What was the first boxing movie?
Perhaps more than any other social phenomenon, the sport of boxing is inextricably tied up with the writing of cinema history. It was boxing that made On the Waterfront’s anti-hero Terry Malloy what he was, in turn making Hollywood legend Marlon Brando’s career. Boxing films secured Sylvester Stallone his big break in film and Robert De Niro his Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
Western movie icon Clint Eastwood also got into acting after watching boxing films as a child. In addition, the plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is driven by a gang’s attempt to rig a boxing match that goes wrong.
But long before the likes of Rocky and Raging Bull, boxing movies were playing a key role in the early development of motion pictures. Several of Charlie Chaplin’s earliest film roles were set in the boxing ring, for example. Even more significantly, it was actually a boxing match that inspired the very first feature film.
The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight was a 100-minute documentary filmed on 63mm nitrate film, covering the world heavyweight title fight between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons on March 17th, 1897. It was screened on May 22nd of the same year at Madison Square Garden, the first showing of a feature film in history.
The length of continuous filming utilised during the documentary’s shooting was made possible by the invention of the so-called “Latham loop”, a method of image capture that ensures the smooth running of the film reel through a camera lens. Woodville Latham is credited with the name of the technique, but French inventor Eugene Lauste is the technician who actually came up with it.
Latham’s collaborator and engineer Enoch J Rector went on to direct and shoot The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight. The achievement of producing a feature-length movie in the 1890s was so astonishing that University of Westminster film historian Luke McKernan claims, “It was the sport of boxing that created cinema”.
Did boxing really invent cinema, though?
Even older short films of boxing matches dating back to 1894 and ranking among the first motion pictures ever produced in the United States support McKernan’s claim. The oldest of these was the Leonard-Cushing Fight, which depicted a six-round exhibition fight set up specifically to be filmed.
However, we can hardly attribute the creation of cinema to boxing alone. The sport just happened to be one of the social pastimes of the day in which public interest was high and which was easy to film. Pointing a camera tripod at a single square of canvas like a boxing ring is much easier than trying to have it follow a football match or a horse race, for example.
The Lumière brothers’ famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, screened a year prior to The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight, had nothing to do with boxing. Nor did short trick films, which proliferated as cinema’s main genre from the late 1890s to around 1908.
The first feature film proved something of an anomaly, and it wasn’t popularised until several years later, thanks to the proliferation of narrative filmmaking. Narrative films were introduced to the world by Georges Méliès at the turn of the century. Méliès used fictional stories rather than boxing matches to create his movie narratives.
In fact, the first narrative film about boxing didn’t appear until 1914. The Knockout was a short, half-hour movie starring comedian Roscoe Arbuckle alongside Charlie Chaplin in a minor role. Cinema boxed clever with the sport until it became a regular theme for comedies and dramas alike in the 1920s.
