Double Feature: Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) and (1962)

Posted on April 24, 2024 by 4 Star Films

Rooney, Gleason, and Quinn in the film version

Requiem for a Heavyweight was an early live television production that was so popular it garnered a feature-length adaptation a few years later.

It’s relatively easy to see the merits in both because although they enlisted the same director and screenwriter, the actors and the medium do quite a lot to make them feel textured and different. I couldn’t necessarily pick a favorite.

The original is bare-boned but intimate, and there’s a darker more caustic theatricality to the film version. It really comes down to preference. Here are my thoughts on the two versions:

Palance and Hunter on Playhouse 90

Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956)

This early showcase of the Playhouse 90 live TV format introduced the fragile and most sensitive version of Jack Palance. He’s a hoarse and husky-voiced journeyman boxer named Mountain McClintock.

One of his greatest claims to fame was that he was almost heavyweight champion of the world. But he’s most proud of his integrity. In 111 fights, he never took a dive. That includes his most recent bout. He got pulverized and still managed to make it seven rounds.

Between Rod Serling’s script — the writer called upon his own memories as a one-time boxer — and Palance’s endearing performance, you have the emotional heart of the tale. Because Mountain is proud and principled in his own way. He didn’t get into fighting to murder people or make a ton of money. It’s just the only thing he’s ever known — the only thing he was good at — and he took solace in it.

Now he’s on the way out. The Doc says he’d better quit before he earns more permanent damage. Somehow he’s impressionable like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Despite his physical presence, he needs protectors and others to look after him. There are certain people in his corner he deeply trusts just as all his words and pearls of wisdom come from the mouths of others.

The real-life familial bond of Keenan and Ed Wynn is equally key because they play the two most important people in Mountain’s life. There’s Maish, his manager, who’s currently in a bit of a bind. Then, Army, his cutman, who’s more resigned to the inevitably around him. He’s seen a lot.

Keenan can exhibit a kind of gruff intensity role to role, but since I know Ed Wynn as such a jovial figure, I almost didn’t recognize him. Both of them exhibit an earnestness in their respective parts. Maish has compromised his integrity and now feels bitter toward Mountain, a has-been fighter he sunk so much time and money into. How is he supposed to get any recompense?

Mountain looks a bit pitiful walking into a job agency with no work experience and a kisser as roughed up as his. However, the attendant behind the desk (Kim Hunter) sees his goodness and drops her business spiel for something more personal.

She responds with heart, tracking him down to his favorite watering hole and vowing to try and help him resurrect his life. The bar serves as the graveyard and burial ground for all the hard-up fighters who wither away inside their own heads. Mountain might easily be headed toward this end and worst yet, he might lose his dignity in service of Maish’s debts…

We must remember what the medium of television accorded the makers. Visually, they were working in fuzzy black and white with tiny boxes of composition but also a more familial viewership. This ultimately impacts the creative choices and the film takes on a hopeful final note.

It’s fascinating to watch the production since it was being taped live and throughout I only noticed one flubbed line rushed over by a mother on the train. Otherwise, around all the orchestrating and simple sets, there’s very little taking us out of the story and disrupting the primary performances. Given the restraints, it’s quite a startling achievement.

3.5/5 Stars

Quinn and Gleason

Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)

Ralph Nelson was the same director who filmed the original TV version. Instantly the big screen is more cinematic thanks to the subjective point of view in the ring. We see a solemn Jackie Gleason, the yelling Mickey Rooney, both standing just outside the ropes.

Then, the announcer calls out the name Cassius Clay, and there he is in all his youthful glory beating back the camera! It does feel like a bit of a gimmick, but then we finally see the face of Anthony Quinn battered and bruised and we have our movie.

I assumed the older Gleason was Army and having just recently been introduced to what Mickey Rooney was capable of in The Comedians, it seemed only too reasonable that he would play the more mercurial Maise. How wrong I was.

Quinn seems especially old for his part, but it’s intriguing to see how his character mythology was altered to fit his own Hollywood legacy. Mountain Rivera came out of New Mexico, he ditched school in the 6th grade (instead of 9th), and he’s been fighting longer than Palance’s counterpart. Still, like Palance, Quinn’s larynx sounds like it’s been beaten out of him positively eviscerated by his years of punishment in the ring.

The movie’s milieu is not too far away from The Hustler (also featuring Gleason) or the sensibilities of a TV-to-film scribe like Paddy Chayefsky. The jump to film also means it owns a sharper even more melancholic edge than its small-screen counterpart.

Maish (Gleason) is tailed and tracked out into the ring reminiscent of The Set-Up, and he’s threatened into paying up on his recently accrued debts. He needs the cash fast. Later, he willfully gets his dwindling prize fighter drunk. It’s all part of a ploy to keep him from getting a real job so he can earn money as a sideshow attraction in some trumped up wrestling showcase.

This time it is Julie Harris, who is tasked with helping Mountain turn a new leaf in his life. Her character never shared consequential time with Maish in the original version, but here they share dialogue on a stairwell adding an alternate dynamic to the picture. He says, “The rich get richer and the poor get drunk.” Mountain’s finished, and he’s skeptical of any do-gooder looking to peddle their charity. The edge of cynicism is deeply entrenched.

Also, in the previous rendition, there’s this happy denouement as we recognize Mountain entering into his post-boxing career. It’s possible for him to make something of himself and gain fulfillment beyond the ring by imparting his knowledge to younger generations.

Here it almost feels like the movie has been shifted and the focal point is Maish. Because he is the person who must come to terms with what he has done by totally denigrating Mountain for his own desperate gain.

When he’s marched out into the ring, totally racialized and trivialized, it sears with a level of pain television would have never dared. And we realize all the self-fulfilling prophesies have come true. Mountain really has become the geek, a kind of carnival show attraction, but it’s not out of his own desperation. He’s doing it for someone else. Mountain willfully subjects himself to the ignominy, but Maish is the one who must live with his conscience. I’m not sure what’s worse.

3.5/5 Stars

Saddle The Wind (1958): In Memory of Richard Erdman

Posted on August 12, 2020 by 4 Star Films

Saddle-the-wind_poster Julie London provides her airy voice to the title track and Elmer Bernstein gives his scoring talents for the rest of the picture. In these beginning moments, Saddle the Wind evokes the expanse of the majestic landscapes of the West like the best of its brethren. There is a sense we really are out on the frontier, not some manufactured piece of artifice. For the time being, the film maintains this sense of the wind-open spaces away from Hollywood soundstages.

It gets its first jolt of action when a leering Charles McGraw stomps into a saloon and shoves his weight around for food and a bottle. He’s got his feet kicked back and starts breaking bottles over counters just to get his point across. The locals aren’t looking for any trouble, but he’s certainly looking for someone: gunslinger Steve Sinclair (Robert Taylor).

Here we must introduce the glut of Saddle The Wind. Robert Taylor is still Hollywood handsome but time has set in and made his features more applicable for the West. Where a hard life and past wounds lead people to make a new existence for themselves. The reformed gunfighter is not a new concept, but it is a handy one. It gives a man menace without him having to show it, until it’s absolutely necessary.

The real action arrives in the form of his spunky dynamo of a little brother, who comes back to the family ranch with a woman (London) betrothed to be his wife. His big brother is less than pleased to find Tony has gone and got himself hitched and spent his money on a spiffy new gun.

If anything is cemented in this preliminary scene, it is that one is the hothead, the other maintains reproachful silence. They are the yin and yang of the West. Cassavetes and Richard Erdman, as rowdy Reb veterans, form a rambunctious partnership looking to tear up the town and have themselves a bit of fun. They positively take the bar by storm, only to have their merriment disrupted by the same out-of-towner. Except the man Venables meets up with isn’t an old local or a squeamish bartender.

Tony is on top of the world, and if there’s one thing he’s never gonna do is back off even when the other man isn’t looking for trouble. His quarrel, after all, is with the elder Sinclair. Still, the feisty buck takes it as a personal affront. He goads the man into action. There is no other way for it. Guns are drawn.

Steven rushes on the scene an instant too late. His brother isn’t killed, but something worse happens. He’s filled with renewed fire. The taste of power — the ability to strike a man down with the pull of a trigger — is like an intoxicating liqueur.

Steve Sinclair has long kept the peace with the main landowner in the area Dennis Deneen (Donald Crisp), who is, by all accounts, a businessman and a pacifist. The stage is set for something…

Clay Ellison (Royal Dano) is a proud man clinging unflinchingly to the promise of land out west, formerly bestowed on his dearly departed father when the territory was still wide-open. He’s come on the scene to take back what’s his even as Steve tells him, brusquely, he’s trespassing. In a different context, that might be the end of the incident.

What ignites it irrevocably is a remnant of North vs. South animosity left over from the Civil War (Ellison is a proud Union man with great distinction). The torchbearers are Tony and the impish Dallas as they have a grand old time with the squatters, upending their wagons and chasing away their livestock in fits of gunfire and laughter. It’s a bit of festering payback for wartime grievances, and it’s easily the most devastating scene, right smack dab in the middle of the picture.

It’s a testament of what happens when men take squatter’s justice into their own hands and when the protective big brother does little more than beat back his baby sibling and throw money at a problem. Nothing is remedied.

However, Saddle The Wind ends up being far more contained than I was expecting. It’s fundamentally a character study about two brothers and how they grapple with one another, based on outside stimuli.

We could name a number of people, first the new wife who is brought home. The old vagabond war buddy who is an instant enabler. A gunfighter with a vendetta looking to tromp up old wounds. Even the obdurate homesteader who’s not about to get pushed out by a punk kid.

None of these characters seems to truly exist for themselves. Even lord of the valley, Mr. Dineen, though deeply humanized by Donald Crisp, is just another piece in the brother’s story. This observation might seem too harsh, but with Rod Serling as the story’s scribe, it seems conceivable to say the intriguing idea — because it is that — takes some precedence over the characters.

There are moments to turn the stomach, feelings of conflict, and wrenching segments of tension. This is not a completely lethargic film by any means. If anything, Cassavetes alone sets it ablaze with his youthful fire. Still, some component seems to be missing.

With this vast assemblage of characters, it could be that there are a handful of stories worth telling when the credits roll, and we only got over the cusp of one of them. The ending lacks all the cathartic payoffs we craved so dearly. The strands don’t entirely tie together, though the movie does try and solve everything with a silver lining. Surely it’s not that easy.

Whereas the opening moments felt like a regalia of western imagery, Saddle The Wind settles into almost small-screen paces, going from long shots full of real sagebrush to close-ups with backdrops painted on.

Although it’s hardly fair to consider the film’s merits on this issue alone — I think the suspension of disbelief being broken speaks to something — even as these characters never settle into something truly genuine. It’s allowable to be harsh with critique only because Saddle The Wind has its share of all-too-brief shining moments to go along with its potential. It’s an oater with enthralling elements not fully realized.

3/5 Stars

Note: I watched this film literally two days before the passing of Richard Erdman at the age of 93. He was one of my most beloved supporting actors. He will be deeply missed for his myriad of classic roles and for his work as Leonard on Community.