Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight

[spadeneal]

[quote: Urbanora on ams, 4-19-2001]The Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight took place on 17 March 1897 and was filmed the Verisccope company (organised by Enoch Rector) using a unique 63mm format and three cameras in parallel, so that whne one ran out of film they simply started up the one next door, so that the whole film seemed roughly to have been filmed from a single viewpoint. The film was also in a roughly widescreen 1:1.65 shape, to fit the dimensions of the ring. The completed film covered scenes in the ring before the fight, the full fourteen rounds, and the extrordinary scenes after the fight when the defeated Corbett tried to assault Fitzsimmons. It lasted around 90mins, 11,000ft of film. Of this, around a third survives, showing the scenes before the fight, probably rounds one, four, five and six, portions of rounds unidentified, and an extremely fragmentary sequence showing the knockout. The film was acquired from a collector by Jim Jacobs (Mike Tyson's sometime manager) of The Big Fights Inc, which has the world's largest boxing film collection (it's now part of ESPN). Jacobs was a good friend of the BFI's National Film and Television Archive, which undertook to restore the film and convert it from 63mm to 35mm. We showed it complete at the National Film Theatre in 1997 (something of a trial for the pianist to
accompany 40mins of blurry boxing footage from a single viewpoint), and sections have been shown at Pordenone and most recently at the Castro in San Francisco last October. I believe there is a print at MOMA which duplicates that at the BFI, plus there is the duplicate material at ESPN. The knockout itself appears now only to survive on 16mm, alas. The version I've seen is cropped, and uses slow motion to show the actual point of knockout - the surviving film at this point was literally in pieces, and though ingeniously reconstructed, Fitzsimmons' legendary 'solar plexus' punch pases by in an instant. Sections from the film have appeared in various TV programmes and video compilations.[/quote]

The knockout sequence was shown in ABC Sports sometime in the 1970s as part of a very interesting bit where Howard Cosell reviewed several of the very early fight films with Muhammad Ali and Ali commented on them. Ali's take was that the slugging style of the antique boxers was rather démodé compared to his own graceful, highly strategized style of boxing. However, this was the only chance I've had to see the Corbett-Fitzsimmons bout, and I would dearly love to see the rest of what survives.

I was wondering if I could get confirmation on the running time here; Urbanora says ca. 40 minutes, and I trust that, but I've read in another account that the surviving material amounted only to 25 minutes. Also, it might be a good idea to synchronize this film to a non-invasive soundtrack -- much as the International Owl Project did with Desperate Poaching Affray -- to give the poor pianists a break and to make this significant film accessible to a greater measure of modern audiences.

The knockout, indeed, is incredibly piecy -- I can't even imagine how it went through a printer. However brief the solar plexus shot is, I still caught it; Corbett's whole abdomen caves in noticeably, and it looks like that hurt, Ali's comments notwithstanding. Did the Veriscope Company make any other films? There doesn't seem to be a word of biography on Enoch Rector after 1897, though he lived to be 94. Also is there any sign extant of Veriscope's earlier bullfight film?

spadeneal

[urbanora]

I was wondering if I could get confirmation on the running time here; Urbanora says ca. 40 minutes, and I trust that, but I've read in another account that the surviving material amounted only to 25 minutes. Also, it might be a good idea to synchronize this film to a non-invasive soundtrack -- much as the International Owl Project did with Desperate Poaching Affray -- to give the poor pianists a break and to make this significant film accessible to a greater measure of modern audiences.

The viewing prints at the BFI is 2625ft, and looks best at 24fps, so a running time of just under 30mins. The original ran 90mins or so. When we showed it at the National Film Theatre in 1997 (to a hardened audience of boxing enthusiasts) Stephen Horne was the accompanist, and it was probably the toughest job in his or any other silent film pianist's career - single shot (in effect), minimal action (it's a dull fight for the most part), indistinct image - he heroically played variations on Eye of the Tiger.

The knockout, indeed, is incredibly piecy -- I can't even imagine how it went through a printer. However brief the solar plexus shot is, I still caught it; Corbett's whole abdomen caves in noticeably, and it looks like that hurt, Ali's comments notwithstanding. Did the Veriscope Company make any other films? There doesn't seem to be a word of biography on Enoch Rector after 1897, though he lived to be 94. Also is there any sign extant of Veriscope's earlier bullfight film?

So far as I know, Veriscope was formed for the specific purpose of filming the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight, and that was all that it filmed. Rector had been part of the negotiations to film a Corbett-Fitzsimmons bout in 1895 using the Kinetograph (Edison camera), but the fight didn't happen; it was then that he filmed the bullfight instead (so not with the Veriscope, and it's not known to exist in any case). He then nearly filmed Fitzsimmons v Peter Maher in February 1896 - the verdict is that he failed do so, but the bout was a quick scrap that was over in 90 seconds in any case. What happened to him post-1897 I don't know.