"Nuffin's changed! I'm tellinyah! Nuffin!"That's the key, you see Boxing is the same story, over and over again It's only the names of the boxers that change. Crammed with eager kids - invariably the majority will be the poorest kids - just starting off on that doomed rollercoaster ride. Why not slip back to 1956 for a while? In the early 90s I showed a tape of The Harder to a young London middleweight I knew, a medium-ranking pro. You can understand why film-makers and writers get drawn to it There's more material than you can use There's guaranteed pathos It's so easy.And, the best thing is, it's still there In a town near you: the boxing gym. Not like in boxing: there you get a jagged graph like a lightning bolt, always ending in that steep descent, you get white heat and icy darkness in one three-minute round, multiple tear-stained lifetimes all in the space of one fighter's six-year career.
But it will be a very good bit of business for Nick, and Eddie will get a big slice, too.Just putting down the transcripted quotes of this old film can make you feel engaged, perhaps a little Runyonesque, intoxicated by the extremes of the boxing world; its compression of our long existences, the barely perceptible dips in our graphs where aspiration turned to manageable disappointment. His every victory will be fixed until he reaches the golden payday of a heavyweight title challenge There, of course, he will be annihilated. The deal is that Eddie, previously a man of impeccable if constantly buffeted integrity, has to mastermind the hype surrounding Toro Moreno EI Toro is a giant, a freak of nature. He can't fight a lick and smarts-wise he's no more than an innocent child, but it doesn't matter. He sells his soul to Nick (Rod Steiger), boxing promoter and seriously powerful gangster.
Here's another thing he told Eddie: "The fight game today is all about show business The best showman becomes the champ." See? On the button And Nick wasn't even saying it today. He was saying it in 1956, to Humphrey Bogart, who played Eddie in The Harder They Fall, in the opening scene of the best boxing film ever made. Eddie is a fallen former big-name sportswriter. Eddie, the fight game in this country is failing apart The boys are getting too smart They all wanna go to college and be doctors and lawyers. They don't wanna fight for a livin' no more." True, true Everyone in boxing is saying the same thing This Nick Banca is perspicacious. Aside from a handful of brief flashbacks, nothing much ruffles the stately progress of an adaptation which misguidedly glosses terror with tastefulness..
While Winfrey and Glover haven't disgraced themselves in the central roles, there's no sense of a performance being wrenched out of them: they look oddly serene for former slaves. It's somehow too strait-laced, too draggy, too solemn in its reverence to make the pulse race. The film's preferred method of signalling high emotion is to have a massed choir warbling out an ethereal hymn. (It's on pages 107-108 of the Picador paperback, in case you're interested).Perhaps people will find a meaning or even an uplift in Beloved which I missed, though I can't see how it would enthrall anyone. I kept waiting for the book's most horrifying scene - one which has stayed with me in the 10 years since I read it involving a chain gang standing in a trench while their white owners sexually abuse them And, wouldn't you know, the film completely overlooks it.
Shots of butterflies and birds proliferate throughout; like last week's The Thin Red Line, much is made of the enigmatic beauty of nature. Demme, who possibly played second fiddle to fellow producer Winfrey, seems to be tiptoeing round the scenery - a strange turnaround from the man who brought us The Silence of the Lambs. Newton, memorable in John Duigan's lovely coming-of-age movie Flirting, is here allowed full rein to make a fool of herself, wobbling her head, twisting her mouth and slowing her voice to Forrest Gump pace Her introduction also has the effect of slowing the picture. Jonathan Demme concentrates instead on the present - the Winfrey-led sections - in which a beautiful young woman (Thandie Newton) dressed in black shows up at Sethe's home, drooling and talking in a voice that sounds like a demonic frog. This is Beloved, the ghost of the murdered daughter in human shape, and armed to the teeth with vengeful schemes.It is also, I'm afraid, an absurd misjudgement. It's here that we expect the film-makers to shift back to the time of Sweet Home in order to detail the misery and suffering of the slave past: this, we're sure, will be the heart of the movie.Instead, past and present have been turned back to front: Sethe's escape from Kentucky and the birth of her daughter on the banks of the Ohio are condensed into amber-lit flashbacks, expertly done and finely played by Lisa Gay Hamilton as the young Sethe, yet much too fleeting for their significance to be felt.
