The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight

Reception[edit]

Brady estimated the film's net profit at $750,000.^[18] Film scholar Charles Musser claims that the film made a more modest $100,000.^[9]: 193


The film is also notable because, 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.^[9] As Miriam Hansen put it, "it afforded women the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action."^[19] 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.


Streible 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.^[20] Their protests of fight films were second only to suffrage on their national agenda.^{[21][1]: 30} Several state and local authorities tried to ban the reproduction of pugilist films, but this did not come to a vote.^{[22][23][1]: 22} 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."^[24] 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.^{[25][1]: 24} 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."^[1]: 24 Promotion for the film avoided the term "prizefight" with its connotations of violence, and promoted it as a "sparring contest."^[1]: 26 Veriscope was trying to run counter to press that had presented the story as feminine resistance to "stag" entertainment.^[1]: 30


Corbett and Brady had toured as fictionalized versions of themselves 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.^{[26][10]: 140} 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.^[1]: 35


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."^[1]: 34 The other article he found by a woman was "Alice Rix at the Veriscope" from the Examiner Sunday Magazine.^[27] 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."^{[1]: 36–37}


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 uninterested 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.^[1]: 38 The pre-war audience had primarily been men and prostitutes.^{[28][1]: 33} By 1897, women were only beginning to see theater as a legitimate social space. Musser notes that The Boston Herald went so far as to call the film the "proper" thing for ladies to see.^[9]: 200 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.^[1]: 46 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.^[1]: 39


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.^[1]: 41


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.,^[9]: 208 reinforcing Streible's theories of hype and female interest in Corbett the matinee idol.


Denis Condon discusses how class, rather than gender, affected audience response to the film in Dublin.^[10] 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.^[10]: 144 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.^[10]: 141