by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Requiem for a Heavyweight, which began life as a Playhouse 90 TV episode and originally starred Jack Palance as
the central character, Louis “Mountain” Rivera, a burned-out heavyweight
fighter who comes out of his last bout — in which he’s brutally beaten over
seven rounds before he’s finally knocked out — with only the dimmest idea of
who or where he is. A doctor examines him and declares that he’s a punch or two
away from being blind, so he will no longer be certified as fit to fight in the
ring. So what is he to do with the rest of his life? He’s only 37 but he
dropped out of school in sixth grade and has been a prizefighter for 17 years,
fighting 111 bouts and never taking a dive once. For the film, made in 1962,
Serling and the original director, Ralph Nelson, returned to the project, but
they replaced Palance as star with Anthony Quinn, who slotted the film in
during a two-month hiatus (October and November 1961) on his work on Lawrence
of Arabia. Requiem is a relentlessly dark story that begins with Rivera
being creamed in his last fight at the hands of a real-life boxer, Cassius
Marcellus Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali — though we see very little of him
in action because most of it is shown from Rivera’s point of view, which
becomes progressively more blurry and disoriented as he loses his ability not
only to defend himself against Ali’s onslaught but even to see. (In a bizarre
irony, the venue where this fight takes place advertises itself as “New York’s
Sporting Mecca” — little did anyone associated with this film that within two
years Clay would convert to Islam for real and take a new name!) When he comes
to in his dressing room he thinks he’s still training for the fight he’s
actually just lost, and when he hears an unrelated bell ring he snaps to and
starts punching the air — evidently he’s supposed to be suffering from what’s
now called post-traumatic stress disorder.
There are four main characters in
the film: Rivera; Maish Rennick (played by a marvelously slimy Jackie Gleason,
who grew a moustache for the role and enacted the villain superbly), his
manager; Army (Mickey Rooney in a good serious performance, though not
particularly a surprise to anyone who’d seen his powerful lead role in The
Big Operator three years earlier), his
trainer; and Grace Miller (Julie Harris), a social worker at the New York
Employment Department who takes a sympathetic interest in Rivera and tries to
place him with a job coaching children in athletics at a summer camp. Only
Maish is determined to sign Rivera for fixed TV wrestling matches with
slimeball promoter Perelli (Stanley Adams) because his life is being threatened
by a group of gangsters led by Ma Greeny (played by someone billed only as
“Madame Spivy” — and for a 1962 movie character she’s so surprisingly
gender-ambiguous that it was only after I watched the film and looked up the
imdb.com page on it that I realized this character was a woman and not just a
weirdly effeminate man!) who, on Maish’s recommendation, made a bet on the
Clay-Rivera bout that Rivera wouldn’t last four rounds — and, though he lost,
he made it to seven. Maish deliberately takes Rivera to Jack Dempsey’s bar in
New York City (the real Dempsey, who unlike the titular heavyweight seems to
have made it out of boxing with his body and his reason relatively intact,
appears in the film as himself) and gets him drunk so he’ll blow his interview
for the camp job. Rivera realizes this in time to make it to the hotel where
the interview was supposed to take place, but is so drunk and obnoxious he
blows the job and in the end he’s convinced by Maish that he owes Maish to go
into wrestling, in the guise of an Indian chief — and the last shot of the film
is of Rivera, all his pride and self-respect gone, woo-wooing in stereotyped
“Indian” noises as he enters the wring to face his opponent in his first
wrestling bout. As the title suggests, Requiem is a good film but also a relentlessly dark one, literally an example of a “kitchen-sink drama” (a particularly
grungy-looking one figures prominently in the set of the hotel room where
Rivera lives), a hard film to watch that Quinn made harder because instead of
speaking his lines in his normal voice, he decided to adopt the almost incomprehensible
slur he’d heard from old, punch-drunk fighters when he’d interviewed them to
prep for the role. According to Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne,
Quinn’s odd vocal inflections pissed off Jackie Gleason, giving the two actors
a real-life animosity that helped make the dagger’s-edge relationship between
their characters that much more believable.
Oddly, though the original
theatrical release was 95 minutes long, TCM’s print was only 85 minutes, and
one imdb.com reviewer noted at least two specific scenes missing: “I distinctly
remember Maish (Jackie Gleason) telling Ma Greeny what he would do to her if
she weren’t a lady. In response, she laughs and says, ‘That’s the nicest thing
anyone’s ever said to me.’ This is part of the early scene where Maish is
attacked in an abandoned boxing ring by Ma’s thugs. There is another whole
scene I can recall in which Mountain (Anthony Quinn) is practicing holds with a
wrestler. He asks that the wrestler stay away from his injured eye, and when he
purposely goes for the eye, Mountain punches his lights out. The cuts I recall
seeing on TV years ago always included these scenes, and I’ve never seen this
shortened cut of the film before. It’s still a great film, but I really miss
these two scenes.” I’d like to see the full-length version sometime, and I’d
also like to see the TV version with Palance (assuming it still exists) since
it reportedly has a different and less relentlessly dark ending, but Requiem is still a good movie, especially in the
heart-wrenching emotional identification director Nelson, writer Serling and
the actors give us with the characters, Rivera in particular. (Even with Maish,
we’re kept in an uncertain, edgy state, one minute wanting his schemes to
succeed, the next wishing the gangsters would kill him already.) Its debt to
Joseph Moncure Marsh’s 1920’s prose poem The Set-Up and the 1949 movie made from it (with real-life
boxer-turned-actor Robert Ryan in the lead) is pretty obvious, especially with
the plot gimmick that the manager has not only bet against his own fighter, he
hasn’t told the fighter to throw the bout because he’s convinced he’ll lose —
and lose on schedule — on his own. Also the character of the social worker
played by Julie Harris is really
too good to be true — she anticipates Mariska Hargitay on Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit in her
schoolmarm-ish attitude and it’s utterly incomprehensible that she could be at
all physically attracted to Rivera (though when he makes a crude move on her
and she repulses him, the scene works because we read it as the only approach
to women Rivera knows: we get the distinct impression that he’s never actually
dated and all his sexual outlets have been prostitutes). But Requiem works as a tour de force for director, writer and the key cast members — even
though Charles couldn’t help but comment that Rooney’s presence in the cast
(TCM was showing this as part of a day-long “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to
him) puts Muhammad Ali one degree of separation from Judy Garland!
