The Harder They Fall

This really did it for me. I liked how it examined corruption and I felt really bad for Toro. On top of that, Bogey goes out on a high note; while not his BEST performance, it is still really great. He really brought his character to life, but it also helps that the dialogue is sharp. I didn't find the morality as sickeningly thick as some people seem to. I mean, it's there, but I don't know that it's different from most movies. I was invested the entire time.

A "message movie" that states that boxing should be outlawed. I'm astonished that anybody would make this. You'll never see filmmakers today with cojones this size

Good solid movie. Bogart ended on a good note.

Strong character performances and a film with a real message - also a brave message for the time. Well worth watching if you like Bogart's style.

In his last role, Bogart draws effectively on his weary cynicism.The expose of the fight racket has a brutal honesty.

A gritty cynical prize fight movie with a good story by Schulberg and fine performances by Bogart and Steiger.

Boxing movies are often dark and cynical, but this is something different. This is an anti-boxing movie (or at least, anti-managerial), and as such, it isn't cynical at all. Quite the contrary, it's moralistic. I felt it had a lot of potential, and could have been realistic and subtly ironic. The dialogue is craftily written, but the plot lays the morality on so thick it made me gag, kind of like Schulberg's script A Face in the Crowd. Robson's boxing movie Champion is much better.

I was not happy to watch Humphrey Bogart play a character that sells out, and at the very end when it was getting interesting, it's over. The story was one that probably needed to be told, but they spent a lot of time building up to an interesting finale and then dropped it like a hot potato. Oh yeah, in the end you find out the write wrote the story. Whoopie.

The focus here is on Bogart's Willis, a reporter turned press agent who finds himself getting deeper and deeper into a game he doesn't want to play. That makes it different from other boxing films whose focus is on the fighter, but it's still ultimately a story of corruption and betrayal, and while I appreciate that Bogart's character is never railroaded in an unrealistic way, and that his performance is very strong, I just don't get all that much new out of this compared to all the others.

This more than a movie about boxing corruption, it's also about the corruption of a person's soul. Eddie Willis is an decent man down on his luck looking to make a big score. He keeps providing self justifications as he get in deeper and deeper. Because we know what's going to happen the boxer, the question is can Willis go all the way?

A really grim and hard-hitting film based on a novel by Bud Schulberg. Bogart apparently didn't think very highly of Steiger, but they play off each other magnificently. This is the kind of film that you know isn't going to end up in nice places, but it still manages to surprise you with just how sickening the spiral is.

Despite the fact that the script and the direction do sometimes telegraph what we're supposed to think and feel, the story remains engaging, and Bogie is quite good.

Surprise, an obvious morality play. One wonders if you have to give them a break, at a time when we hadn't been saturated by far more complex takes, and an ever less generalising cinema, at least on the surface. Still Bogart's character is not without interest or complexity, not as strongly characterised or developed as his better roles. Perhaps in 1956 exploitation in the USA was on the nose and in your face throughout society, so movies were like that too.

Bogart's last movie, and he really delivered an excellent performance. Good story too.