Day of the Fight

Stanley Kubrick was never one for realistic films about ordinary people; the nearest he came to a straightforward drama was probably the heist movie, The Killing. This shying away from realism seems to show itself in his very first film, this short documentary about the boxer, Walter Cartier, preparing for and engaging in a fight. Any boxer is a special person, but some directors might have portrayed Cartier as a regular guy with a particular skill; but from the start Kubrick stresses Cartier's unusualness by showing waking up beside, and going around town with, his identical twin brother, giving a surreal aspect to the film.

The way Cartier psychs himself up for the fight in his dressing room, turning himself into a fighting machine, also seems to fit in with Kubrick's later interest in making films about people under stress (eg Full Metal Jacket) or in an abnormal state (eg The Shining and Clockwork Orange). It is also intriguing to wonder whether the director's fondness for voiceover narrative in his feature films stems from this and his other early documentaries. Oh, by the way, it's quite a good documentary about a fighter who, in fact, never became champ, and went into TV and films.

"Look" magazine photographer and chess-player Stanley Kubrick teamed up with old school chum Alexander Singer to launch their filmmaking careers and that of their star with this short but sweet self-financed boxing documentary, based on the future legendary director's 1949 photo feature "Prizefighter", which after the original buyer went belly-up was sold to RKO for a cool $100 profit.

We follow the fan (short for fanatic as no-nonsense narrator Douglas Edwards informs us) to the places where matched pairs of men get up on a canvas covered platform and commit legal assault and lawful battery in an attempt to capture the primitive vicarious visceral thrill of seeing one animal overcome another with the science of hammering each other unconscious with upholstered fists.

Irish-American middleweight Walter Cartier is selected at random, with a little help from boxing historian Nat Fleischer, from the 6,000 professional prize fighters who more often than not fail to scrape a living in America to give us insight into the people the fan seldom sees and never considers behind the facts and figures and columns of cold statistics in the record books.

Walter Cartier makes an amiable enough presence at the centre of the action to be able to go on to a TV acting career as we see his daily routine transform him into arena man, with able support coming from his twin brother and manager Vincent Cartier and opponent Bobby James as well as a brief appearance from Nat Fleischer and the dulcet tones of news reader Douglas Edwards.

The filmmakers make a fine pairing as Kubrick ducks and dives with his hand-held camera getting up close and personal with Cartier both before and during the fight while Singer rises above it all with his camera on a tripod to catch an overview of the action which together with the debut score of another childhood friend Gerald Fried all comes together to make a strong first impression.

"No one ever told Walter to be a fighter..."

Had Stanley Kubrick never gone on to become a famous director, three of his early films would never have been packaged together for sale on a DVD. That's because these films are cheap shorts made by an eager and unknown director--hardly works of art. They show none of the director's expert touches--they are just standard short films you might have seen in the early 1950s.

Of the three films in this package, the only one really worth seeing for most people is DAY OF THE FIGHT. While it's not a great film (made with a cheap hand-held camera) and seems rather "square", it does remind you of his first feature, KILLER'S KISS and it surely provided an excellent training ground for his craft. In other words, if Kubrick hadn't done a "throwaway" film like DAY OF THE FIGHT, he wouldn't have been able to make such a great low-budget film like KILLER'S KISS.

Overall, a film most could skip but perhaps worth seeing for fans of this director or students who are in film school.

It's true, I would not know anything about this short RKO-type documentary if not for the fact that it was the first time that iconoclast Stanley Kubrick picked up a camera with rolling film stock to be screened in theaters. But as a student filmmaker myself, I find it of the utmost fascination - even when it is in a jittery, ragged print like the one I obtained on video - to see the early, primitive works of famous directors (Last Year in Vietnam by Stone, My Best Friend's Birthday by Tarantino, and Les Mistons by Truffaut are others) and the foundations of style. Day of the Fight, to be sure, is not something of incredible note, and it would not be until the Killing that Kubrick would create a great film. Yet through this film, I was constantly aware- and pleased- by how this very typical kind of story was executed.

In a way, it's almost of more worth to watch this film with the sound off; the narration, while good at getting to know the very basics of this boxer that's being profiled, it's also a distraction and not very revelatory. As just a succession of images, however, it works a lot more. It's the kind of short documentary that is 70% real, and 30% staged, with Kubrick following the boxer and his brother on the streets of New York, leading up to the fight that will bring him recognition. When looking at how Kubrick uses the camera, it seems fairly simple and, for those looking for all of the Kubrick trademarks, disappointing. But in just looking at how he uses the camera, how he gets his subjects in frame, and the importance of composition and the subtleties of lighting, it's really quite good. And the fight sequence, filmed by Kubrick and a friend, has some cut-away shots that almost ring of the future of Scorsese's Raging Bull (though, of course, still primitive).

Is it more of a curiosity, a film for Kubrick die-hard completists looking to have all 16 of his works, docs and features, in their collection? Sure, but it is also one of the better short doc's he made in his formative years, taking a subject he was already interested in (he was a photographer for Look magazine with this boxer under profile) and going a step further. As his sort of film school, this is in terms of the image even more fascinating than the lackluster 'doodle on the fridge' film Fear and Desire.

Very interesting documentary short by Kubrick, "The Day of the Fight" (1951) showcases Kubrick's unmatched (apart only from Tarkovsky's) eye for film making and photography.

To think that a 23 year-old Stanley Kubrick laid that groundwork inspiring Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, "Raging Bull" (1980) in terms of both theme and most certainly cinematography, is truly astounding. Stanley Kubrick truly was unmatched amongst his previous and future peers of American cinema.