Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short subjectdocumentary film financed and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Shot in black-and-white, the film is based on an earlier photo feature he shot for Look magazine in 1949.
Story
Day of the Fight shows Irish-American middleweightboxerWalter Cartier during the height of his career, on April 17, 1950, the day of a fight with middleweight Bobby James. The film opens with a short section on boxing's history and then follows Cartier through his day as he prepares for the 10 P.M. bout. Cartier eats breakfast in his West 12th Street apartment in Greenwich Village, goes to early mass, and eats lunch at his favorite restaurant. At 4 P.M., he starts preparations for the fight. By 8 P.M., he is waiting in his dressing room at Laurel Gardens in Newark, New Jersey, for the fight to begin. We then see the fight itself, which he wins in a short match.
Cast
Douglas Edwards as Narrator
Walter Cartier as Himself
Vincent Cartier as Himself - Walter's twin brother
Stanley Kubrick as Himself - man at ringside with camera
Alexander Singer as Himself - man at ringside with camera
Judy Singer as Herself - female fan in crowd
Cast notes
The year after the fight chronicled in Day of the Fight took place, Walter Cartier made boxing history by knocking out Joe Rindone in the first forty-seven seconds of a match. Cartier had played some bit parts in movies before he appeared in Day of the Fight, and afterwards continued to appear occasionally in movies up until 1971, but he was most successful playing mild-mannered Private Claude Dillingham on the sitcom The Phil Silvers Show for the 1955-1956 season.
Douglas Edwards, who narrated Day of the Fight was a veteran radio and television newscaster. At this time, he was the anchor for the first daily television news program, on CBS, which would later be called Douglas Edwards with the News, and then The CBS Evening News. Edwards was replaced by Walter Cronkite in 1962, but remained a noted voice on CBS Radio news programs until he retired in 1988.
Production
Kubrick and Alexander Singer used daylight-loading Eyemo cameras that take 100-foot spools of 35mm black-and-white film to shoot the fight, with Kubrick shooting hand-held and Singer's camera on a tripod. The 100-foot reels required constant reloading, and Kubrick did not catch the knock-out punch which ended the bout because he was reloading. Singer did, however. Day of the Fight is the first credit on composer Gerald Fried's resume. Kubrick did not pay him for his work on the film. "He thought the very fact that my doing the music" for the film "got me into the profession was enough payment", Fried told The Guardian in 2018 conceding that Kubrick's point was accurate. Fried, a childhood friend of Kubrick, later wrote the score for the director's Paths of Glory and three other films Although the original planned buyer of the picture went out of business, Kubrick was able to sell Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for $4,000, making a small benefit of $100 above the $3,900 cost of making the film. According to Jeremy Bernstein, the film lost $100, as documented in a November 1965 interview with Kubrick. Day of the Fight was released as part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series and premiered on 26 April 1951 at New York's Paramount Theater, on the same program as the film My Forbidden Past. Frank Sinatra headlined the live stage show that day.
