Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph

The fact that Edison and co. had gotten James Corbett to appear in front of the camera must have been a big break for them. Corbett was the heavy weight champion at the time (he had just defended his title against Charley Mitchell, prior to this movie) and he on top of that also was one of the most popular and best known boxers at the time. He's better known under the nickname Gentleman Jim and is being credited as the 'father of modern boxing'. He is being portrayed by Errol Flynn in the boxing movie "Gentleman Jim", from 1942.

In this boxing match he is competing against an 'underdog', Peter Courtney. Originally the entire movie consisted out of six one minute rounds to be displayed all one by one but now days only a small portion of only a few seconds of the movie has survived. A real shame, since I'm sure that boxing fans now days are still willing to pay an handsome amount of money just to see James Corbett boxing a whole match. Still it must also be noted that the fight was probably fixed though in advance. The Edison Manufacturing Company needed 6 rounds, so Corbett was probably holding back a little during shooting.

In the surviving bit of the movie you can see him deliver some punches, in his very powerful and technical superior (at least for its time) way. It wasn't the last boxing match in front of a 'camera' Corbett appeared in and after his career he actually became an early movie star but not a real successful one though. So this movie is not the only one that shows Gentleman Jim in live moving action.

Filming boxing matches was actually the most profitable thing they ever did for the movie pioneer boys from the Edison Manufacturing Company. As a matter of fact, this particular movie was actually the most profitable one they ever made during the kinetoscope era. Because boxing was illegal in some states at the time, they could sell these shot boxing matches, which could be played on a Kinetograph (lets say a 20th century TV-set). People then were able to view a match, for a certain amount of money. For this purpose they founded the Kinetoscope Exhibiting Company, which also developed and created new special kinetoscopes, which could play movies of a minute long. Before this the movie could only display movies for 30 seconds tops. This wasn't the first boxing match they had filmed and that honor must go to "Leonard-Cushing Fight", from earlier in the year.

It's great to see the legendary Gentleman Jim in live action in this movie, or what is left of it though.

8/10

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At least one portion of this Edison Company film survives, and it constitutes quite an interesting part of early cinema history. The idea itself is of interest as one of many early attempts to make movies more profitable, and the quasi-legal status of the movie in its time is of considerable interest as part of the history of the movies, and also as part of the life of Thomas Edison himself.

The basic idea is fairly simple, but resourceful. Boxing hero James J. Corbett takes on an underdog named Courtney, in a match with some special conditions that allowed it to be filmed with the limited resources and techniques of the mid-1890s. The rounds were only one minute each, since even at that they used up three times the amount of film that was normally used for one movie, and it was filmed in the 'Black Maria' studio, with the trainers and other onlookers all squeezed in along one side of the ring, behind the two fighters in the foreground.

The financial end of it speaks to Edison's business sense, as the Edison Company then showed each round as a separate feature, each one of course being paid for separately. It is supposed to have made an enormous profit for all involved, even though the action in itself (at least in the one portion that seems still to exist) doesn't really look like anything special now.

What is even more interesting is that the whole thing was technically illegal, since prize-fighting was then against the law. In one of the extras to Kino's DVD collection of Edison features, film historian Charles Musser gives a fascinating account of the legal difficulties and how the Edison Company maneuvered around them. It's a side of early film-making that you rarely hear of, and this background adds some real interest to the movie.

1894 was a big year for the Edison company, for it was the very year where their fame began to spread. While the earliest public showings of films in America had actually been in 1893 the year before (or arguably 1891, if you consider the 149 women in Edison's laboratory being shown "Dickson Greeting" a public demonstration) it was 1894 when the company really began to prosper after the completion of the Black Maria studio the previous year. Oftentimes, to get in on the popularity of the various sensations of the era, a performer or athlete would often be hired to come down to the studio in order to be filmed performing their routine. You had people like Eugen Sandow, the famous strongman being filmed several times; Annabelle Moore the serpentine dancer, Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter, etc.

Another kind of act that the company was really into shooting was boxing, and this was probably because of how low-brow (and even illegal in certain places) it was considered to be at the time. Thus, by filming the matches in secret and then distributing them for public viewing, audiences would be allowed to view such sport without getting in trouble. Ultimately, this is what would lead to the rise of the sport as we know it today--and that's why it was such a common theme among filmmakers (and it's not just Edison I'm talking about either, Veriscope also created what is now considered to be the world's first feature length boxing movie, "The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight").

"Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph" is another one of those boxing movies, and is apparently the second boxing match Edison filmed that showed actual boxers ("The Leonard-Cushing Fight" is reportedly the first). Before the company had officially formed, some of the earliest camera tests made in 1891 and 1892 were of boxing matches. There was the famous "Men Boxing" (1891) but that film was a mere experimental work never released, and featuring amateurs instead of professionals; another early movie in the genre was "Boxing" of 1892, but as that short is now probably lost, there is little actually known about whether or not it showed a real championship match. (I'm guessing it was just another mock demonstration as that movie also was a camera test). As far as I know, the boxing genre went as far as 1895 for Edison, and was, I suppose, left off probably so Heise could spend more time with filming documentary (since the Lumière Brothers began filming real life the same year). Variations on the boxing theme include the camera test of "Monkey and Another, Boxing" (apparently featuring two monkeys boxing), and "Boxing Cats" of the same year.

This particular boxing match has some special historical interest to it. Here we see two boxers long dead (especially Courtney, who died about a year after it was filmed) participating in a frivolous match taking place in the boundaries within the Black Maria. Unlike "Men Boxing", there is a referee and a small crowd watching in the sidelines, probably added to enhance the effect. But the bout itself is real since it in truth consisted, as most of the boxing movies did, of six rounds. Alas, the single round that remains intact doesn't tell us anything about the winner of the championship. I suppose that, Courtney being the underdog, he probably lost to Corbett but this remains a mystery to my knowledge.

Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph (1894)

I'm not sure if James Corbett's name is well known today but he is considered the father of modern boxing and some might remember him as the character Errol Flynn played in Gentleman Jim in 1942. Apparently this was an actual fight with certain conditions set early on so that Edison could film it. From what I've read there were six, one-minute rounds but only the footage here seems to remain. This short runs twice as long as the rest of Edison's work from this period but that's still not long enough to fully enjoy seeing Corbett but it's still great to see what we have. Apparently this was a tremendous hit and countless other boxing films followed.