Cinderella Man

[IndianaGuybrush]

Saw it today and loved it. An excellent film with a great message, solid acting, that was well shot and well directed. The costuming, at least to my untrained eye, was very good. My one costume critique was being underwhelmed by the hats. I'm not talking about the hats that poor characters wore, I understand that in the depths of the Great Depression it would be uncommon for your average Joe Schmoe to be wearing a fine hat when he could barely feed himself. I mean the hats the some of the richies wore looked a bit too much like modern fedoras. Lowish crowns, and iffy looking felt. Also, from what I saw, black sweatbands. But hey, I'm really stretching here to say something bad about this movie. In fact, I'm really surprised that there isn't a thread devoted to it already, as I think it's right down our alleys.

And if you do see it make sure to get a look at the leather jacket worn by one of Jim Braddock's friends (Mike). OOOOOH mama, come to papa.

Anyone else see it? Thoughts, reviews?

 

[MK]

.

I really want to see this one. The trailer looks amazing. Ron Howard is a great film maker and it looks like he sure nailed this one.

 

[Quigley Brown]

Not another underdog film....geesh....with that same sappy soundtrack. I already have a sequel planned: 'Cinderella Man meets Seabiscuit meets The Natural meets...."

 

[Badluck Brody]

I thought it was sharp!

It didn't go over the edge to sappy. Just a solid story of a working-man trying to make it through the depression... And the fight scenes should be seen on the big screen.

I also heard that Crowe was recently arrested???

Brody

 

[IndianaGuybrush]

He was. He hit a man in the face with a phone in a hotel here in NYC and has been arrested and faces up to 7 years in jail. We all know how this is going to end, and it sure as hell isn't with Crowe in jail. In all likelihood the man who was assaulted is going to come away with a scar, a story, and a few hundred thousand dollars to help him on his way.

 

[Canadave]

...In fact, I'm really surprised that there isn't a thread devoted to it already...

There are a couple already...here's what I wrote in one;

...Shooting of the movie "The Cinderella Man" (The story of Depression-era fighter and folk hero Jim Braddock, who defeated heavyweight champ Max Baer in a 15-round slugfest in 1935.) with Russell Crow and Renée Zellweger just wrapped in Toronto. My wife and I went down to see some of the "set"...redesigned storefronts, street lighting etc. in a local neighbourhood. There were dozens of old cars lining the streets and extras wandering around in period dress, including hats, waiting for the shooting to start. This was near 10 p.m., so the darkness gave it a black and white feel. It was cool.

One of the most surprising (to me) attentions to detail was the fact that they "rebuilt" the sidewalk curb cuts that are commonly used today to accommodate wheelchairs and strollers etc. With plywood, they had replaced them with level "concrete" and a true curb. In the edge of the curb were the (fake) steel reinforcements that you sometime see in old neighbourhoods. Very cool!

David

David

 

[flat-top]

I just saw it, and it's GREAT! Paul Giamatti is (as always) fantastic, and Craig Bierko as Max Baer was AWESOME!!!
See it!!
flat-top

 

[MDFrench]

Just saw this film - I have reviewed it at my website -
http://www.frenchbrosreviews.com

AMAZING FILM

 

[Hondo]

As much as I admire Ron Howard, its a False portrayal of Max Baer, Max deserves better, human side, he wasn't the brut in this film.

Fight Snub
How Cinderella Man sucker punches the Jewish boxer Max Baer.
By David Fellerath
Posted Thursday, June 2, 2005, at 12:51 PM PT



Max Baer (left) vs. James J. Braddock heavyweight championship fight, Long Island City, New York, June 13, 1935

Attentive viewers of the climactic fight of Cinderella Man, Ron Howard's Depression-era crowd-pleaser, will notice a Star of David on the red trunks of Max Baer, the lethal opponent of Jim "Cinderella Man" Braddock. The star is significantly less prominent than the one that the real Baer wore in the 1935 fight. It's no surprise that Howard would obscure this detail, as it would complicate his film's Rocky-meets-Seabiscuit narrative. What's funny, and ironic, is that by downplaying Baer's Star of David, Howard may be making an accurate historical comment: Baer was the only self-proclaimed Jew to ever claim the heavyweight crown. But was he really even Jewish?

To be sure, Cinderella Man's fleeting portrait of Baer as a skirt-chasing playboy, notorious for clowning in the ring, is consistent with published accounts. Baer was also a ferocious hitter—a "larruping thumper," in the Times' gloriously redundant formulation. In his early career, he secured a fearsome reputation on the West Coast, killing a boxer named Frankie Campbell during a 1930 bout. The tragedy so rattled Baer that he lost four of his next six fights. In the film, the death of Campbell is used to build up Baer as a remorseless killer. One movie's terrifying thug, however, is another man's father. "It was after he killed Campbell that he started clowning," Maxie Baer Jr. said in a recent telephone conversation from Las Vegas. "He started smoking cigarettes and he had nightmares for years."

After Campbell's death, Baer decided to move east and train under the tutelage of Jack Dempsey. It was in 1933, when Baer was 24, that he came out as a Jew and wore the Star of David on his trunks for the first time. His opponent was Max Schmeling, the "Black Uhlan of the Rhine" and a reluctant standard-bearer for Hitler's Third Reich. "That one's for Hitler," Baer snarled between blows to the stumbling Schmeling. He knocked him out in the 10th round. It was his finest hour in the ring.

In the post-fight coverage, however, Baer's new "racial" identity raised eyebrows. As reported in the New York Times:

[Baer] explained yesterday, however, that he wore this insignia for the first time, because he is partly Jewish. "My father is Jewish and my mother is Scotch-Irish," said Baer. "I wore the insignia because I thought I should, and I intend to wear it in every bout hereafter."

Over the years, the significance of Baer's gesture has been dismissed as a publicity stunt in a sport that thrives on racial and ethnic conflict. Jeremy Schaap, the author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History, takes a more nuanced view. Schaap establishes that Baer's father was at least half-Jewish before arguing that Baer's manager, Ancil Hoffman, stoked his boxer's ethnic consciousness as a motivating tool. Baer Jr. confirms this view. "My dad didn't know who Hitler was. He only read the sports pages, but Hoffman kept drilling it into his head, 'You're fighting for the Jews.' "

Baer's prominent display of the Star of David came at a time of continuous bad tidings from Germany. Anti-Jewish boycotts were under way, Jews were being expelled from official positions, and Dachau had opened for the internment of communists. A day after the Schmeling fight, a Times dispatch from Berlin reported that the German papers were reticent about their countryman's defeat. "All papers ignore the fact that Schmeling was beaten by a man who in Germany would be classified as a Jew," the unnamed Times correspondent wrote. One can only imagine the propaganda uses Joseph Goebbels would have found had Schmeling defeated Baer.

By disposing of Schmeling, Baer earned his title shot against another unfortunate show horse for European political fashion, Primo "the Ambling Alp" Carnera, a 6-foot-6-inch, 263-pound former circus strongman and a mobbed-up mascot for Benito Mussolini. This 1934 fight—briefly but vividly re-enacted in Cinderella Man—was a frightful affair in which Baer knocked down the clumsy giant 11 (or 12) times, despite being outweighed by 53 pounds.

The heavyweight title now belonged to Baer, who would hold it for 364 days of nightclub carousing and adoring magazine articles. In a 1934 Vanity Fair profile, Baer is described by a bemused Westbrook Pegler in strikingly Gatsby-like terms, a striver taking "dago-singing" lessons and "long-wording people into a daze" from a pocket dictionary. More presciently, Pegler also wrote, "Baer is a fast swinger and he probably will keep the title until frivolity, late hours and cigars abate his speed by the fraction of an instant. Then, presumably, a scientific boxer will beat him. …"

That studiously determined upstart turned out to be gritty Jimmy Braddock from the Jersey docks, known by the more fitting "Plain Jim" before Damon Runyon tagged him "Cinderella Man." Braddock's tale is indeed inspiring: He had a family to feed while Baer's expenses ran mostly to his wardrobe and his mistresses. Baer Jr. cheerfully admits that his father was woefully unprepared. "He didn't take Braddock seriously, he didn't train, and he got a b.j. before the fight," he says, apparently listing the offenses in ascending order of gravity.

Despite the star on his trunks that night, Baer was never a practicing Jew. His tenuous claim, however, seems to have been good enough for Jewish fight fans. Schaap writes that, on the night of the Braddock fight, "Of the 30,000 people in the Bowl, virtually everyone except the Jews was cheering for Braddock."

Stepping back, Baer's "Jewishness" was only one aspect of his elaborate self-invention. In 1933 he starred with Myrna Loy and his upcoming opponent Primo Carnera in The Prizefighter and the Lady, in which he played an all-American underdog who challenges Carnera for the championship. The film was a success and Baer received good reviews for a role that included singing and dancing. It played for a while in Germany, until Goebbels banned the film because Baer was in the cast. But his most enduring film is the 1956 anti-boxing exposé The Harder They Fall, adapted from a Budd Schulberg novel. The film is a virtually undisguised scandal-mongering account of events leading up to the Baer-Carnera fight of 1934. While the justifiably aggrieved Carnera sued Columbia Pictures and Schulberg, Baer gamely played a vicious caricature of himself, a portrait not unlike the Baer we see in Cinderella Man. Schulberg slammed The Harder They Fall as naively sensationalistic, singling out the film's use of Baer: "Maxie Baer, who queens through this incredible part, may have been a tamed tiger but he wasn't a monster."

Even though Baer underachieved as a boxing talent, he still has the distinction of being a feared fighter who wore a conspicuous Star of David on his trunks in the dangerous years of the 1930s. He died of a massive heart attack at the age of 50 in 1959. (Among other things, he didn't live to see his son achieve television celebrity as Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies.) Cinderella Man may reduce Baer to a crude and simplistic villain, but Baer probably would have enjoyed the movie anyway—he despised boxing. "He thought it was horseshit," says his son. "He really wanted to be an actor."

 

[Canadave]

Very interesting...thanks for posting that.

Surprisingly, the film didn't seem to do very well. I'll still rent it.

David

 

[Mr. Jason]

star of david

I'm glad someone explained the star of David. I noticed it in the movie and just kept thinking to my self, "That's the tallest Jewish man I have ever seen."

 

[Canadave]

...kept thinking to my self, "That's the tallest Jewish man I have ever seen."

Baer was 6'2".

Hank Greenberg was 6' 3 1/2".
Sandy Kofax is 6'2".
Shawn Green is 6'4".
Jeff Goldblum is 6'4".
Woody Allen is 5'5"...er, forget that one.

I'M 6'1"!

David

PS How many Jews have you seen?

 

[Honduran]

Flawed Film

I saw "Cinderella Man", and by far the best aspect to the film was Russell Crowe's performance, closely followed by Paul Giamatti. The film itself lacked resonance - Ron Howard missed the mark. Max was portrayed as cartoonish, and all I could think about was how the character reminded me of Max Baer's real life son on the Beverly Hillbillies. As to the Jewish aspect, that didn't strike a chord in me at all.

On that note, I'll leave, before Dave brings forth his tape measure..........

Brian

 

[jitterbugdoll]

I enjoyed this movie--it wouldn't be at the top of my list of favorite period movies, but I liked it just fine. Of course, I will go to any movie set in my favorite eras simply for the clothes alone, so perhaps my opinion is somewhat biased!

 

[Mr. Jason]

Tall Jews

Baer was 6'2".

Hank Greenberg was 6' 3 1/2".
Sandy Kofax is 6'2".
Shawn Green is 6'4".
Jeff Goldblum is 6'4".
Woody Allen is 5'5"...er, forget that one.

I'M 6'1"!

David

PS How many Jews have you seen?

Not many and I just watched "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask", my wife forced me, so I had Woody Allen on the brain. Frankly I've never been very good at picking Jewish people out from other people with pink colored skin.

Did anybody else think that Crowe's accent was a little off. I expected an Irish edge but it wasn't there.