Leger Grindon

Getting into shape: classic conventions make their move into the boxing film 1937-1940.

American popular culture witnessed a change in the Hollywood boxing fiction films during the late 1930s. These films formed a meaningful trend by absorbing conventions from the gangster film in response to reinforced censorship codes and by riding the wave of the Joe Louis phenomenon absorbing the Popular Front political values associated with the heavyweight boxing champion. Beginning with Kid Galahad in 1937, these films reshaped their conventions into an ensemble of traits that marked the boxing film genre for the next 50 years. These films appropriated and refashioned a critique of the ethos of opportunity and the ambitions of the ethnic outsider from the gangster film. In addition, they reinforced the thematic opposition between body and soul, the material and the spiritual, central to the genre by appropriating the art motif as a manifestation of spirit.

Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film.

Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Analyzing the Historical Fiction Film 2. The Politics of History: La Marseillaise 3. Hollywood History and the French Revolution: From The Bastille to The Black Book 4. Risorgimento History and Screen Spectacle: Viscontis Senso 5. The Politics of the Spectacle: The Rise to Power of Louis XIV 6. Politics and History in Contemporary Hollywood: Reds Coda Notes Index

The Boxing Film and Genre Theory

An important task in the poetics of film genre is to map the history of the productions in a genre. Genre study has often been characterized as resistant to history because it emphasizes the conventions that link a group of films rather than the changes marking a genre over time. Nonetheless, the general turn to history that has characterized scholarly film study over the past twenty years is evident in genre study as well. In his influential 1984 essay, “Is Radical Genre Criticism Possible?” Alan Williams calls for a return to film history in genre criticism. Subsequently, Steven Neale and Rick Altman have put forward models for such a history that have challenged prevailing conceptions of genre development. My study of the Hollywood boxing film has led me to test these various concepts for understanding film genre history. Since the coming of sound well over one hundred and fifty feature length boxing films have been released. Three periods of intense activity mark the development of the boxing film genre: 1930–42, 1946–56 and 1975 to 1980, with a minor revival in the 1990s that continues to today. The boxing film genre may be further divided into six cycles and three clusters of films. They are the Depression cycle from 1931–33, the Popular Front cycle from 1937–42, the noir cycle from 1946–51, the “after the ring” cycle from 1950–56, the racial and ethnic prejudice cycle of 1950–54, the failed hybrids cluster of 1956–57, the “comeback” cycle of 1975–80, the African-American documentary cluster of 1993–2005, and the masculinity crisis-postmodern cluster of 1993–2005. See the appendix for more details on these cycles and clusters. Historical analysis benefits from a focus on cycles of productions as part of the larger development of the genre. Cycles present a series of similar films that are often associated with a particular film studio, like Universal’s horror films in the 1930s, or Arthur Freed’s musicals at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. In the post-studio era cycles more frequently are associated with a series, like the James Bond films or sequels, such as the Star Wars productions or a filmmaker, such as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. However, a cycle becomes generic when it extends beyond a particular company, character, or filmmaker, and its formula is replicated with variations across the film industry or the entertainment world. Furthermore, a generic cycle is contained within a limited time, a decade for example, such as espionage films, like The Ipcress File (1965), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) or the Matt Helm series (1966–69) that followed in the wake of the James Bond films in the 1960s. Genres experience cycles as important phases in their development, such as the epics set in ancient times that extended from Samson and Delilah (1949) to The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) only to vanish from Hollywood until the recent success of Gladiator (2000). The slasher films that followed the success of Halloween (1978) are