Word: champion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Champion is hard & fast at slugging the audience. It is stunningly photographed and the pace seldom slackens. At its brilliant best in the fight scenes, which are probably the most brutally believable ever screened, Champion is equally good at creating suspense. In a chase sequence, when Midge is being cornered in an empty arena by faceless racketeers, the camera movement in & out of the vast shadowy beehive of tunnels, arcades and aisles is expertly terrifying...
...first to last, Champion is a tough-minded, penetrating character study which makes Midge neither an inhuman monster nor a whining victim of circumstances. It simply focuses a hard glare on his unreflective brutality, his arrogance and his bursts of self-interested decency. Much of its punch comes from the sensitive performances of Arthur Kennedy and Paul Stewart. Its final wallop it owes to Kirk Douglas, who fills out every corner of Kelly's unattractive pug with bulging assurance and conviction...
...Champion proved to be a clean knockout for practically everybody connected with it. To get ready for his remarkable fistic performance, Actor Kirk Douglas, 32, trained for a month and a half, six days a week, under the knowing eye of "Mushy" Callahan, onetime world's junior welterweight champion. Until then, the nearest Douglas had ever come to boxing was skipping rope at St. Lawrence University in preparation for a tournament in which he became intercollegiate wrestling champion of the Eastern Division (1938-39)* By the time Mushy finished with him, Douglas was in such good ring training that...
Douglas had been known in Hollywood as a competent actor (The Walls of Jericho, A Letter to Three Wives'), but Champion promptly doubled his price per picture. Warner Brothers took one look and signed him up for a seven-year, nine-picture deal at just under $1,000,000. His first two pictures for Warner will be Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. He will also continue to do one film a year for Screen Plays, Inc., the welterweight studio which produced Champion...
...were sitting pretty. On something like $600,000 (chicken feed for a modern A movie), they had made a picture which some experts guessed would gross $3,000,000. They had also delivered a stiff uppercut to Hollywood's heavyweights. Sam Goldwyn promptly bought up the talents of Champion's young (34) Director Mark Robson (who, like Douglas, will continue to do one picture a year for Screen Plays). Aggressive little Screen Plays' next: Home of the Brave, the first of the new Hollywood cycle on the Negro problem (TIME, March...