The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s farewell movie. He’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer not long before shooting started and knew he didn’t have long to live. Though he looks tired and ill, it doesn’t affect his performance. In fact it probably enhances it. Careworn individuals being something of a Bogart speciality.
In a version of the character he’d been playing since The Maltese Falcon made him a superstar and Casablanca reinforced it, Bogart is a journalist down on his luck who is hired by a boxing promoter to puff his boy to the heavens and turn him into a champion. This in spite of the fact that the kid cannot fight, physically imposing though he is. And so Eddie Willis (Bogart) goes to work, making clear that he’s not entirely happy being a press agent, a poacher turned gamekeeper, and not at all convinced that he can work the miracles that unscrupulous Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) requires. A “powder-puff punch and a glass jaw – that’s a great combination,” gripes Eddie. Benko is unfazed. The fights Toro Moreno can’t win on his own Benko will fix, which means all of them.
Bogart plays Bogart, in effect, a decent guy trying to keep an even keel in choppy moral waters, and determined not to let the world spot that he cares. He is introduced smoking a cigarette – ironic, considering that’s almost certainly what killed him – and regularly does that strange, half-to-camera Bogart version of the not-quite eyeroll when a check-this-guy, or what have-I-let-myself-in-for reaction is required.
There are two world champion boxers in this film. Jersey Joe Walcott plays “powder-puff” Moreno’s trainer George, and though he doesn’t get much to do, he steps up in a crucial scene where Moreno needs to be convinced to keep fighting, a little moment suggesting Walcott should have been given more. Max Baer plays Buddy Brannen, the reigning champ Moreno will eventually face in the climactic scenes. Baer is about 20 years past his peak but has charisma to burn and twinkles away in and out of the ring. Mike Lane, as the patsy Moreno, flails about like a guy with no physical co-ordination at all. Just to see Moreno climb into the ring is to know that this guy cannot fight.
It’s one of the great boxing dramas on most of the “best of” lists. But The Harder They Fall has broader intentions – to flesh out the people who are to boxers what pilot fish are to whales: the managers, the media, the girls and the crowds who love or hate but not much in between.
And ambitions even beyond that. It would comfortably sit alongside films like In a Lonely Place or The Sweet Smell of Success, as a drama lifting the lid on shady goings-on, not just in the world of boxing (that had been done before) but journalism and its too-close-associate public relations. Rather than showing training boot camps, this film’s montage sequences show journalists being fed pre-digested stories. Eddie Willis doesn’t just manipulate the news, he fabricates it from nothing. Then, once the toboggan is moving, money starts buying in and everyone falls in line. Fake news.
So, a critique of America and its networks of illusion, to an extent, with the only really blameless characters greenback immigrant Moreno and his naive South American manager Luís (Carlos Montalbán, brother of Ricardo). Plus Beth (Jan Sterling), Eddie’s wife and confidant, Sterling battling hard to be more than just a useful foil for getting Eddie’s inner thoughts onto the screen.
If you’re not a member of the Rod Steiger fan club, you might be surprised by his performance here. He’s good: punchy, the plausible bully-boy promoter swimming in a cesspit. Playing a hoodlum in effect gives Steiger a licence to overact. Even so, watch him try to steal the camera from Bogart here and there with little bits of business – a flutter of a handkerchief, a twitch of an eye. There is madness in Steiger’s Method. But watch also Bogart outclassing him with total stillness. While Steiger sweats, Bogart leans back and waits.
All that said about the film’s grander ambitions, Robson doesn’t entirely abandon fight fans. But he does save most of the blow-by-blow fight sequences for the climactic bout between Brannen and Moreno, which is ugly and dramatic. Which is this film’s view of boxing itself.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
