Young, promising violinist Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) is in financial difficulties and decides to earn money as a boxer, though he will risk hand injuries. His father, Mr. Bonaparte senior (Lee J. Cobb), wants his son to continue developing his musical talent and buys him an expensive violin for his 21st birthday. But Joe persuades the almost bankrupt manager Tom Moody (Adolph Menjou) to let him try his hand at boxing and wins match after match. When his conscience starts bothering him and he questions his decision to enter boxing, Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck), Moody's girl, is dispatched to convince him to keep fighting. Gangster Eddie Fuseli (Joseph Calleia) tries to get a piece of the action and buys Moody's share, turning the formerly sweet Joe into a hard-hearted boxer. Joe enters the semi-final match against Chocolate Drop (James “Cannonball” Green) determined to win, but when he knocks out his opponent in the second round, killing him, both his and Lorna's attitudes change. He retires from boxing and returns with Lorna to his father and his music.[3]
James "Cannonball" Green plays Chocolate Drop, Joe's final opponent, in an uncredited role.[5]
Production
In 1938, Columbia purchased the rights to Odets' play for $100,000, intending to produce a film starring Jean Arthur and directed by Frank Capra. Actors considered for the role of Joe Bonaparte included John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Richard Carlson, and Tyrone Power.[6] However, director Rouben Mamoulian expressed interest in Holden after seeing his screen test. Under the terms in which Holden was obtained contractually from Paramount, Columbia paid him $25 a week.[7]Golden Boy was Holden's first starring role and jumpstarted his career.[4]
“The film is memorable in great part because of the luminous performances of Barbara Stanwyck and Mamoulian’s personal discovery, William Holden…Holden credited Stanwyck with having pulled him through his demanding assignment by coaching him in her trailer each evening after the day’s shooting.”—Film historian Marc Spergel in Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian (1993).[8]
The producers were initially unhappy with Holden's work and tried to dismiss him, but Stanwyck insisted that he be retained.[9] Thirty-nine years later, when Holden and Stanwyck were joint presenters at the 1978 Academy Awards, he interrupted their reading of a nominee list to publicly thank her for saving his career.[9] In 1982, Stanwyck returned the favor during her acceptance speech for an Honorary Oscar at the 1982 Academy Award ceremony, saying of Holden, who had died in an accident a few months earlier: "I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish".[10][11]
Playwright Clifford Odets was reportedly displeased at the many changes made in the film from his original play, partly due to the Motion Picture Production Code and partly to the rewritten ending. Whereas the play ended with Joe and Lorna deciding to escape their problems and being killed in a car accident, the film closes with Joe and Lorna deciding to return to Joe's home together.[12][9][13]
New York Times film critic Frank Nugent offers conditional praise for Mamoulian’s adaption of the Clifford Odets play. According to Nugent, Golden Boy is at its best when it diverges from “stage bound” patterns and applies cinematic methods to convey “the Odets allegory.” The climatic and tragic boxing match, which occurs off-stage in the play, appears in the film as “a savagely eloquent piece of cinematic social comment” showcasing the social milieu that attend these fights: “T]he mugs, the gamblers, the fashionable set, the race groups, the sadists, the broken-down stumble-bums rolling their heads with the punches...these are the memorable things in the picture, the truly cinematic things.”
Though “scarcely first-rate motion picture” Nugent concedes that Golden Boy “is the sort of film we can endorse heartily in spite of its shortcomings.”[14][15]
Clifford Odet’s stage play was “stripped of its left-wing rhetoric” by Columbia Picture’s screenwriters, as well as its tragic denouement.[17] Director Mamoulian ignored the larger social issues of “modern capitalist society” and proceeded to reduce the central theme to that of an individual’s struggle to “choose between his spiritual or animalistic impulses.”[18][19]
By entering into a Faustian bargain, concert violinist cum professional boxer Josef “Joe” Bonaparte “loses his soul and wreaks destruction on the lives of others in his quest for self-fulfillment. In the end he is left with almost unendurable guilt.” Mamoulian and Columbia deviated from the Odets theme and tacked on a Hollywood-style happy ending.[20][21]
The picture does not address the “racial issues inherent in the fight” in which the white Bonaparte “Golden Boy” is pitted against the African-American “Chocolate Drop,” the latter who is killed in the homicidal match.[22] Film historian Marc Spergel writes:
Mamoulian has the murdered boxer’s father say “We just little people, and all of us got a burden, even you,” maintaining the screen image of blacks as lovingly accepting their status as morally superior victims, without rancor, and so patronizing blacks under the guise of ennoblement.[23]
Spergal concludes that Golden Boy is an expression of Mamoulian’s misanthropic outlook that informs his themes: A cinematic metaphor that defines Hollywood “as a place where artistic sensitivity and appreciation are wasted on people who crave only bread and circuses…”[24][25]
^Spergel, 1993 p. 172-173: Odet’s play “was a success in 1937 when it was produced by the Group Theatre on Broadway.” And p. 281: Filmography and Stageography.
^Spergel, 1993 p. 173: Ellided material reads “where artists are exploited and managers are villainous exploiters.”
^Danks, 2007: “Mamoulian quickly developed a taste for nostalgic Americana and a suspicion of the benefits of the modern world…Golden Boy (1939) and Applause do not really have a genuine feeling for the present day.”
