The Harder They Fall

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched The Harder They Fall, a mid-50s movie exposing boxing as a crooked sport. Starring humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger.

Story concerns a once-proud sportswriter now roped in, for the money, into promoting an incompetent boxer for a gangster. The main line concerns getting the giant, helpless Toro Moreno a fight with the champ.

Climax/crisis comes when toro refuses to go through with the big fight. Bogart, our writer/promoter, must convince toro to fight.

Seq. Seven then is the fight. Toro gets butchered and must go to the hospital, but at least he has made a deal with Bogart that after this fight they will both quit and take their money. Bogart leaves the boxer at the hospital and goes up to collect.

Bogart meets with gangster rod steiger who’s celebrating. 2 twists come in this scene: steiger has sold toro’s contract to an evey scummier manager, who intends to have toro fight in every town cross country where he won fixed fights to build him up – but now he will have to take a fall in every fight. Not only that but twist 2 comes when Bogart insists on getting toro’s share of the million-dollar gate and learns it comes to forty-nine bucks and change. All legal, with receipts.

Sequence 8 consists of two movements, unless we want to call the second an epilogue. First movement has bogie going to the hospital and collecting toro. Steiger’s goons try to stop them but bogie is too smart for them. He and toro take a taxi to the airport where toro will fly back to argentina. Toro asks to hold his money, how much was it? Bogie squirms for a little, then hands over the envelope with his share – twenty-six grand. He puts toro on a pan-am flight and waves him off.

Second movement of seq 8 has bogie back at his apartment. Things are now patched up with his wife after he’s done the right thing, but he’s broke and needs her to hold onto her job while he scrounges up something. Steiger and his goons barge in looking for toro. They don’t believe that he’s gone, at first. Then steiger insists that bogie must pay him back for the seventy-five grand he’ll lose by not being able to sell toro’s contract. ‘And we’ll start with your twenty-six grand for first payment.’

Bogie says he gave it to toro, but he’ll pay steiger back every penny by making him famous, he’ll write a series of articles all about him. Steiger threatens but it’s no good.

Steiger and his goons leave and bogie sits at the typewriter and begins his first expose article, while wifey makes him coffee.

Script by Philip Yordan, a Hollywood vet, produced by Yordan, from a book by Bud Schulman, a sportswriter who wrote what’s called the finest boxing novel ever – can’t recall the name of that one.

Anyway that’s how I see the third act. Interesting that the actual fight is not part of the climax, that they didn’t coincide toro’s crisis of conscience in the middle of the prize fight.

Mark Robson directed, not too well. The performances seem flat. Maybe the script is at fault, it’s too heavy handed and preachy.

Bogart seems tired and he spits a lot when he talks. The scenes in general seem rushed somehow, and we don’t see enough of Bogart’s unease at the sort of racket he’s in. the problem is we see, and Bogart knows, that it’s a scam from the opening. He descends into more and more corruption, but just breezes into it. So long as the money is bigger, he’ll do worse, until finally the end when he turns. I found it hard to believe him taking the money all along, and I found it impossible to believe that after doing all that, he would give the fighter his money and end up with nothing. I suppose the big fight is supposed to change our opinions, it is shot to be bloody and horrible. Nothing like raging bull or the violence that they would do today, but it must have been pretty rough back in the mid fifties.

In general I find all of Bogart’s movies from the fifties to be weak. He seemed tired in all of them, and off his game as a performer. The best ones are those like Barefoot Contessa where he plays a weary soul anyway. In Sabrina it’s such a joke that he ends up with Audrey Hepburn.

(written around 15 February 2009)