Robert Rossen (1947)

Widely deemed a great boxing movie and certainly an influential one, Body and Soul is itself, in its themes and character types, surely indebted to Reuben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939).  Robert Rossen’s sports film noir, written by Abraham Polonsky, has a set-up a bit less florid than Mamoulian’s screen version of the Clifford Odets stage play.  For example, Rossen’s protagonist, Charley Davis, shares with Golden Boy‘s Joe Bonaparte a proud, loving parent who wants their son to be doing something very different from boxing – but at least Charley (John Garfield) isn’t forced, as Joe is, to choose between prizefighting and a career as a concert violinist:  Charley’s widowed mother, Anna (Anne Revere), just wants him to make a decent living in a steady job.  Body and Soul is nearly as moralistic as Golden Boy, though, and calling either of them a sports film is something of a misnomer.  In both pictures, the fight game is presented as essentially corrupt and corrupting and, as such, representative of a cutthroat, commodifying capitalist society.

At dead of night, Charley Davis wakes up to a nightmare.  He calls out the name ‘Ben’ in anguish, gets up from his bed and into his car, and speeds away from the house where he’d been sleeping.  Hearing the car, other men and one girl emerge from the house:  ‘Where’s he going? The champ must be crazy.  He’s got a fight tomorrow night’.  The group includes Charley’s manager, Quinn (William Conrad), and Roberts (Lloyd Gough), an unscrupulous boxing promoter who, it’s soon revealed, has fixed the upcoming fight.  Roberts has paid Charley to lose the bout and thereby his world title.  He’ll then retire from the ring; if he’s smart, he will have boosted his nest egg by betting on his fight opponent the bribe received from Roberts.  Behind Quinn and Roberts stands the former’s glamorous gold-digger girlfriend, Alice (Hazel Brooks), who’s another part of the crooked, mercenary world that has seduced Charley.  He drives to his mother’s New York home, where his ex-girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer), is currently staying.  Like Alice, Peg is beautiful – but she’s decent, too:  as well as loving Charley for himself, she’s an aspiring artist (this is as close as Body and Soul gets to the classical violin aspect of Golden Boy).  After telling Anna that ‘Ben’ is dead, Charley succeeds only in making things worse with his mother and Peg, who tell him to leave.  Once he’s got through a bad-tempered weigh-in for the big fight, against up-and-coming Jackie Marlowe (Artie Dorrell), Charley has some time alone to reflect on where it all went wrong.  The narrative moves into extended flashback to tell his story so far.

At first, the melodramatic pressure of its plot and James Wong Howe’s noir visuals promise to be enough to sustain Body and Soul but the bad guys in Rossen and Polonsky’s Manichean scheme are monotonous and a drag on the film’s momentum, even though Abraham Polonsky gives mobster Roberts some neat mercenary one-liners (like ‘Everything is addition and subtraction – the rest is conversation’).  The key roles, including the hero, are better played in Golden Boy than they are here.  John Garfield’s own background was akin to Charley’s – Garfield too was Jewish and grew up in poverty in New York City – and this is certainly his best-known performance.  He was thirty-four when the film appeared.  That didn’t necessarily make him too old for the part, yet Garfield seemed it to me (though it feels unkind to say so – he died before he was forty).  Competent and likeable as he is, John Garfield never comes across as a hungry, ambitious kid.  He’s naturally easier to accept in the later stages of the story, once Charley is the well-established world champion and rumoured in some quarters to be past his best.

Lilli Palmer does well, even though Peg’s biography is a little confusing.  In different conversations, she talks about (a) her extensive experience of life in continental Europe and (b) her down-to-earth, stable American background – presumably because (a) is de rigueur for a credible artist and (b) indispensable to being a nice girl, which Peg emphatically is.  The film’s best characterisation comes from dependable Anne Revere as Charley’s watchful mother.  Revere wasn’t and doesn’t look Jewish, but she handles the New York-Jewish rhythms of the dialogue very naturally.  Ben turns out to be Ben Chaplin, the reigning world champion when Charley starts his meteoric rise to the top.  (They’re presumably middleweights, though I’m not sure if this is made explicit.)  Ben (Canada Lee) is also Black.  He’s hors de combat, with a blood clot on the brain, when Roberts insists – as always, with filthy lucre to support his argument – that Ben’s entourage offer Charley a shot at the title.  That fight ends with Ben apparently at death’s door, though he recovers enough to become Charley’s loyal trainer until he dies on the eve of the Marlowe fight.  Ben’s ethnicity clearly gives an extra edge to Rossen’s portrait of boxing as a form of exploitation.  Canada Lee, himself a professional boxer before he turned to acting, is extra-conspicuous in Body and Soul’s overwhelmingly white cast.

The sequences in the ring – especially the climactic fight – are highly dynamic.  James Wong Howe shot the Charley-Marlowe bout on roller skates.  You clearly see, in Howe’s camerawork and the (Oscar-winning) editing, by Francis D Lyon and Robert Parrish, the traditions of black-and-white boxing cinema that inspired Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).  Body and Soul also has visual highlights away from the ring, as when Charley arrives unexpectedly at his mother’s place, startling her into dropping a glass:  Anne Revere’s movement and the editing give the moment an almost dreamlike quality, until the glass shatters.  Also memorable is an exterior sequence in which a punchbag is shown hanging, gently swinging, as if lynched.  More typical of Robert Rossen’s political agenda is a montage that cuts between newspaper headlines tracking Charley’s boxing progress and images of the high life that in tandem is morally corroding him.

Charley Davis doesn’t quite sell his soul, though.  Like Golden Boy, Body and Soul engineers a happy ending.  It’s Ben’s fate especially that compels Charley to win the contest Roberts has paid him to lose.  Afterwards, the pair confront each other, as Charley, reunited with Peg, prepares to leave the site of his moral triumph.  The thwarted Roberts menacingly asks, ‘What makes you think you can get away with this?’  Charley replies with questions of his own, ‘What are you gonna do?  Kill me?’  He then finally throws back at Roberts his own words, spoken with a shrug when Charley expressed alarm about Ben Chaplin’s state of health:  ‘Everybody dies …’

11 April 2026