expect this lost child to joyously reappear after thirty years to throw a monkey wrench into Brandy and Mike’s plans (though that may have made for an interesting twist). Postwar audiences were as aware as any of the potential for horror in the world, and the details of the Lindbergh case still lingered in the public mind, as would the circumstances of the Wineville Chicken Murders (known to contemporary audiences thanks to Clint Eastwood’s Changeling) and many other newswire scandals of the period. In giving Two of a Kind such a happy denouement, fate can’t mete out the justice required by the noir universe. Sometimes the happy ending is an important part of the noir journey, as in the redemption-oriented Tomorrow is Another Day. Yet here Vincent, Brandy, and Mike contrive a terrible crime: they casually and unremorsefully attempt to cash in on the grief and hope of a decent family that has lost its only child, in all likelihood to a horrible death. The film trades justice for romance, and no two stars, even O’Brien and Scott, possess screen chemistry sufficient for us to forgive a crime that involves preying on the heart of a bereaved mother. We are left to wonder how the title, Two of a Kind, is intended to represent Brandy and Mike, though in some dark, accidental way conjures thoughts of Mike and that vanished little boy, a plot device of so little consequence to the film that he’s denied even the human dignity of a name.

Two of a Kind (1951)

Director: Henry Levin

Producer: William Dozier

Cinematography: Burnett Guffey

Screenplay: James Edward Grant, James Gunn and Lawrence Kimble

Starring: Edmond O’Brien and Lizabeth Scott

Released by: Columbia Pictures Corporation

Running Time: 75 minutes

OUT OF THE STORM (1948)

In order to understand how important typecasting was in classic Hollywood, how it could make or break a movie — even a cheap B picture with a twelve-day shooting schedule — look no further than Republic’s 1944 crime programmer Out of the Storm, starring Jimmy Lydon. Lydon gained fame playing comic strip teenager Henry Aldrich nine times for Paramount Pictures throughout the war years. After the fighting ended he signed a contract with Republic Pictures (which he jokingly referred to as Repulsive Pictures!) and made several low rent crime films, the most notable of which was Edgar Ulmer’s Strange Illusion (1945). From time to time Lydon appeared in supporting roles in major studio productions, including a pleasantly funny turn alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the 1947 William Powell hit Life with Father, and, believe it or not, as Ingrid Bergman’s little brother in Victor Fleming’s 1948 colossus, Joan of Arc. Lydon enjoyed a lengthy acting career in Hollywood films and on television before transitioning into a significant role as a producer. He even did a stretch as vice-president of the Screen Actors Guild. As of this writing he’s approaching 92 and living happily in California with his wife of 62 years.

In Out of the Storm, set during the war, he is perfectly cast as Donald Lewis, a clerk at west coast naval yard. Amidst the tumult of the never-ending stream of tankers, freighters, and liberty ships sliding into the Pacific, Donald spends his days in the relative calm of the payroll office, endorsing checks for the yard’s ten thousand workers. It’s Christmastime as the movie opens, and Donald has just taken possession of $125,000 in folding money, when a crew led by Stubbins (familiar hood Marc Lawrence) hurries up the stairs and into the payroll loft. Stubbins shoots the guard, beats another man unconscious, and then forces Donald to grab stacks of bills from the safe. After the gang flees Donald telephones security, but before they arrive he gapingly realizes that the crooks overlooked the $100,000 intended for the workers’ Christmas bonuses and made off with significantly less: the $25,000 in fives and tens meant for check cashing. Donald hesitates for just a moment, and then hides the money. He returns later, in the dead of night, and smuggles it home. The remainder of the movie vacillates between the predictable and the surprising as Donald tries hard to hang onto the loot before eventually coming around — though Out of the Storm pleases even when it treads this familiar ground.

Let’s momentarily imagine the challenge faced by Out of the Storm’s producers, needing to fill the lead. Here we have a fairly straightforward morality tale about a war worker who steals, albeit passively (everything about Donald is passive), and most importantly, whose crime becomes the catalyst for his coming of age. We need an actor who can sell two key characteristics: the audience must be able to understand his motivation to steal, and in time they must be able to forgive him. The movie never explicitly tells us why Donald isn’t in the service, though there are two possibilities: he could have received a 2-B deferment from service as an employee of the war industry, or his designation could have been the dreaded 4-F: “registrant is not acceptable for military service.” The casting of Jimmy Lydon, neither a tough guy nor a dreamboat, makes it clear exactly which weak-kneed designation the filmmakers wanted us to assume, and it shows us why the casting process is vital.

What kind of a guy would take this money? What kind of guy would end up in the payroll office in the first place? Donald lacks the physical strength required to man either a rivet gun or a machine gun. And he’s bitter about it. Here’s a kid with guilt. The movie’s opening narration, in which he resignedly laments his situation over stock footage of the smoking wreckage of Pearl Harbor, and then over images of countless ships under construction during the big buildup of 1942, is a self-pitying diatribe about how some young men “went to the fighting lines [and] some went to the assembly lines.” Donald feels left out of both groups, resenting not just the servicemen overseas, but also the blue-collar workers who make more money than he does:

“Seemed like everybody in the yard was making money. Everybody else was really building something, really doing something. But me? I got stuck in the payroll department with a lot of adding machines and file records and a salary of $40 a week. How far can you make that go?”

And yet Donald is still a good boy — he mails a chunk of his meager earnings home to his mother and struggles by on the rest. We get the impression that all would be well if only he could strap on a uniform and get in the fight like everybody else. All of his simmering guilt is cleverly ratcheted up by the presence of his girlfriend and coworker Ginny (Lois Collier, sort of a poor man’s Gail Russell). Ginny’s a real doll, and entirely out of Donald’s league. They’ve been together for nearly a year, after bumping into each other during lunch. Here's how it needles: it’s a mismatched relationship only made possible by the war, and Donald knows it. He constantly uses his small salary as an excuse not to get married, but we suspect that he really believes he doesn’t deserve such a great girl in the first place. Ginny, for her part, is strangely desperate to get hitched, Donald’s finances be damned. (It’s terribly easy to imagine a dead Marine on Guadalcanal with her picture in his breast pocket.)

At any rate, the film excellently establishes Donald’s angst at being left out of the fighting and his disappointment at not landing an appropriately butch spot in the war effort, and then being saddled with a devoted girlfriend whom he doesn’t feel he deserves. Such a character could easily come across as a weasel. We’d hate Donald if we didn’t think his heart was in the right place, if he didn’t so obviously love his mother, if he hadn’t fretted and called the guards after the theft, and if he wasn’t just a dumb, jealous, understandably immature kid. But we do like him, and we also feel sorry for him. We understand, just as he does, that Captain America is just a comic strip character and that there wasn’t a place on the front lines for every weak-kneed kid who wanted to get in. Perhaps the movie’s best, most transformative moment comes near then end, when Ginny looks Donald in the eye and calls him a coward, and the sting of the remark compels him to finally understand something that all of us ultimately have to come to grips with: that life ain’t fair, and that not getting all the things we want isn’t an excuse to act out.

Out of the Storm presented a complex casting problem that, in this instance, the filmmakers solved perfectly. Jimmy Lydon is nearly flawless as one of the countless fellows left to grapple with self-worth while fighting the war from home. He successfully spins the confused, frustrated angst of youth into the moral ambiguity and misguided choices that lie deep within the tangled heart of film noir.

Out of the Storm (1948)

Directed by R.G. Springsteen

Screenplay by John K. Butler

Story by Gordon Rigby

Starring Jimmy Lydon, Lois Collier, and Marc Lawrence

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running Time: 61 minutes