While most people think of Clint Eastwood as relating eternally to the western film genre and to some extent to war movies, it’s also true that he’s provided his fair share of efforts in the boxing movie world, too, most notably with his 2004 sports drama Million Dollar Baby, starring Hilary Swank.
The film sees Eastwood play a cantankerous Irish-American boxing trainer who comes across a young woman’s talent, even though he has a rule about not training women. Eventually, Frankie Dunn turns Maggie Fitzgerald into a title contender while dealing with issues in his personal life.
In a 2005 interview with Tony Macklin, Eastwood explained how boxing movies had an impact on him when he was a child. “I grew up looking at boxing movies, and I liked them a lot as a kid,” he said before pointing out two boxing films that stood out to him as markers of excellence in the genre: Body and Soul and The Set-Up.
Body and Soul is Robert Rossen’s 1947 film noir boxing flick starring John Garfield and is considered to be one of the best boxing movies ever made, while 1949’s The Set-Up is Robert Wise’s take on the genre, starring Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter, and it’s a film that stayed with Eastwood throughout his adult life.
Discussing his memories of The Set-Up, Eastwood noted, “It was one of Robert Wise’s first films — a B movie, but it was great. I remember walking down the Via Veneto with Robert Ryan; we were both over there working. We met in Italy and hung out — had a couple of beers together. And people were yelling out the windows at him, ‘Hey, The Set-Up!’ It’s amazing how in Italy this film was so popular, but very few people knew about it in this country, because it just fades into the B movie genre.”
Eastwood also admitted to enjoying the first Rocky movie and particularly how Sylvester Stallone believed in his own creative vision to get the movie made how he wanted to, rather than sell his story to a big studio. That kind of spirit shown in boxing films would serve Eastwood well throughout his career.
Not only has Eastwood made a significant contribution to the boxing film genre with the movie Million Dollar Baby, but it could be said that boxing, in general, seems to be epitomised by the kinds of characters Eastwood has been known to play, who often traverse narratives with a quest for vengeance or redemption.
Take Dirty Harry, for instance. Though Eastwood’s character, tough cop Harry Callahan, is not a boxer by trade, he’s a maverick who has to rely on his own wits (and sometimes his fists) in order to get the job done, no matter how dirty it gets. In that light, Callahan himself is akin to a boxer dodging and weaving the ring.
Then, in Unforgiven, there’s a mirror to the kind of stories told in the Rocky movies, whereby a man has to return to his old way of life for one last job – or one last fight as Balboa often had. Could Eastwood’s ‘The Man With No Name’ character from Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy also be akin to a boxing movie character, one stepping out from the shadows to deal with his competitors? Absolutely.
So Eastwood himself seems to have taken a few lessons from his favourite boxing films, fancying himself in the underdog role, faced with seemingly insurmountable odds and yet coming out on top anyway.