Playhouse 90: "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (CBS Television Network, Playhouse 90, aired October 11, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 3) my husband Charles got home from work an hour earlier than usual, which gave us a chance to watch the original version of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, done on live TV October 11, 1956 as the second episode in the Playhouse 90 anthology series. We’d just watched the 1962 film version on Sunday night after the Grammy Awards, and though I didn’t recall having seen it before Charles remembered it from a 2013 viewing I’d posted about to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/08/requiem-for-heavyweight-columbia-1962.html. Serling wrote the script for the film version as well, and both were directed quite capably by Ralph Nelson, but while at least one actor in a minor role (Stanley Adams as Pirelli, the wrestling promoter) repeated from the TV show, all the principals were different and so were two of the four major characters’ names. The central character in both fought under the nom de pugil “Mountain,” but on TV his real name was Harlan McClintock and he was played by Jack Palance. In the 1962 film his real name was Louis Rivera and he was played by Anthony Quinn (I guess as a nod to Quinn’s real-life part-Mexican ancestry). The sympathetic social worker who takes an interest in him was changed from Grace Carney to Grace Miller, and in 1956 she was played by Kim Hunter – a much better choice than Julie Harris in the 1962 film. (Like Heath Ledger, Harris was great at playing tortured introverts, as she did in Member of the Wedding and East of Eden, and sucked at anything else. It’s altogether fitting that the capstone of Harris’s career was her one-woman show as the ultimate real-life introvert, Emily Dickinson, in The Belle of Amherst.)

As for the two people in Mountain’s camp, manager Maish Rennick and “cut man” (the person responsible for patching up a fighter so he can “go the distance”) Army, in 1962 they were played by Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney, respectively, while in 1956 Playhouse 90 producer Martin Manulis (who in the 1980’s introduction looked considerably younger than his colleagues from the old show) made a truly brave and incredible casting tradition. He cast Keenan Wynn as Maish and his father, Ed Wynn, as Army. Ed Wynn had been a vaudeville and radio comedian for decades (as “The Perfect Fool” on stage and “The Fire Chief” on radio) but had never before played a dramatic role. Most of the introduction, which was shot for a short-lived 1980’s series re-running old kinescopes from the so-called “Golden Age of Television,” consisted of various people who’d been involved in the original program reminiscing about Ed Wynn and how many difficulties he caused them during the show’s rehearsals. He kept blowing his lines and trying to insert old gag lines from his days as a comedian when he did so, and it got so bad that at one point they were seriously considering firing him and replacing him with actor Ned Glass (who was in the show in the minor role of a bartender). They didn’t dare only because Manulis was worried that getting rid of a major (if faded) star on the eve of a broadcast would screw up his ability to recruit Hollywood “names” for future episodes. In the end Ed Wynn came through marvelously and delivered a spot-on performance that far outpointed Mickey Rooney (though when we’d watched the 1962 film I’d given director Nelson major points for calming Rooney down and getting him to underact for one of the few times in his career), In fact, all four principals on the TV show totally out-performed their replacements in the film.

The plot of Requiem deals with a former heavyweight contender who’s been so badly beaten in his latest fight, which he lost by a knockout in the seventh round, that he’s told by the ring doctor that he must never fight again or he risks being blinded. That puts him in a quandary because he didn’t finish high school (he dropped out in the ninth grade on the 1956 TV version and even earlier than that, in sixth grade, in the film) and he literally doesn’t know how to do anything but fight. A sympathetic state employment development counselor, Grace, takes at least a platonic interest in him (they kiss on the cheeks in 1956; in 1962 they kiss on the lips and then he tries to rape her, though she successfully fights him off) and thinks she can get him a job teaching athletics to boys in a summer camp. Meanwhile, Maish is in hock to two gangsters with whom he bet on Mountain’s last fight: he bet against Mountain and lost his bet when, though Mountain lost the fight, he actually kept it going until 2:34 in round seven. Maish had bet that the fight wouldn’t last more than three (in 1956) or four (in 1962) rounds, and when Mountain stayed in until round seven, Maish ended up owing the gangsters $3,000 he had no way to pay. To keep from getting himself beaten up (or worse), Maish hits on the idea of selling Mountain’s services to a corrupt wrestling promoter who stages fixed fights. This hits Mountain’s pride hard since he had never thrown a fight and didn’t intend to this time. Maish arranges with Pirelli, the wrestling promoter, to have Mountain wrestle under the banner of a mountaineer with a silly hat that reminded me of the one Ed Wynn wore as the Fire Chief (in 1962 he was going to pass Mountain off as a Native American), and it’s here that the plots of the two versions radically diverge.

In the 1962 film Mountain blows his chance at a camp job by letting Maish and Army get him drunk at Jack Dempsey’s bar (Dempsey played himself and served as a living example that you could survive a prizefighting career with your brains and body relatively intact and, if you’d husbanded your money, have a reasonable post-fighting career). So he misses his 10 p.m. interview with a rich couple who run a summer camp for boys, and he’s forced to be humiliated in the wrestling arena. Six years earlier, Serling gave his tale a much more hopeful ending: Grace buys Mountain a train ticket to his original home town, Kenesaw, Tennessee, and tells him to go back there and re-establish ties with what’s left of his family. On the train Mountain runs into a boy who wants to learn to box, and though the kid literally doesn’t know his left from his right, Mountain gives him a few pointers and his face lights up as he realizes he has a knack for working with children and that’s a suitable career path he should pursue when he gets back to New York. Ralph Nelson did some unusual camera tricks in the 1962 film he couldn’t have done on live TV, including shooting most of the boxing match at the opening (in which Mountain was fighting real-life heavyweight contender Cassius Clay, who two years later would convert to Islam and take the name Muhammad Ali; I did a double-take when he appeared and I thought, “Is that Muhammad Ali?”) from Mountain’s increasingly blurry point of view, and a later scene in Mountain’s apartment in which he makes his inept pass at her. But all four of the principals in the 1956 TV version acted better than their counterparts in 1962, and in particular Jack Palance was stronger and more powerful. Palance played Mountain in a relatively understated way that suggested he had begun as a man of normal intelligence whose brains had been scrambled by 15 years of blows to the head in the ring, while Quinn in the film looked like someone severely mentally challenged (or whatever the au courant euphemism is for the “R”-word) even before he took up boxing as a career.

Both the TV show and the film illustrated how much Serling owed to Budd Schulberg, who in 1954 (two years before the Playhouse 90 version of Requiem) had written the script for On the Waterfront, and in particular the famous scene in which Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy lamented his former boxing career, which ended ignominiously when his corrupt manager ordered him to throw a fight. In both versions Serling seemed to be channeling Schulberg’s scene in which Brando as Malloy said that if he hadn’t gone along with the fix, “I coulda been a contenda, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” In both versions of Requiem, Mountain gets a strikingly similar speech in which he tells Grace that he was once considered number five on the list of contenders for the heavyweight championship, and that’s the part of his life of which he’s most proud. An imdb.com reviewer of the Playhouse 90 version wondered why Rod Serling took a TV script that offered at least a glimmer of hope for its protagonist and turned it into a film of unrelieved despair: “When the Anthony Quinn-Julie Harris version was made in 1962, Serling was deeply involved in crafting The Twilight Zone series – a very major undertaking. But that in itself does not seem to explain how this rather simple and often touching story about several troubled people morphed into a generally downbeat tale that ends with such a negative feeling of loss. It is not difficult to understand why the Playhouse 90 production – even with all its well-known creative and technical problems – was such a huge popular and critical success, while the feature film, with its greater invested resources and production values, was unsuccessful at the box office. The latter is actually a difficult movie to watch, with so much unrelieved pain experienced by the characters and audience from beginning to end. What was the point of Serling’s decision to tell a quite different story in making the feature film version, and in doing so abandoning the positive possibilities inherent in the television play?” Actually, in 1962 Serling had been producing The Twilight Zone for five years and CBS-TV had made the shocking decision to cancel the show even though it was doing well in the ratings, and that might have made the 1962 Serling much more cynical about life in general and show business in particular than he’d been as the Bright Young Man of early TV writing six years earlier.