A Film Canon

Champion plays like a conservative backlash against the late 1940s boxing film's critique of big business. On the one hand, Robson frames middleweight Michael 'Midge' Kelly's (Kirk Douglas) betrayal of his first, wholesome, small-scale manager, for corrupt corporate sponsorship - a generic staple - in the most sympathetic terms possible; a combination of his desire to escape abject poverty ("Do you know what it is to be real poor? Poor poor? Hungry poor?"), yearning for "nice, clean, healthy work" (as opposed to the adolescent world of "soda jerks, dry-cooks, busboys, ditch-diggers"), and lifelong dream to hire a detective capable of tracking down his vanished father. On top of this, Kelly offers one of the most rousing condemnations of fixed fights in the genre - both verbally, in the form of an eloquent, enraged denunciation, and physically, through his first, minute-long subversion of his sponsors' expectations. This might be expected to imbue his eventual corruption with a tragic inescapability, or, at the very least, some more panoramic critique of the boxing establishment, but instead gives way to a sudden, implausible shift in sympathy, such that Kelly comes to demonically personify everything wrong about the game, making its various ringleaders seem mild by comparison, and producing a fantastic simplification of corporatism that is encapsulated in the media's vocal congratulation of his initial resistance, as if it weren't complicit in the whole process. From this perspective, the visceral intensity of the final fight serves to depict the emergence of Kelly's inner monster - the horror of a poor man who has risen above his station - while the supporting cast (a jilted lover, crippled brother) act as so many sentimental reinforcements of this disingenuous, regressive replacement of character development with character revelation.