The Boxing Film

As one of popular cultures most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the mediums late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinemas most celebrated directorsfrom Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsesemade boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edisons Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sports meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.