Great list of fight movies with loads i haven’t even heard of
Boxing and the cinema have been inseparable from the earliest days of movie-making. The propulsive excitement and fierce elegance of the sport were perfectly suited to the screen, and some of the earliest surviving motion pictures are filmed boxing matches. As the sport grew in popularity throughout the 20th century, so too did the movie genre.
It’s no surprise filmmakers return to it frequently. With the sport’s mythic, violent clashes and long history of social eruption, it can be an allegory for nearly whatever you want it to be. They can be simple fight yarns, but more often they’re other things—explorations of greedy commercial exploitation, poverty, violence, race. They prod at class divisions, and at what it means to be a ‘man’ in the world. But they can also be brooding meditations on what may have been or could never be. They speak of the long dark night of the soul, a damned-if-you-do existentialism where you rise from the gutter only to be chewed up and spat out again by the fierce internal cogs of the sport. Then again, there are light-hearted celebratory biopics and slapstick parodies to choose from, too.
You’ll find all of the above in this list of fifty of cinema’s greatest on the sweet science.
I found and watched the number one movie on this list and for a 70 year old movie it’s brilliant and focuses on the dark side of boxing, mob guy bleeding fighters dry and controlling every fighter in that city etc - the main fight scene is pretty good too considering how old the movie is.Hot Gold Digging girl in it too
Yeah I was setting up my old man’s new tv last week and he still has a DVD player so I was checking it all worked and Power of One was inside and started playing. We ended up watching the whole film. Great movie.
Have not heard of many of these. Yeh The Power of one was fantastic. If they are including bare knuckle you have to go with Hard Times with Charles Bronson! Liked Play it to the Bone also. Have been looking for The Mouse that came out in the 90’s. Oh and don’t forget Diggstown ;D. Liked it for having so many active fighters in it.
Body and Soul wasn’t the only boxing movie John Garfield ever made and the second favorite to watch on a rainy Sunday summer afternoon in New York was, “They made me a criminal.”
