champ31

The Great Depression was in all negative ways truly great. Great hardship, great unemployment,
great poverty and great suffering. For the parents who could find the outlet, many sent their kids
away to live with relatives who might be better off. Some gave their kids up to whoever would take
them. Families who stuck together took the high road in those bleak times.

“The Champ” deals with these very issues in the third year of the depression. In short, fewer films
are timelier than this one. I imagine people walked away with a lot to think about in 1931 that was
relevant to them after seeing this powerful character drama.

The movie follows Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, a father and son who stick with each other
through thick and thin. Beery and his wife had a bad split soon after their son was born and the wife
pretty much abandoned Beery and her son. Beery isn’t the perfect guy. He’s a former boxing
champion turned compulsive gambler and drunkard. He tries to provide the best for his son, but
more often than not ends up letting his kid down.

Without warning one day, his ex-wife walks back into their lives, a mother Cooper never knew. She’s
married a rich dude and has a daughter. They want to take Cooper away to live with them. Both
Beery and Cooper won’t have it. They’d rather live in poverty together than be split, but Beery can’t
keep himself out of trouble and unless he can regain a steady income, he’ll lose Cooper. They both
vow to make him a champ again in the boxing ring.

Modern movie watchers will know Cooper from later in his career when he played the cantankerous
Perry White in “Superman: The Movie.” However, Cooper was a lifetime performer and here he pulls
all the stops, giving modern child actors a run for their money. You will believe he is Beery’s son.
Where he gets his raw energy and relentless emotion is truly amazing.

What clinched this movie for me was the pull-no-punches aspect of poverty and hardship. Pre-
Hayes Code filmmaking wasn’t afraid to say something and not be nice about it. Bolstered by grand
performances from Beery and Cooper, it shows the emotion that comes with parenting and the hard
choices people are forced to make for what appears to be the greater good.

Filled with humor and pathos and a powerful dose of real-life situations, “The Champ” is realistically
dramatic and also understated and sometimes anti-climactic, much like life itself. I’ve seen a lot of
father-son films, but I must quote Cooper from this movie and say that if I had to watch one and I had
my choice, “I want the champ.”