{"id":3251,"date":"2011-07-22T14:57:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T18:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=3251"},"modified":"2011-07-22T14:57:45","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T18:57:45","slug":"film-day-of-the-fight-1951","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=3251","title":{"rendered":"Film: Day of the Fight (1951)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to: <\/strong>Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>D<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Film: Very Good\/ DVD Transfer: n\/a\u00a0\/ DVD Extras: n\/a<\/p>\n

Label: n\/a\u00a0\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a<\/p>\n

Genre: Documentary \/ Newsreel<\/p>\n

Synopsis: Day in the life of middle-weight boxing champion Walter Cartier, adapted by Stanley Kubrick from his 1949 Look magazine photo-essay.<\/p>\n

Special Features: n\/a<\/p>\n

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Review:<\/p>\n

Inspired by his 1949 photo essay \u201cPrizefighter\u201d for Look <\/a><\/strong>magazine, Stanley Kubrick gathered a core team to produce a spec boxing documentary, and filmed a simple narrative of a prizefighter\u2019s daily routine leading up to and including his big bought with a rival middleweight fighter.<\/p>\n

Focusing on Walter Cartier again as his subject, the short is a bit longer than an average newsreel, and follows a much more fluid narrative style, with visuals and editing superior to the choppy, shakycam structure of the standard format. Fight<\/strong> is comprised of three parts: an intro showing the atmosphere of a boxing match; a midsection where we\u2019re introduced to Walter and his twin brother \/ manager \/ trainer Vincent; and the finale where Cartier fights Bobby James at Laurel Gardens.<\/p>\n

Newsreels sometimes relied on narration to fill in missed footage and smoothen continuity gaps, and it wasn\u2019t atypical to hear creaky catch-phrases (\u2018How\u2019s them apples, folks?\u2019), designed to extract chuckles from audiences.<\/p>\n

Kubrick\u2019s directorial approach was more literary, insofar as the concept was in line with the formal magazine spreads he had done for Look<\/strong> (a good 400!): in Fight<\/strong>, he captured the gritty NYC locations, the characters within the boxing world, the earthiness of a fighter\u2019s hard life, and used dramatic visuals and a fact-filled narration \u2013 typical aspects of the best kind of photo journalism which often captured serious social issues that studios tended to mutate into star-studded melodramas. (Another key player in the photo-essay was Gordon Parks<\/a>, whose subjects for rival LIFE<\/strong> magazine included gangs, poverty, and a boy struggling to survive in Brazil\u2019s emerging favelas.)<\/p>\n

The film’s midsection follows the Cartiers as they wake up in their NYC apartment, eat breakfast, train, relax with the dog, and prep for the fight, and near the end Kubrick injects material from a boxing historian, intercutting images from a book chronicling the era\u2019s best-known prize fighters.<\/p>\n

The combat finale is richly covered with wide shots, close-ups, and a few in-your-face moments of the boxers locked in close proximity, and (apparently) the material in the final edit was culled from footage shot using two camera. Nothing was staged, and there weren\u2019t any retakes, and it is remarkable that Kubrick was able to include several edits which maintain continuity with specific dramatic strikes.<\/p>\n

Produced for $3900 and sold to RKO for their \u201cThis is America\u201d series, Fight<\/strong> is polished, informative, intelligent, and fairly engaging, and it even boasts a striking modernist score by Gerald Fried.<\/p>\n

Like Kubrick, this was the composer\u2019s film debut, and Fried would score 4 feature-length films for the director \u2013 Fear and Desire<\/strong> (1953), Killer\u2019s Kiss<\/strong> (1955), The Killing<\/strong> (1956), and Paths of Glory<\/strong> (1957) \u2013 before getting lost in B-movies and numerous TV series for most of career. A prolific and under-appreciated composer, Fried\u2019s Kubrick scores are still some of his best work (and scream for full score releases, if not full re-recordings).<\/p>\n

The success of his debut put the director \/ cinematographer on the good side of RKO, who soon accepted his pitch to direct another documentary, Flying Padre<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1951), after which he directed the industrial promo The Seafarers<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1953).<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2011 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IMDB <\/a>—Internet Archive Download<\/a> — Vintage Kubrick Interviews<\/a> — \u00a0Soundtrack Album<\/a> — Composer Filmography<\/a><\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> <\/em><\/em><\/em>\/\u00a0D<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews \/ D . Film: Very Good\/ DVD Transfer: n\/a\u00a0\/ DVD Extras: n\/a Label: n\/a\u00a0\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a Genre: Documentary \/ Newsreel Synopsis: Day in the life of middle-weight boxing champion Walter Cartier, adapted by Stanley Kubrick from his 1949 Look magazine photo-essay. Special Features: n\/a . . Review: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[598,599,245,189,600],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-Qr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3266,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions\/3266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}