Cinderella Man

The historical movie says much about our conditions today

by Junius

What makes Cinderella Man more than a boxing movie is that it is set in the Great Depression of the early thirties and the hero is a working man, when the New Jersey docks can not give him any work at all. This setting, convincingly portrayed in the near starvation of the family, is not just background. We are made to feel the heroism in the quiet determination of the man, rolling with the punches of life right to the bottom; and when given a chance to fight again in the ring he now knows what he is fighting for. He tells the reporters (one of whom you will recognize from Vancouver) that he is fighting for “milk.” Literally, milk for his children.

Cinderella Man has been rightly described as a “feel good” film, but it was made by a director haunted by the faces of want and the Hooverville shanty town in Central Park, NY. He doesn’t let us leave feeling all that good.

The hero himself puts the Depression down to “bad times” that have to be lived through to get back to the prosperity that America is destined to have. In this he is a simple, trusting soul, as he is in other matters: when he got some money from boxing, he went to the Welfare Office and paid back all he had had to ask for in the worst of the bad times. (If some of our corporate welfare cases would do that, we would faint with shock—Bombardier, for example.)

Our honourable hero should know that “bad times” don’t come without cause. The cause of the Great Depression was that America lured itself into reliance on big business, and when big business lost confidence in being able to maintain its usual profits, it closed down or cut back drastically. This left self-help and neighbourly bartering as the mainstays of survival, except of course for the rich who were clever enough to prepare their nests.

The opportunity far war profits in the forties restored confidence in profits from off-shore enterprises which trickled back in diminishing amounts. Michael Moore’s Downsize This made everybody aware of the treachery of global corporations that used to be American. And when they’ve finished violating Asia and South America, the trickle will stop entirely. Cinderella Man is not past history; it is a film with a hidden warning. They are going to do it to us again.

****