PG | 2 h 2 min | Drama | 1979
An over-the-hill boxer, Billy “The Champ” Flynn (Jon Voight) treasures his 8-year-old son, Timothy Joseph or T.J. (Ricky Schroder), while battling his vices of gambling and drinking.
Estranged for seven years on account of her careerism and now remarried, the boy’s mother, Annie (Faye Dunaway), suddenly tries to get T.J. back into her life, propped up by opulence that Billy can only dream of providing their boy.
In turn, T.J. worships Billy and idolizes his boxing exploits years after they’ve faded. Reassuringly for Billy, T.J. is also unmoved by the allure of Annie’s affluence. Still, desperate to hold on to his boy, Billy gives up gambling and drinking. He hopes that his comeback boxing match will rake in big money and secure the boy’s future with him, rather than with his, until now uncaring, mother.
His child’s utter surrender to his care, soothes and scares Billy at the same time. It floods him with a sense of power, especially when the boy pleads not to be sent to his mother: “I’ll do whatever you say.” But it also fills him with a fiery sense of duty, not just to do things right but to do the right thing, especially when T.J. is so irrevocably dependent on him for joy, for laughter, and for comfort.
So Billy doesn’t glorify fighting. In jail, following a scrap with creditors, he explains: “A champ don’t use his fist nowhere but in the ring.”
T.J. naively excuses Billy’s flying fists; after all, it was to prevent creditors from seizing the horse Billy had gifted him. But Billy clarifies that it makes no difference: “I had no right, see?”
T.J.’s idea of parenthood flows from his father’s definition of love. It is, and must always be, triangular, not bilateral. To love their child, a father and mother must love each other first. So the boy tests both parents. He asks Billy, “Did you love her?” and to Annie, “Do you love The Champ?” Annie’s response is silence, but Billy’s is immediate: “‘Course I loved her!”
Director Franco Zeffirelli’s film is a remake of the 1931 film. Unfairly, many ridicule Zeffirelli’s movie for its unabashed display of emotion, but his melodrama here is far from misplaced. Have they seen an 8-year-old, incurably attached to a beloved parent, being torn from that parent? What would they expect? Monastic restraint?! In his debut film, Schroder (himself about T.J.’s age at the time) doesn’t hold back any shade of feeling, whether it’s confusion, loss, pain, guilt, regret, fear, joy, expectation, or triumph.
Dunaway is the perfect foil, less given to open (or easy) displays of emotion. She rarely laughs or cries, moves slowly, or stays perfectly still. In a scene where she herself is overcome with emotion and kneels to welcome T.J., she waits for him to fall into her arms, fighting every impulse to embrace him first.
Voight Valiant but Vulnerable
Voight stays in character, striding across the screen like a colossus, helped by Zeffirelli’s shots from below that render The Champ louder and larger than he is.
Screenwriters Frances Marion and Walter Newman envisioned The Champ as a mercurial character, whether gambling, drinking, or squabbling. So, of course, Billy is larger-than-life, literally flinging himself in every direction. It’s because he’s so temperamental, so “over the top,” that uber-cultured Annie struggled to stay with him in the first place.
With no resources to speak of, he squanders money on a horse, merely to please T.J. Is he not thinking things through? He’s throwing down the dice in life, just as he does in a gambling gig. He runs more than he walks. He shouts more than he talks. It’s why he rushes into a big-time match even years after being out of action, merely on a whim that he’ll hit the jackpot and be able to afford T.J. the comfort and schooling he’s being denied.
In the very first scene, an old-timer recalls how he’d won in the past by betting big on Billy, but he warns the ex-boxer against talk of a comeback when he says that Billy’s been away too long to expect the magic to simply return.
While listening, Billy spots a fly or bug on his left forearm, snatches it with his right hand, solemnly bunches it in his fist for a second, and then opens his palm to watch it fly up and away. Through that blink-and-you-miss-it snippet, Voight marvelously captures the essence of The Champ: saint and sinner rolled into one. You may not realize it, but from that moment on, you’ll find it easier to love the saint and harder to hate the sinner.
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