Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he can only find.\u00a0 He and his brother Connie arrive on a freight train from the east and believe they have an ownership stake in a small restaurant.\u00a0 But discover they\u2019ve been conned.\u00a0 Taking jobs as waiters there, Midge becomes romantically involved with the owner\u2019s daughter Emma but this leads to the couple being forced at gunpoint by her father into a marriage.<\/p>\n
This prompts Midge to abandon Emma and he and Connie end up at a boxing gym where a trainer named Tommy Haley agrees to manage Midge.\u00a0 Midge proves to have considerable skill in the ring but more importantly he has a killer instinct that leads him to brutalize his opponents with maniacal force whenever he gets in the ring.\u00a0 Eventually Haley arranges for Midge to fight the number one contender for the middle weight crown, Johnny Dunne in New York.\u00a0 But the gambling interests have only allowed Midge the fight with the understanding that he\u2019ll take a dive to allow Dunne to capture the middle-weight crown from an aging champ.<\/p>\n
Midge double crosses Haley and the gamblers and knocks Dunne out in the first round.\u00a0 The mobsters beat Midge, Haley and Connie badly but now the reality is Midge is the leading contender for the crown.\u00a0 Dunne\u2019s platinum blonde girlfriend Grace tells Midge that the only way he\u2019ll ever get a shot at the crown is by appeasing the gamblers.\u00a0 And the only way that will happen is if he dumps Haley and signs up with Grace\u2019s friend Jerome Harris.\u00a0 And Midge does it without blinking an eye.\u00a0 Seeing how Midge stabbed Haley in the back and what company he was now keeping, Connie decided to leave New York and go back to his mother\u2019s apartment in Chicago.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Midge is flying high with a victory in the ring against the champ.\u00a0 He\u2019s dating Grace but sleeping with Jerome Harris\u2019s wife Palmer.\u00a0 Neither of these women know that he is still married to Emma.\u00a0 But now all of Midge\u2019s double-crossing comes due.\u00a0 He has to defend his title against Johnny Dunne and he\u2019s out of shape from living the high life.\u00a0 So, he hires Haley to train him but has to agree to split 30% with him.\u00a0 But Haley doesn\u2019t really care whether Midge is up to the fight and after missing his mother\u2019s death bed Connie and Emma despise him.\u00a0 On the day before the boxing match, she tells Midge she\u2019s divorcing him and marrying Connie.\u00a0 He answers her statement by dragging her to bed to claim his conjugal rights as husband.<\/p>\n
At the boxing arena Connie attacks Midge for what he did to Emma.\u00a0 But Midge beats him down and heads for the ring.\u00a0 The match is very even at the start.\u00a0 Midge manages to knock Dunne to the canvas in the first round but after that the match slowly but surely shifts in Dunne\u2019s favor.\u00a0 By the twelfth round Midge has one eye closed and looks almost punch drunk.\u00a0 But when he sees Grace and his other \u201cfriends\u201d in the audience smiling at his defeat he becomes enraged and with a manic flurry of punches he beats Dunne to the canvas and wins the fight.\u00a0 But he is basically dragged back to his dressing room by Haley and his trainers and after a brief ranting speech that seems to come from his angry tortured soul, he drops dead.\u00a0 The movie ends with reporters asking Connie about his brother and him replying sardonically that Midge was a perfect reflection of the spirit of his sport.<\/p>\n
This movie has some good points.\u00a0 The early scenes of Midge and Connie travelling across country to make a new life for themselves and their loyalty to each other is affecting.\u00a0 However, the unfolding of Midge\u2019s personality and his general hatred of humanity is a very unpleasant experience.\u00a0 As he goes from one betrayal to the next, I found him despicable.\u00a0 And because of this, by the end of the movie, I wasn\u2019t enjoying the story at all.\u00a0 I was very relieved when he dropped dead and I could turn off the tv.\u00a0 I can\u2019t recommend this movie to anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[190,2451,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-36364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-classic-movie","tag-kirk-douglas","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n