If anyone doubts the veracity of the fight between Tom and Red there's an interesting interview (on set!) with Stanley Baker in the features section of the March 2007 Network DVD. Baker says quite explicitly that Cy Endfield told them both to just go for it, and that they were both trained boxers. It looks real - it was real....
shareIt looks real - it was real....Fooled you anyhow!
I remember a lot of publicity over supposedly the same thing happening with Chuck Conners and Claude Akins in an epsiode of "Branded" in the mid-60's. I didn't beleive it for a moment. But it got them plenty of publicity.
One final thought: Isn't it in the script who is suppoed to win? What if the worng guy won?
Fun movie, but the fight was really odd.
Each opponent repeatedly waits for the other to make a move, and then is often SURPRISED by it! Huge telegraphed head butts and charges with no defensive moves make no sense. One apparently surprisingly painful "reach around" kidney punch sort of ends the fight but doesn't.
There is a bit more close grappling and rolling around on the floor than the typical movie "body throwfest", but the fight immediately struck me as unrealistic and staged like a dance number.
The fight in this movie is of the same quality as the driving footage - some of it works like receiving punches to the face, but most of it doesn't, the reason is poor cinematography, actors have to make sure they're in the shot, DP isn't trying to get them in his shots, maybe that's how they did it back then, but I doubt that. Nevertheless a perfectly watchable movie, because the story is so easy to relate to.
shareI was wondering about that kidney punch. I've been lucky enough to have never received one so I was wondering if a kidney punch was as debilitating as portrayed in the movie. If it is, why don't we see more of them in movies? Not as manly as a sock on the jaw?
shareI used to watch Roy Jones, Jr fight. He would run his weight up and down winning titles in four different weight classes. In one fight with Virgil Hill, Hill came out swinging but by the 4th round Jones was in control. Jones had been throwing head punches but just as he threw a hard body shot, Hill turned and the punch landed on a kidney with a loud sound. Hill dropped like a rock. The referee stopped the fight. Hill was in agony and had to sit on his stool for awhile before he could walk and was then taken to a hospital. At that point Roy was (36-1) and Hill's record was 43-3.
Jones kept saying it was an accident that he would never hit someone like that intentionally and that it sounded like a shotgun going off. He liked to go hunting in Mississippi where he lived.
Like Jones, Hill was a former Olympic boxer and winner of five professional championships.
I don't know everything. Neither does anyone else
Interestingly enough, Patrick McGoohan also had a fight scene in The Prisoner episode Free for All, in which he was hit with a punch to his back. He was then held in place while several men punched him in the stomach. That scene was censored according to press stories when the episode was first shown in the UK.
McGoohan had a scar on his chin, but if news stories were correct, they were gotten from a car accident he was involved in while making the movie "Nor the Moon by Night" in Africa. I believe he was driving and hit a bridge abutment, and wasn't found for several hours. He had GOD watching over him that time!
BCNU