Word: champion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Harrison ("Bones") Dillard, world-record hurdler and Olympic-champion sprinter, who has reaped reams of publicity on the track, took off his spikes and put on another pair of shoes: he set to work grinding out publicity for the Cleveland Indians baseball team...
...Three Wives." In that film he played a pensive English teacher. His second appearance gives him a chance to show off his musculature as Midge Kelly, a lightweight boxer who is nearly normal until he steps into a ring. Douglas is a competent boxer and a fine actor in "Champion...
...agreement or because of terrific punishment. He wins his last fight after being beaten silly because he gets sore in the fifteenth round; he dics afterwards of a brain hemorrhage-- ending his career not as a heel, not as a has-been, but as just one thing; the champion, if dead...
Male support is consistently top-level. Arthur Kennedy and Paul Stewart, as the crippled brother and manager of the champion, make perfect foils for Douglas. Their humaneness and concern are in sharp contrast with his simple-minded machine destruction; their relative smallness, in spite of their warmth, shows all the more his brutal greatness...
...Champion" loses the acid of Lardner's prose, although length is probably as much at fault as anything. It also indulges in a handful of coincidences and cliches that weaken an otherwise tight structure. Perhaps the most difficult problem facing a critic of this movie is its basic black-and-white. journalistic character: you can't get involved because the hero doesn't draw sympathy. Director Mark Robson has shaded the film impersonally and perfectly. It is a tribute to his direction that the one strong emotion the audience feels is the desire to haul Midge Kelly...