Max Baer

(On Cable TV, September 2022) Classic Hollywood movies are exceptionally good at two things that are well illustrated in The Prizefighter and the Lady. For one thing, older movies can be instructive in illustrating the passing of fame: You can be famous enough one year that they make a movie about you, and then completely forgotten decades later (except by Hollywood nerds). And yet Hollywood will also teach you that there is nothing new under the sun—that the formulas that work now have been in use for generations. So it is that The Prizefighter and the Lady is a boxing film that happens to start a true-life boxing champion (Max Baer, much better as an actor than you’d expect, fighting other champion Primo Carnera in a climactic bout that prefigures their real-life fight the following year) and it goes for boxing movie clichés with the same gusto as Rocky would decades later. It’s quite standard, although the film does benefit from the great Myrna Loy as the titular lady, a gangster’s moll who makes things even more interesting. Some of the boxing sequences, under the successive tutelage of directors Howard Hawks (who left the production early on) and W. S. Van Dyke, still have some punch to them. It’s not much of a movie, but it still works and that, when you get down to it, is what still counts about Classic Hollywood.