The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight
Encyclopedia
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight is an 1897 documentary film
directed by Enoch J. Rector
depicting a boxing
match between James J. Corbett
and Bob Fitzsimmons
in Carson City, Nevada
on St. Patrick's Day the same year. Originally running at over 100 minutes, it was the longest
film that had ever been released to date. As such, it was the world's first feature film
. The technology that allowed this is known as the Latham loop
, and Rector was a rival for claiming the invention of the device. He used three such equipped cameras placed adjacently and filming on 63mm nitrate film. Only fragments of the film survive today. The known fragments were transferred from a print owned by Jean A. Le Roy of New York City.
According to Dan Streible, the film is "one of the earliest individual productions to sustain public commentary on the cinema."
The film is so important to film history that Luke McKernan declared, "it was boxing that created the cinema."
(whom Corbett defeated in 1892) and his manager, Billy Madden
, introducing the event, the introduction of referee George Siler, and both boxers entering the ring in their robes. The film also caught the one-minute rest between each round and, when the film was reissued in Boston and many of its subsequent reissues, including in Dublin, included a ten-minute epilogue of the empty ring at the end of the fight, into which members of the audience eventually stormed. Even with these approximate timings, the film ran a minimum of 71 minutes, and sources generally report that it exceeded 90 or 100 minutes. The film climaxes with Fitzsimmons hitting Corbett in the solar plexus for a knockout, Corbett crawling outside the space of the camera so that he is not visible above the waist.
(1894) in six one minute rounds, each exhibited via the Edison Kinetoscope as a separate peep show
for a separate fee. Some time after leaving the company, Rector arranged for the film with boxing promoter Dan Stuart
(Condon, 137). Stuart offered $10,000 to the winner of the bout in an agreement signed by both boxers on 4 January 1897. Corbett, along with his fans, was eager to win back the title that he had lost to Fitzsimmons in Mexico. Producer William Aloysius Brady got an agreement from Rector that 25% of the proceeds of the film would go to he and Corbett, and an arrangement that Fitzsimmons and his manager, Martin Julian, were to receive $13,000. Fitzsimmons was outraged upon learning of the deal, and the terms were renegotiated with each boxer and his manager taking 25% each, with Rector, Stuart, and Samuel J. Tilden Jr (who had left Kinetoscope with Rector in a battle over who invented the Latham loop) dividing the remaining 50%.
The film was shot in widescreen
format on 2 3/16 gauge film stock. Rector brought 48,000 feet of film stock, the largest amount that had ever been brought on location, and exposed 11,000 feet of it.
The night before the match, Stuart cut the ring down from 24 feet to 22 feet for the sake of the camera, but the referee noticed this and Stuart was forced to change it back.
Legend holds that Wyatt Earp
was the referee at this event (as claimed here) and that Bat Masterson
can be seen in the film wearing a bowler hat
. Earp was, in fact, a reporter for The New York World at the time, which published his commentaries on the fight on March 14 (p. 15) and March 18. Far from being the referee, he disagreed with referee George Siler's decision when Fitzsimmons allegedly hit Corbett in the jaw, which should have resulted in a foul, coming after a knockout blow to Corbett's solar plexus. The World heavily promoted the film, and the day after the film's release, printed a statement from Fitzsimmons, "I don't believe there is a single picture in it that will substantiate those [claims] published in The World."
Local debuts:
May 31, 1897 (Boston
)
June 6, 1897 (Chicago
)
June 7, 1897 (Buffalo
)
June 26, 1897 (Philadelphia)
July 3, 1897 (Pittsburgh)
July 13, 1897 (San Francisco)
July 27, 1897 (Portland
)
September 27, 1897 (London
)
April 1898 (Dublin)
When the film was shown in Coney Island
, it was advertised under the title Corbett's Last Fight.
claims that the film made a more modest $100,000.
The film is also notable because that, at the time, women were essentially prohibited from viewing boxing matches, which were seen as a "stag
" activity, but they were not prohibited from viewing this film. Much attention was given to the fact that Rose Julian Fitzsimmons, Bob's wife, viewed the live match from a box with other female companions, such as dancers Loïe Eiler and Ida Eiler, while women otherwise did not mix with the crowd. As much as 60% of the Chicago audience was composed of women. As Miriam Hansen
put it, "it afforded women the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action." She argues a connection between the female reception of this film and the large female audience for Rudolph Valentino
two decades later, who was typically shown stripped to the waist and beaten in his films.
Dan Streible's article calls this into debate, and suggests that the size of the female audience is predominantly self-generated boilerplate. The film had been strongly opposed by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which tried to get legislation passed to prevent the film's transmission by mail. Their protests of fight films were second only to suffrage on their national agenda. Several state and local authorities tried to ban the reproduction of pugilist films, but this did not come to a vote. An editorial in The New York Times
declared, "It is not very creditable to our civilization perhaps that an achievement of what is now called the 'veriscope' that has attracted and will attract the widest attention should be the representation of a prizefight." Rector claimed that the film had "every defect known to photography" in the San Francisco Examiner in attempt to quell the protests against a film falsely deemed unusable. Because the audience for prizefighting was "perceived to be a rowdy, less desirable class of patron[,] Veriscope recruited more genteel audiences. Ladies were officially invited." Promotion for the film avoided the term "prizefight" with its connotations of violence, and promoted it as a "sparring contest." Veriscope was trying to run counter to press that had presented the story as feminine resistance to "stag" entertainment.
Corbett and Brady had toured as fictionalized versions of themselves (Jim Corbett became "Jack Reynolds") in a play by Charles T. Vincent called Gentleman Jack, which contributed to Corbett's reputation as a matinee idol
for women, as the play was presented to mixed audiences. Brady had honed Corbett's image as an educated gentleman in order to improve his appeal to bourgeois audiences. Streible notes that this reputation as a matinee idol and "ladies' man image," in addition to the bare-gluteus trunks, about which he could find no contemporary commentary, may have drawn women audiences to the film.
Streible found two contemporary accounts of the film that were written by women. One of these was by "Matinee Girl," a reporter for The New York Dramatic Mirror (who may or may not have been a real woman), who reported in the June 12, 1897 issue viewing the film with some shame, admiration for Corbett, and disappointment at his loss. He points out that she name-drops Brady, which identifies her as an "insider." The other article he found by a woman was "Alice Rix at the Veriscope" from the Examiner Sunday Magazine. Alice Rix, known for a particular brand of "sob sister" journalism (along with Nellie Bly
and Dorothy Dix
), claimed that when she viewed the film at the Olympia Theatre, she counted only sixty women in an audience of a thousand, and found the dress circle empty. She observed that they were mostly "dressed down," and that all were escorted by men and appeared uninterestedly watching a bloodless spectacle. She proceeded to describe the entire medium of motion pictures as "awful."
On page 38, Streible reproduces a drawing that accompanied Rix's article depicting two women in attendance of the film. One appears to be younger and leaning forward, watching the film with interest, while the other, apparently an older woman acting as chaperon, is turned away from the screen and disinterested in the film, even dismayed at the younger woman's interest. He notes that "respectable women" had been allowed to attend theater for only about a generation, and that Broadway did not actively court women or families as audience members until 1865. The pre-war audience had primarily been men and prostitutes. By 1897, women were only beginning to see theater as a legitimate social space. Musser (200) notes that The Boston Herald went so far as to call the film the "proper" thing for ladies to see. Streible, citing the research of Antonia Lant, contrasts paintings of women in theater audiences by Mary Cassatt
, Claude Monet
, and Berthe Morisot
with this drawing by making it appear that the fact that women were allowed to look was more important than that the act of looking being allowed to them. That the younger woman is leaning indicates that what she is looking at is, in fact, what is important to her rather than the simple privilege of looking.
Streible also touches on potential homoerotic interest in the film, citing work on strongman
photos by Thomas Waugh. He concludes that prizefighting, as opposed to physical culture
, was not associated with aesthetics or male beauty, Corbett excepted. The aesthetics of the boxing scene were better known for broken jaws and cauliflower ears, such that one's sexual orientation
probably had little bearing on one's appreciation of the film, and of a sport surrounded by homophobic press.
Musser, in his discussion of subsequent feature-length fight films, that subsequent to The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, no boxing film drew comparable audience numbers and that women stopped attending in significant numbers., reinforcing Streible's theories of hype and female interest in Corbett the matinee idol.
Denis Condon's article, "Irish Audiences Watch Their First U.S. Feature: The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897)", discusses how class, rather than gender, affected audience response to the film in Dublin. The significance of the film's reception in Ireland derives from the fact that Corbett was Irish by birth and often contrasted to the English-born Fitzsimmons, who himself was the son of an Irish blacksmith, a fact that no newspaper noted at the time. He notes a surprising absence, in response to the film, of ethnic partisanship, in spite of the St. Patrick's Day day of the fight, the Irish-English tension of 1898, and heavy antagonism of the Irish-American Corbett and the English Fitzsimmons, who is elsewhere described as Anglo-Australian. Audiences put aside political fervors and suspended their knowledge, pretending that they were watching a live performance. Irish women did not attend, possibly because The Lyric Hall, where the film was shown, often featured live boxing and sexually risqué material, and thus considered an inappropriate place for a respectable woman, while another theatre nearby was regarded as more family-friendly.
created a film the same year known as Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons Fight, staged on a rooftop with two freight handlers from the Pennsylvania Railroad
. Each round was shot on only 50 feet of 35 millimeter film stock at a very slow speed. Veriscope threatened to sue, but there was no law broken. Audiences did not appreciate the facsimile, even though it was advertised as such. The Arkansas Vitascope Company showed the film. The June 1897 issue of Phonoscope reprinted an article from The Little Rock Gazette that stated that the audience was so angered by Lubin's film that it was turned off after the third round for lack of an audience. The August–September issue of Phonoscope noted that the manager of the opera house turned over his $253 profits to a state senator who, after time to deliberate, eventually refunded the patrons' money.
Ramsaye notes that The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was the singular film that pushed the social status of film, then uncertain, into the low-brow
. This is not consistent with the way that the film was actually marketed. Prices for seats were set up to $1 for the wealthiest patrons, assuring middle and upper class attendance.
Rector intended to go into long form dramatic films, but was dismissed as a crank, although he continued to be involved in the technical side of motion picture production.
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
directed by Enoch J. Rector
Enoch J. Rector
Enoch J. Rector was an American boxing film promoter and early cinema technician. He was a partner in Woodville Latham's Kinetoscope Exhibition Company during the mid-1890s, working with Latham and his sons Otway and Grey, as well as fellow cinema technicians William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and...
depicting a boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
match between James J. Corbett
James J. Corbett
James John "Gentleman Jim" Corbett was an Irish-American heavyweight boxing champion, best known as the man who defeated the great John L. Sullivan. He also coached boxing at the Olympic Club in San Francisco...
and Bob Fitzsimmons
Bob Fitzsimmons
Robert James "Bob" Fitzsimmons , was a British boxer who made boxing history as the sport's first three-division world champion. He also achieved fame for beating Gentleman Jim Corbett, the man who beat John L. Sullivan, and is in The Guinness Book of World Records as the Lightest heavyweight...
in Carson City, Nevada
Carson City, Nevada
The Consolidated Municipality of Carson City is the capital of the state of Nevada. The words Consolidated Municipality refer to a series of changes in 1969 which abolished Ormsby County and merged all the settlements contained within its borders into Carson City. Since that time Carson City has...
on St. Patrick's Day the same year. Originally running at over 100 minutes, it was the longest
Feature length
Feature length is motion picture terminology referring to the length of a feature film. According to the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a feature length motion picture must have a running time of more than 40 minutes to be eligible for an Academy Award.The term may also...
film that had ever been released to date. As such, it was the world's first feature film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
. The technology that allowed this is known as the Latham loop
Latham loop
The Latham Loop is used in film projection and image capture. It isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods....
, and Rector was a rival for claiming the invention of the device. He used three such equipped cameras placed adjacently and filming on 63mm nitrate film. Only fragments of the film survive today. The known fragments were transferred from a print owned by Jean A. Le Roy of New York City.
According to Dan Streible, the film is "one of the earliest individual productions to sustain public commentary on the cinema."
The film is so important to film history that Luke McKernan declared, "it was boxing that created the cinema."
Synopsis
The film no longer exists in its entirety; however, it is known from contemporary sources that the film included all fourteen rounds of the event, each round lasting three minutes. This was not unusual for a boxing film, although each round would previously have been presented as a separate attraction. What made this film exceptional is a five-minute introduction that showed former champion John L. SullivanJohn L. Sullivan
John Lawrence Sullivan , also known as the Boston Strong Boy, was recognized as the first heavyweight champion of gloved boxing from February 7, 1881 to 1892, and is generally recognized as the last heavyweight champion of bare-knuckle boxing under the London Prize Ring rules...
(whom Corbett defeated in 1892) and his manager, Billy Madden
Billy Madden
Billy Madden was a champion American pugilist, trainer, and manager.Billy Madden was born on December 10, 1852, London England of Irish immigrant parents, and died February 22, 1918 in White Plains, New York after a protracted illness...
, introducing the event, the introduction of referee George Siler, and both boxers entering the ring in their robes. The film also caught the one-minute rest between each round and, when the film was reissued in Boston and many of its subsequent reissues, including in Dublin, included a ten-minute epilogue of the empty ring at the end of the fight, into which members of the audience eventually stormed. Even with these approximate timings, the film ran a minimum of 71 minutes, and sources generally report that it exceeded 90 or 100 minutes. The film climaxes with Fitzsimmons hitting Corbett in the solar plexus for a knockout, Corbett crawling outside the space of the camera so that he is not visible above the waist.
Production
Enoch J. Rector had been an employee of the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, which filmed Corbett and Courtney Before the KinetographCorbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph
Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph is an 1894 American short black-and-white silent film produced by William K.L. Dickson and starring James J. Corbett...
(1894) in six one minute rounds, each exhibited via the Edison Kinetoscope as a separate peep show
Peep show
A peep show or peepshow is an exhibition of pictures, objects or people viewed through a small hole or magnifying glass. Though historically a peep show was a form of entertainment provided by wandering showmen, nowadays it more commonly refers a presentation of a sex show or pornographic film...
for a separate fee. Some time after leaving the company, Rector arranged for the film with boxing promoter Dan Stuart
Dan Stuart
Dan Stuart is an American musician best known as the leader/singer/songwriter of 80's post punk, alt-country rock band, Green On Red , and for his teaming with Steve Wynn as Danny & Dusty.-History:Raised in Tucson, Arizona, Dan Stuart founded punk band The Serfers in 1979...
(Condon, 137). Stuart offered $10,000 to the winner of the bout in an agreement signed by both boxers on 4 January 1897. Corbett, along with his fans, was eager to win back the title that he had lost to Fitzsimmons in Mexico. Producer William Aloysius Brady got an agreement from Rector that 25% of the proceeds of the film would go to he and Corbett, and an arrangement that Fitzsimmons and his manager, Martin Julian, were to receive $13,000. Fitzsimmons was outraged upon learning of the deal, and the terms were renegotiated with each boxer and his manager taking 25% each, with Rector, Stuart, and Samuel J. Tilden Jr (who had left Kinetoscope with Rector in a battle over who invented the Latham loop) dividing the remaining 50%.
The film was shot in widescreen
Widescreen
Widescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film....
format on 2 3/16 gauge film stock. Rector brought 48,000 feet of film stock, the largest amount that had ever been brought on location, and exposed 11,000 feet of it.
The night before the match, Stuart cut the ring down from 24 feet to 22 feet for the sake of the camera, but the referee noticed this and Stuart was forced to change it back.
Legend holds that Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an American gambler, investor, and law enforcement officer who served in several Western frontier towns. He was also at different times a farmer, teamster, bouncer, saloon-keeper, miner and boxing referee. However, he was never a drover or cowboy. He is most well known...
was the referee at this event (as claimed here) and that Bat Masterson
Bat Masterson
William Barclay "Bat" Masterson was a figure of the American Old West known as a buffalo hunter, U.S. Marshal and Army scout, avid fisherman, gambler, frontier lawman, and sports editor and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph...
can be seen in the film wearing a bowler hat
Bowler hat
The bowler hat, also known as a coke hat, derby , billycock or bombin, is a hard felt hat with a rounded crown originally created in 1849 for the English soldier and politician Edward Coke, the younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester...
. Earp was, in fact, a reporter for The New York World at the time, which published his commentaries on the fight on March 14 (p. 15) and March 18. Far from being the referee, he disagreed with referee George Siler's decision when Fitzsimmons allegedly hit Corbett in the jaw, which should have resulted in a foul, coming after a knockout blow to Corbett's solar plexus. The World heavily promoted the film, and the day after the film's release, printed a statement from Fitzsimmons, "I don't believe there is a single picture in it that will substantiate those [claims] published in The World."
Exhibition
The film premiered on May 22 at the New York Academy of Music and played into June, where it was presented with running commentary. In total, eleven companies toured with the film (Musser, 199)Local debuts:
May 31, 1897 (Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
)
June 6, 1897 (Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
)
June 7, 1897 (Buffalo
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
)
June 26, 1897 (Philadelphia)
July 3, 1897 (Pittsburgh)
July 13, 1897 (San Francisco)
July 27, 1897 (Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
)
September 27, 1897 (London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
)
April 1898 (Dublin)
When the film was shown in Coney Island
Coney Island
Coney Island is a peninsula and beach on the Atlantic Ocean in southern Brooklyn, New York, United States. The site was formerly an outer barrier island, but became partially connected to the mainland by landfill....
, it was advertised under the title Corbett's Last Fight.
Reception
Brady estimated the film's net profit at $750,000. Charles MusserCharles Musser
Charles Musser is Professor of Film and American Studies at Yale University. He is a prominent film historian and documentary film maker who has "added a great deal to our knowledge of early cinema with his writings and his filmmaking."...
claims that the film made a more modest $100,000.
The film is also notable because that, at the time, women were essentially prohibited from viewing boxing matches, which were seen as a "stag
Stag (disambiguation)
Stag usually refers to an adult male deerStag may also refer to:-Animals:*Adult male of some other species; see List of animal names*Adult male after late castration; see Castration#In veterinary practice*Stag-moose, an extinct species...
" activity, but they were not prohibited from viewing this film. Much attention was given to the fact that Rose Julian Fitzsimmons, Bob's wife, viewed the live match from a box with other female companions, such as dancers Loïe Eiler and Ida Eiler, while women otherwise did not mix with the crowd. As much as 60% of the Chicago audience was composed of women. As Miriam Hansen
Miriam Hansen
Miriam Hansen was a film historian who made important contributions to the study of early cinema and mass culture.-Career:...
put it, "it afforded women the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action." She argues a connection between the female reception of this film and the large female audience for Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik...
two decades later, who was typically shown stripped to the waist and beaten in his films.
Dan Streible's article calls this into debate, and suggests that the size of the female audience is predominantly self-generated boilerplate. The film had been strongly opposed by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which tried to get legislation passed to prevent the film's transmission by mail. Their protests of fight films were second only to suffrage on their national agenda. Several state and local authorities tried to ban the reproduction of pugilist films, but this did not come to a vote. An editorial in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
declared, "It is not very creditable to our civilization perhaps that an achievement of what is now called the 'veriscope' that has attracted and will attract the widest attention should be the representation of a prizefight." Rector claimed that the film had "every defect known to photography" in the San Francisco Examiner in attempt to quell the protests against a film falsely deemed unusable. Because the audience for prizefighting was "perceived to be a rowdy, less desirable class of patron[,] Veriscope recruited more genteel audiences. Ladies were officially invited." Promotion for the film avoided the term "prizefight" with its connotations of violence, and promoted it as a "sparring contest." Veriscope was trying to run counter to press that had presented the story as feminine resistance to "stag" entertainment.
Corbett and Brady had toured as fictionalized versions of themselves (Jim Corbett became "Jack Reynolds") in a play by Charles T. Vincent called Gentleman Jack, which contributed to Corbett's reputation as a matinee idol
Matinee idol
Matinée idol is a term used mainly to describe film or theatre stars who are adored to the point of adulation by their fans.The term almost exclusively refers to male actors. Invariably the adulation was fixated on the actor's looks rather than performance...
for women, as the play was presented to mixed audiences. Brady had honed Corbett's image as an educated gentleman in order to improve his appeal to bourgeois audiences. Streible notes that this reputation as a matinee idol and "ladies' man image," in addition to the bare-gluteus trunks, about which he could find no contemporary commentary, may have drawn women audiences to the film.
Streible found two contemporary accounts of the film that were written by women. One of these was by "Matinee Girl," a reporter for The New York Dramatic Mirror (who may or may not have been a real woman), who reported in the June 12, 1897 issue viewing the film with some shame, admiration for Corbett, and disappointment at his loss. He points out that she name-drops Brady, which identifies her as an "insider." The other article he found by a woman was "Alice Rix at the Veriscope" from the Examiner Sunday Magazine. Alice Rix, known for a particular brand of "sob sister" journalism (along with Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly was the pen name of American pioneer female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She remains notable for two feats: a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from...
and Dorothy Dix
Dorothy Dix
Dorothy Dix , was the pseudonym of U.S. journalist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer....
), claimed that when she viewed the film at the Olympia Theatre, she counted only sixty women in an audience of a thousand, and found the dress circle empty. She observed that they were mostly "dressed down," and that all were escorted by men and appeared uninterestedly watching a bloodless spectacle. She proceeded to describe the entire medium of motion pictures as "awful."
On page 38, Streible reproduces a drawing that accompanied Rix's article depicting two women in attendance of the film. One appears to be younger and leaning forward, watching the film with interest, while the other, apparently an older woman acting as chaperon, is turned away from the screen and disinterested in the film, even dismayed at the younger woman's interest. He notes that "respectable women" had been allowed to attend theater for only about a generation, and that Broadway did not actively court women or families as audience members until 1865. The pre-war audience had primarily been men and prostitutes. By 1897, women were only beginning to see theater as a legitimate social space. Musser (200) notes that The Boston Herald went so far as to call the film the "proper" thing for ladies to see. Streible, citing the research of Antonia Lant, contrasts paintings of women in theater audiences by Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
, Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, and Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.In 1864, she exhibited for the first...
with this drawing by making it appear that the fact that women were allowed to look was more important than that the act of looking being allowed to them. That the younger woman is leaning indicates that what she is looking at is, in fact, what is important to her rather than the simple privilege of looking.
Streible also touches on potential homoerotic interest in the film, citing work on strongman
Strongman (strength athlete)
In the 19th century, the term strongman referred to an exhibitor of strength or circus performers of similar ilk who displayed feats of strength such as the bent press , supporting large amounts of...
photos by Thomas Waugh. He concludes that prizefighting, as opposed to physical culture
Physical culture
Physical culture is a term applied to health and strength training regimens, particularly those that originated during the 19th century. During the mid-late 20th century, the term "physical culture" became largely outmoded in most English-speaking countries, being replaced by terms such as...
, was not associated with aesthetics or male beauty, Corbett excepted. The aesthetics of the boxing scene were better known for broken jaws and cauliflower ears, such that one's sexual orientation
Sexual orientation
Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...
probably had little bearing on one's appreciation of the film, and of a sport surrounded by homophobic press.
Musser, in his discussion of subsequent feature-length fight films, that subsequent to The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, no boxing film drew comparable audience numbers and that women stopped attending in significant numbers., reinforcing Streible's theories of hype and female interest in Corbett the matinee idol.
Denis Condon's article, "Irish Audiences Watch Their First U.S. Feature: The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897)", discusses how class, rather than gender, affected audience response to the film in Dublin. The significance of the film's reception in Ireland derives from the fact that Corbett was Irish by birth and often contrasted to the English-born Fitzsimmons, who himself was the son of an Irish blacksmith, a fact that no newspaper noted at the time. He notes a surprising absence, in response to the film, of ethnic partisanship, in spite of the St. Patrick's Day day of the fight, the Irish-English tension of 1898, and heavy antagonism of the Irish-American Corbett and the English Fitzsimmons, who is elsewhere described as Anglo-Australian. Audiences put aside political fervors and suspended their knowledge, pretending that they were watching a live performance. Irish women did not attend, possibly because The Lyric Hall, where the film was shown, often featured live boxing and sexually risqué material, and thus considered an inappropriate place for a respectable woman, while another theatre nearby was regarded as more family-friendly.
Legacy
Quick to compete, Siegmund LubinSiegmund Lubin
Siegmund Lubin was a Polish-American motion picture pioneer.-Biography:He was born as Siegmund Lubszynski in Breslau, Silesia, Germany on April 20, 1851, to a German Jewish family...
created a film the same year known as Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons Fight, staged on a rooftop with two freight handlers from the Pennsylvania Railroad
Pennsylvania Railroad
The Pennsylvania Railroad was an American Class I railroad, founded in 1846. Commonly referred to as the "Pennsy", the PRR was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....
. Each round was shot on only 50 feet of 35 millimeter film stock at a very slow speed. Veriscope threatened to sue, but there was no law broken. Audiences did not appreciate the facsimile, even though it was advertised as such. The Arkansas Vitascope Company showed the film. The June 1897 issue of Phonoscope reprinted an article from The Little Rock Gazette that stated that the audience was so angered by Lubin's film that it was turned off after the third round for lack of an audience. The August–September issue of Phonoscope noted that the manager of the opera house turned over his $253 profits to a state senator who, after time to deliberate, eventually refunded the patrons' money.
Ramsaye notes that The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was the singular film that pushed the social status of film, then uncertain, into the low-brow
Low culture
Low culture is a term for some forms of popular culture. Its opposite is high culture. It has been said by culture theorists that both high culture and low culture are subcultures....
. This is not consistent with the way that the film was actually marketed. Prices for seats were set up to $1 for the wealthiest patrons, assuring middle and upper class attendance.
Rector intended to go into long form dramatic films, but was dismissed as a crank, although he continued to be involved in the technical side of motion picture production.
External links
- The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight on JRank.org
- The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight on IMDB