The Harder They Fall (Columbia, 1956)

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

Turner Classic Movies’ second boxing movie on their double-bill Saturday, December 13 was The Harder They Fall, made by Columbia Pictures in 1956 and based on an anti-boxing novel Budd Schulberg had published in 1947. Schulberg had hoped to get the assignment to write the script, too, but producer Philip Yordan pulled rank on him and wrote it himself. He also made one dramatic change in the material: originally the character of Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart in his final film) ends it by writing an article that begins, “Boxing must be outlawed in the United States, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” In the film as it stands now the final line he types is, “The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and corrupt managers, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” The change was made at Budd Schulberg’s insistence, since in his 1971 book Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali he said he’d only meant to call for the reform of boxing, not its abolition altogether. The Harder They Fall, directed by Val Lewton veteran Mark Robson (and it shows in a scene in which gangsters corner a fighter who refused to take a dive when he’d been paid to in a gym shower and beat him to death, and Robson depicts it with a scene of bloody water trickling out of the shower, copped from Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man), deals with Eddie Willis, a long-term sportswriter who lost his regular column when the New York newspaper he wrote for went out of business. He’s contacted by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to do P.R. for a scam Benko has cooked up: he’s signed a deal with Argentinian boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) who looks formidable – he weighs 278 pounds, 60 to 70 pounds more than a typical heavyweight – but has, as Willis put it after he sees him with his African-American sparring partner George (played by real-life boxer Jersey Joe Walcott), “a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw.”

Benko and his corrupt henchmen set up a series of fixed fights in which Toro will win by knockouts and build up a reputation as a contender for the heavyweight championship. Despite the misgivings of his wife Beth (Jan Sterling, five years after her incandescent performance as the faithless femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole; alas, she’s largely wasted her in her typical good-wife role) and his old friend Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), a TV sportscaster who catches on that Toro’s first fight was fixed, Willis takes on the job. Meanwhile, the heavyweight championship for which Toro is being promoted changes hands as contender Buddy Brannen (another real-life boxer, Max Baer) defeats reigning champion Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) and leaves Dundee with a concussion. In Toro’s next fight with Dundee, as a warmup for his championship bout with Brannen, Dundee dies from his previous injuries and Toro is convinced that he killed him. Homesick, bereft of his original manager Luis Agrandi (Carlos Montalbán) whom Benko sent away, and upset by a note he’s received from his parish priest back in Argentina that his father is dying, Toro wants to quit the ring and return home to be with his sick father. But with the championship fight with Brannen already arranged, Benko and his gang are determined not to let Toro leave the country and bail out on his big bout. First they have five people corner him with chains and try to beat the shit out of him – Toro’s helplessness in the face of these thugs, as well as the scene in which he was first introduced and he clumsily bumped into an overhead light fixture, tell us all we need to know about his utter haplessness as a fighter – and then Willis corners him in a church (whose pastor is played by legendary voice actor Paul Frees) and talks him into going ahead with the Brannen fight because there’ll be a major pay envelope waiting for him after it.

Meantime Brannen has formed a personal grudge against Toro over the claims that it was he, not Toro, who inflicted the fatal blows against Dundee. Benko’s men have told Brannen to go easy on Toro for six rounds to make it look competitive, but the furious Brannen refuses and opens up on Toro almost from the get-go and totally humiliates him. Toro ends up in a hospital with his jaw badly fractured and wired shut, which doesn’t stop Benko from selling Toro’s contract to an equally corrupt manager, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews), for $75,000. Weyerhause figures he can make his money back touring the hapless Toro in the counties in which he won his fixed fights and allowing the local boys to clobber him, but in the meantime Willis determines (in the classic arc of a Bogart character who lost his ideals in the backstory but regained them in the finale) to help Toro get out of the country as soon as he’s well enough to travel. When Willis goes to Benko to get his and Toro’s shares of his earnings, he gets an envelope containing $26,000 but is told that after all the deductions for expenses, all Toro has coming to him is $49.07. Willis gives Toro his own share of the proceeds and then announces his intention to Benko to write a series of articles exposing the corruption of the fight game. Benko threatens him but then realizes that a man who’d give away $26,000 out of a sense of righteousness is someone who can’t be corrupted, bribed, or intimidated.

The Harder They Fall was a good movie for Humphrey Bogart to go out on; it’s tough, well-made, gives Bogart one last change to portray nobility regained, and the reported real-life antagonism between him and Steiger adds verisimilitude to the story. Bogart made no particular secret of his distaste for the Method and the actors who practiced it – he referred to it as the “scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school” – and in this movie we see Steiger throwing himself into his role with all his Method affectations and Bogart taking the acting honors with his simple, direct Old Hollywood professionalism. One aspect of this film that irritated me on previous go-rounds was the cheesy “Latin” theme composer Hugo Friedhofer inflicted on us every time Toro’s tour bus is shown on screen, though most of the music is actually quite good even though it’s a functional rather than an expansive score: one which works in the context of the film even though it doesn’t generate great music on its own. Robson’s direction and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography are good enough to serve their purposes – this is an exposé, not a film noir, though the basic story had potentials for noir atmospherics that weren’t realized or even attempted (notably in the scene in which Willis is on the phone to his wife Beth and a woman sneaks into his hotel room and puts her hand on the phone cord, thereby hanging up the call; we momentarily believe that Willis is going extra-relational on Beth, but that’s about the farthest thing from his mind at the moment) – and for some reason, even though he was about to be diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in early 1957, Bogart actually looks healthier here than he had in Beat the Devil two years earlier.