Thomas Edison’s brief East Coast monopoly on the movie business allowed him to produce hundreds of minor silent shorts. You’ll find all of the above in this list of fifty of cinema’s greatest on the sweet science. Then again, there are light-hearted celebratory biopics and slapstick parodies to choose from, too. They speak of the long dark night of the soul, a damned-if-you-do existentialism where you rise from the gutter only to be chewed up and spat out again by the fierce internal cogs of the sport. But they can also be brooding meditations on what may have been or could never be. They prod at class divisions, and at what it means to be a ‘man’ in the world. They can be simple fight yarns, but more often they’re other things-explorations of greedy commercial exploitation, poverty, violence, race.
With the sport’s mythic, violent clashes and long history of social eruption, it can be an allegory for nearly whatever you want it to be. It’s no surprise filmmakers return to it frequently. As the sport grew in popularity throughout the 20th century, so too did the movie genre. The propulsive excitement and fierce elegance of the sport were perfectly suited to the screen, and some of the earliest surviving motion pictures are filmed boxing matches.
Boxing and the cinema have been inseparable from the earliest days of movie-making.
