The Crooked Circle (Ventura, Republic, 1957)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 6) my husband Charles and I watched an engaging if overly familiar movie from 1957 about the corruption within the boxing world. It was called The Crooked Circle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-JiiBA7U4Y] (given the fact that boxing matches take place inside a space called a “ring” that, despite its name, is actually a square, The Crooked Ring would have made more sense as a title) and was a co-production between an entity called Ventura and our old friend, Republic Pictures. It was noteworthy for having a director, Joseph Kane, and a star, John Smith, who mostly (like Republic itself) did Westerns. “John Smith” was born Robert Errol Van Orden but had his name changed by his infamous agent, Henry Willson, on the ground that “John Smith” was so ordinary a name no actor had used it before, so his client would be different. Willson’s most famous clients, Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, were both Gay, and even at the height of his fame Willson had a great deal of difficulty signing straight male actors as clients because the scandal-mongers inside Hollywood assumed that all his clients were Gay, and that they’d had to trick with Willson to get him to sign them. Smith was married to actress Luana Patten in 1960 but they divorced after 4 ½ years. He had the brief part of a ship’s doctor in the marvelous farce We’re No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart and Aldo Ray and the last film Bogart made with his Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Smith’s best-known role was as star of the TV Western series Laramie with Robert Fuller, who became a lifelong friend.

The Crooked Circle is an exposé of the corruption inside boxing, and specifically the way syndicates of crooked managers, agents, trainers and gamblers build up young hopefuls by putting them in fights that, unbeknownst to them, are “fixed” by bribes to their opponents to lose. Then the young fighters are told to start throwing bouts themselves when it’s in the interest of their sponsors, who are now betting against them, for them to lose. It starts with a fight sequence in which a boxer named Castro, who’s been told to throw the bout, knocks out his opponent and wins – only later that night his body is found in the street, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run traffic accident. But sports journalist Ken Cooper (Steve Brodie, formidable as ever; he was one actor who deserved better career breaks than he got) suspects he was really murdered because his sponsors had bet against him and had lost a lot of money when he won instead of losing as instructed. A few years before, a promising young boxer named Joe Kelly (Don Kelly) had abruptly quit the ring because he’d been getting demands like this. He fled to the countryside (the script sends conflicting signals as to what U.S. state this takes place in; one of the fights is announced as being held under the auspices of the New York Boxing Commission, but the one auto license plate we see, on a Chrysler, is from Connecticut) and opened a fishing resort, where his younger brother Tom Kelly (John Smith, top-billed) works. Tom has been coached in the basics of boxing by his brother, but only for self-defense purposes. But Tom has been bitten by the prize-fighting bug, and he’s being pushed by his girlfriend, Carol Smith (Fay Spain), towards a career in the ring even though big-brother Joe wants to keep him from that because he fears he’ll fall into the clutches of corrupt sponsors the way Joe himself did.

Tom runs away from the resort and goes to the big, bad city, where he hooks up with his brother’s friend Ken Cooper and asks for help getting into the fight game. Cooper tells him to change his name, and he starts boxing as “Tommy Patrick.” He wins his first professional fight, aided by manager and coach Al Taylor (and I was overjoyed to see the great character actor Robert Armstrong in this role, about the one person in this movie – two if you count Steve Brodie, who’d been a name buried deep in my unconscious – I’d actually heard of before), only the second fight he trains for is abruptly canceled because the syndicate that controls boxing in this city wants a fighter of their own in his place. Tom is told in no uncertain terms that the only way he can get enough matches to build a career is to dump Taylor as his manager and sign with syndicate member Larry Ellis (John Doucette). Ellis is part of the gang along with arena owner Max Maxwell (Philip Van Zandt) and gambler Sam Lattimer (Richard Karlan), and the three of them make clear to “Tommy Patrick” that he can only have a boxing career if he plays along with them. He goes on to win 10 more fights, eight of them by knockouts, only unbeknownst to him eight of them are fixed, with opponents paid to lose to him. Then Tom is told to take a dive in his next fight, and one of the gang members tells him that boxing is just “entertainment,” that the people running the fight game decide who will win and who will lose, and it’s all to keep the millions of viewers watching on TV happy and enthralled with the fake spectacle. (This is an unusual film for the late 1950’s in that it actually acknowledges the existence of television as a medium. At first Hollywood studios had depicted TV as a novelty, then in the early 1950’s they barred TV from films altogether, but by 1956 the major studios started to realize they could make money selling their old films to TV and filming new half-hour and hour programs for the home screen, so TV’s started appearing in movies again. But there were still attacks on the TV medium in major movies like the 1957 satirical farce Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, in which the image suddenly shrinks to a fraction of its size and goes from vivid color to blurry black-and-white, and the lead character played by Tony Randall announces that that’s what the movie would look like if you were watching it on television. Ironically, both the movie itself and Tony Randall would end up on TV.)

Among the people watching Tom’s thrown fight on TV are his brother Joe, who notices he’s not up to his usual standards and correctly guesses he was bribed to lose the match – which he took because he wanted $1,000 to buy an engagement ring for Carol. Despite his latest loss, the syndicate sets him up with a bout that will earn him a shot at the heavyweight championship if he wins, but naturally they want him to lose this match, too. Meanwhile, sportswriter Ken Cooper is determined to expose the syndicate once and for all, and to that end he dresses an impostor in Tommy Patrick’s robe and witnesses an encounter between him and a syndicate member telling him to throw the upcoming match. Tommy wins the fight, but the syndicate goes after him determined to run him over in the street in a faked “accident” the way they did with Castro (ya remember Castro?) in the opening scene. Fortunately, Ken chases them down in his Ford Thunderbird sports car and so do the police, who block the gangsters’ car just as it’s about to run over Tom. Ultimately Ellis, Maxwell and Lattimer are arrested and Tom is determined to stay in the fight game but to do so honestly, with Al Taylor returning as his manager. Movies alleging corruption in prizefighting were nothing new; this film came out a year after one of the best, The Harder They Fall (1956), directed by Mark Robson and with Humphrey Bogart (in his last film) as a press agent hired by a corrupt syndicate to build an imposing but spectacularly untalented boxer as a championship contender through a series of fixed fights. The Harder They Fall was advertised with a slogan that would have fit The Crooked Circle as well: “The only thing that’s on the square is the ring itself.”

In fact, boxing was portrayed not only in movies but in real life as so hopelessly corrupt that by the early 1960’s there were demands for its abolition, especially after two promising young fighters, Benny Paret and Davey Moore, were killed in the ring. What saved the sport was the arrival of Muhammad Ali; progressives who once had denounced boxing as immoral and corrupt now started to follow the sport so they could root for Ali and support his courage in taking on the U.S. government over the war in Viet Nam. When Ali was asked how he could justify claiming status as a conscientious objector when he made his living through violence, he answered effectively, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” The Crooked Circle was well made (Republic had a state-of-the-art studio that was bought by CBS and became Television City when Republic CEO Herbert Yates pulled out of new production in 1958, and their movies generally looked better than other minor companies’ “B”’s) but nothing special, and given that Columbia had told this sort of story a good deal better with “A”-list actors like Bogart and Rod Steiger a year before it’s hard to get excited about this version starring John Smith and Steve Brodie.