The Joe Louis Story

Two years after the Jackie Robinson Story came out another and slightly better film tribute to a black sports icon came out. Joe Louis had a bit more sense than Jackie Robinson did and let someone else play the part of Joe Louis.

Coley Wallace who had a boxing background stepped into the part and it helped. Of course the same cheapness of production classified this film as the Robinson biographical film. It did however give more information about Louis and his rise and fall though not nearly enough.

Joe Louis, born Joseph Louis Barrow, from an incredibly poor Alabama sharecropper family started his professional career in 1934 and became heavyweight champion in 1937 knocking out the Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock whose story was told two years ago in a film of the same name. Louis met and took on all comers for the next twelve years.

Only three people defeated Joe Louis, Max Schmeling former heavyweight champion on the way to a comeback as Louis was rising in heavyweight ranks, Ezzard Charles when Louis decided to come back himself for financial reasons, and Rocky Marciano on his way up to be champion in Louis's last fight. Interesting that all three men who defeated him became champions themselves.

His ring record was 68 wins with 54 of them by knockout, 3 losses, one of them a decision for Ezzard Charles and he was knocked out by Schmeling and Marciano. He made a still standing record of 25 successful defenses of the heavyweight championship.

Along the way Joe Louis managed to get himself in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations twice. The first is covered in the film as he said at a War Bond Rally in 1942 that we will triumph "because we are on God's side."

The second concerns his title defense against Billy Conn which was not mentioned. Conn, a light heavyweight had bulked up to challenge Louis in his division and Conn was known as one who was lightning fast in the ring. When asked how he would counteract his speed Louis was quoted as saying, "he can run but he can't hide."

Best acting performance in the film without a doubt goes to James Edwards who played old time lightweight fighter, Joseph Blackburn who originally trained Louis. Edwards with the proper breaks could have had the breakthrough career for black leading men as Sidney Poitier had.

Paul Stewart is in the film in the role of a fictional sportswriter character and narrator in the same type of part that Walter Brennan had in Pride of the Yankees. John Marley has an early movie role as Mannie Seamon who succeeded Blackburn as Louis's trainer.

Given the cheapness of the production it's good that they covered as much as they did. A made for TV film was done about the two Louis- Schmeling fights. Maybe someone will do a good biographical film at some point.

Joe Louis was one class act who reached the very heights and had a lot of heartache and bad times after leaving boxing. Even doing stuff like going into professional wrestling to earn money to pay the tax man, he still was a class act. Fitting and proper that Joe Louis is buried in Arlington National Cemetery because he was nothing less than a national treasure.

This is a biopic of Heavyweight Boxing Champ Joe Louis (Coley Wallace). It starts with his early days training without his mother's consent. It follows his life and his career to his loss to Rocky Marciano.

This is a lower grade B-movie production. The camera work is a little static at times. The technical is not that good. The acting is somewhat limited. Coley Wallace is an actual boxer and a functional sports-actor. This is always a compromise in movies like these. For this one, they are going with the physical and hope for the emotional. I don't mind his acting for the most part, but the director isn't pushing him too hard. They have inserted some real fighting footage. Overall, I am not engaged in this emotionally and that is due to a variety of reasons.

Continuing to review African-Americans in film in chronological order for Black History Month, we're now at 1953 with The Joe Louis Story with Coley Wallace in the title role. This movie about the real-life champ from the '30s and '40s glosses over the racism that I'm sure he must have encountered being such a high profile sports figure during that time though at least one mention was made about it early in the picture. As for the actual footage of Louis and many of his opponents, they weren't very exciting to me possibly due to the lack of close-ups of them. Among the performances of many actors of color, Wallace-himself a fighter-did pretty good as Louis though he's not given much of a chance to express real emotion when things don't go so well. Best among them is James Edwards as first trainer Jack "Chappie" Blackburn whether disciplining Wallace or expressing concern to others about him. As the wife of Louis, Hilda Simms does what she can in that role whenever she expresses some frustration with how little time she has with the constantly busy champ. Other players of the same race worth noting include Evelyn Ellis as Joe's mother, John Marriot as Sam Langford, Isaac Jones as Johnny Kingston, P. Jay Sidney as handler John Roxborough, and Dots (Dotts) Johnson as Julian Black. Incidentally, this is the third time in several days I've seen this actor on film having just previously watched him in Reet, Petite, and Gone and No Way Out. So on that note, The Joe Louis Story is worth a look. P.S. Mr. Wallace was born in Jacksonville, FL, which is where I lived from 1987-2003.

There is not much to recommend about this film. It is a standard issue biopic saddled with inept editing that makes the pace really lag and a screenplay that is nothing but flat undramatic exposition. It is only worth checking out because about 35 minutes are the film are actual Joe Louis fights-including his fight with James J. Bradrock, aka Cinderella Man. Even there the filmmakers decided to try to splice created footage in with the archival material, which doesn't work and distracts from the value of the archival footage. You must be a hardcore boxing or boxing movie fan to get anything from this.

If you want to see a movie about Joe Louis, at least up to the point where his career peaks, i recommend that you make a double bill of "The Joe Louis Story" and "Spirit of Youth," the latter STARRING Joe Louis as a young man from a poor family in Alabama who goes on to become the heavyweight champion. That's right -- Joe Louis (and, no actor he, but what does it matter -- it's JOE LOUIS!) made a better *fictional* film about his own life than his memorializers did in this ostensibly non-fiction film. All the insights into Louis' personal life that were missing in the bio-pic -- the Alabama beginnings, the smug over-confidence and breaking of training that led to the loss of the first Schmeling fight, the wife troubles, the emotional reliance on his mother and on his trainer -- all that and more is in "Spirit of Youth" -- PLUS the latter gives us a comic side-kick in the form of none other than the great comedian Mantan Moreland. Yes, "Spirit of Youth" is a fiction, and a light-hearted one for much of the way, and, yes, Joe Louis was not a professional actor in any way, shape, manner, or form, but the fiction in "Spirit of Youth" is in some ways based more closely on fact -- and certainly bears more emotional truth about Joe Louis -- than "The Joe Louis Story" does. Also, it features some great fight scenes with Louis playing the role of a fighter -- that is, staged fights that show him up close and personal the way the old newsreel footage in "The Joe Louis Story" cannot do. My advice is to rent or buy them both (they are both available for a low public-domain price) and watch them back-to-back, "Spiit of Youth" first, followed by "The Joe Louis Story." You'll be glad you did.