Body and Soul (1947)

Body and Soul is not a groundbreaking boxing movie by any means, but it's done well. John Garfield is a great lead, and Lilli Palmer, as his girlfriend, is much, much better than she has any right to be in a regular old boxing movie. Body and Soul also boasts good performances by Anne Revere, Hazel Brooks, Joseph Pevney (who I don't recall seeing in anything else), and Canada Lee! That's a lot of good performances.

And then there is the extraordinary cinematography of James Wong Howe. His work really elevates this movie to an entirely other level.

Like many movies about pugilism in the late 1940s, this one is about the corruption of the boxing racket – the gambling, the fixed fights, the lack of care for the men who are actually doing the fighting. I am thinking, especially of Champion, which boasts a brilliant Kirk Douglas performance, and also The Harder They Fall from 1956, which turns its attention to corruption directly. Body and Soul is about the choices the fighter makes and how he deals with corruption personally. It's a liberal tack that asks how we personally behave when confronted with corruption. This isn't the (much smarter) institutional critique that The Harder They Fall takes, but Body and Soul works all the same.