The Champ, nominated for Best Picture of 1931-1932, is the story of an alcoholic ex-heavyweight champion boxer and his young son. The son, Dink, is played by Jackie Cooper, one of the most talented child actors in the history of film, and the father, whose actual name is Andy Purcell but who is called "the Champ" throughout the film, is played by Wallace Beery, one of the most unlikely of movie stars. The key to this movie's success is the interaction between the two of them; they make what has since become a somewhat cliched premise into a touching examination of the ways that parents and children try to care for each other.
When the film begins, Andy and Dink are running, trying to keep in shape for whatever fight might be in the future. The Champ lost his boxing title several years earlier because of his drinking and gambling, and now he just can't seem to pull it together to make a comeback. Whenever he gets enough money to go back into training, he gets drunk instead. In fact, one of the early scenes in the film involves Dink and one of his young friends trying to sober the Champ up so that he can meet with some fight promoters. Needless to say, he's still too drunk to impress the promoters, and he loses a shot at a match.
What's amazing about this scene is what happens after the promoters leave the dingy room where the Champ and Dink live. Dink gets his father undressed and puts him to bed before he starts to get himself ready for a night's sleep. You get a clear sense that this scene has played itself out over and over, that Dink has at a very young age become more of a caretaker for his father than his father is for Dink. Beery's Champ cares for his son, certainly, but he doesn't seem to be very knowledgeable about how to care for a young boy properly.
After the Champ purchases a racehorse for Dink, a promise he's made to the boy for years, they enter the horse (now dubbed the Little Champ) into a race, only to meet another racehorse owner named Linda and her husband Tony Carleton. It turns out that Linda is Dink's mother. She and the Champ divorced years earlier, but the Champ received custody of the boy. Linda, now married to a wealthy man and with another child, a daughter, wants to give Dink a better home. The Champ, sensing that he might not be the best father figure, decides after a night of drinking and gambling that leads to him being arrested that Dink should go with Linda. He even lies to the boy, saying that he doesn't want Dink hanging around him so much and eating too much food that they cannot afford. Cooper plays this scene particularly well, crying as he promises he will be a better son and companion, and both he and Beery are teary-eyed by the end of it.
Dink jumps off the train in San Diego, leaving Linda behind, and rejoins his father in Tijuana. The Champ agrees to fight the Mexican heavyweight boxing champion, for which he would receive $20,000 for a win. The fight is particularly brutal, one of the more punishing bouts depicted on film. However, the Champ knocks out the Mexican fighter and wins, only to faint on the way back to the dressing room. It's there that he dies after a tearful discussion with Dink. Cooper's cries of "I want the Champ! I want the Champ!" are pretty heartbreaking to watch. He had been nominated the year before as Best Actor for the film Skippy, the youngest (at age 9) person nominated for an acting Oscar at that time. Unsurprisingly, he's still the youngest person ever to be nominated for Best Actor. He deserved another nomination for his performance in The Champ, but the Academy had limited the number of nominees in the category that year to only three.
Beery was so good in this film that he won the Oscar for Best Actor in a rare tie with Fredric March, who won for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Legendary stage actor Alfred Lunt, the third nominee, apparently raced back to the more comfortable world of live theater after losing to two people in a three-man race.) Beery was one of the most reliable stars of the era, but he wasn't anyone's idea of a matinee idol. He was a character actor who specialized in tough guy roles, starting back in silent films. He was also in the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1931-1932, Grand Hotel, and had been nominated two years earlier for Best Actor for The Big House. His is not a style of acting that anyone follows today, and it's certainly not Method. Yet there is a sense of realness to his performances. He manages to elicit sympathy in the part of the Champ even when he's taking a $200 bribe from the Carletons to allow them to spend some time with Dink, and that's no minor accomplishment given how greedy his character could have been portrayed.
What stands out the most about this film, written by the legendary Frances Marion, who also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay of 1931-1932, is the father-son relationship. Beery and Cooper were in a couple of movies together, and they have an easy rapport with each other. The film was remade in 1979 with Jon Voight as the father and Ricky Shroeder as the son; Faye Dunaway played the role of the wife who left the champ years earlier. It's a far inferior version of the original. The Beery-Cooper version has far more heart than the remake, and it earns our sympathy for the characters in a far more honest fashion.
There's one other moment that struck me when watching The Champ. One of Dink's friends is a young African American boy named Jonah, played by Jesse Scott. This film was made during a time of Jim Crow laws and legal segregation, yet Jonah and Dink are great friends and everyone accepts this as being completely unremarkable. Even more astonishing is an interchange between Dink and his mother when they first meet at the racetrack. He introduces her to Jonah and points out that his friend is "colored." She smiles and replies that Jonah is "kind of a pretty color." I know that such dialogue as that would be seen as hopelessly racist nowadays, but that must have been a truly radical statement in 1931. Marion always had a way of infusing her scripts with a sense of social justice. It's one of the many reasons that her films like The Champ still seem just as watchable today.
Oscar Wins: Actor (Beery) and Story
Other Oscar Nominations: Picture and Director
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