Requiem for a Heavyweight

Mountain Rivera boxed for seventeen years and never held a title. A fight puts him in hospital, and the doctor tells him another one will blind him. His manager, Maish, is deep in debt over that fight, and plans to clear it by turning Mountain into a clown on the wrestling circuit. Ralph Nelson directs. The text is Rod Serling's, and it existed first on television: the same play went out live on Playhouse 90 in 1956 with Jack Palance, directed by Nelson too. In the film Anthony Quinn is Mountain, Jackie Gleason is Maish, Mickey Rooney is Army in the corner, and Julie Harris is Grace from the employment office. The fighter who beats Mountain in the opening scene is a real one: Muhammad Ali, then still Cassius Clay, appearing as himself. The film's interest is not the sport but what comes after it. It is about what happens to an athlete once he has been used up, and what work he then has to accept, and it does not soften any of it. Who it is for: viewers who want the dark end of boxing cinema and the American realism of the early sixties. Who it is not for: it is genuinely bleak. Do not look for a shaft of light. There isn't one.