Humphery Bogart Closes Out His Acting Career with The Harder They Fall

From now until the end of time, The Harder They Fall will be unable to stand as just another movie. It'll always be linked to its star Humphery Bogart in that this was the final film Bogart starred in before his passing in January 1957. Dying at only 57, Bogart closed out his Hollywood career with an extremely solid motion picture. It's no Casablanca or The African Queen but what is? The highest compliment one can pay The Harder They Fall is that it's good enough to stand out as noteworthy even beyond its significant place in the history of its leading man. It isn't just sentimental wistfulness over the passing of Bogart that makes The Harder They Fall an entertaining boxing noir.


Bogart stars as struggling writer Eddie Willis in The Harder They Fall. Willis sure could use a break and he gets just that with a job offer from boxing manager Nick Benko (Rod Steiger). Benko wants Willis to be the head PR person for his newest boxer, Toro Moreno (Mike Lane). Now, Toro isn't that great of a fighter. In fact, he's kind of terrible at it. But he's tall, yes sir, he's tall and he sure looks like he could knock a fella out. With Willis penning flashy promotional materials and, most importantly, money being slid around so that Moreno only fights in rigged events, Toro Moreno could be a big deal. Willis joins in the operation knowing that if Moreno goes big, so does he.

Eventually, as Moreno makes his way across West Coast boxing engagements, Willis and company do get famous. However, screenwriter Philip Yordan proceeds to depicts problems emerging when these lies get out of control. An embellished fact here and a white lie there soon turn into a whole scam involving Moreno being responsible for the death of a boxer! This plot turn makes The Harder They Fall a classic example of a Be Careful What You Wish For story that Hollywood had regularly turned to even before 1956. Luckily, Yordan has a couple of tricks up his sleeve on how to make The Harder They Fall's take on this type of story unique, the best of which includes leaning heavily into the world of boxing.

Specifically, emphasizing the isolated nature of boxing reveals that it's the perfect sport to center a noir story around. Unlike many other sports (football, basketball, baseball, etc.), boxing isn't traditionally done on teams, it's a sport with one person and a group of managers. That means Toro Moreno has no other teammates to turn to when things in his life go south, he basically has no one that he trusts beyond Eddie Willis. That depiction of a man alone in a daunting morally corrupt world fits right at home in the bleak atmosphere of film noirs. To boot, The Harder They Fall leans into the excessive physical costs of boxing to create gripping tension in its third act. What other sports arena could you have a genuine risk of death without it coming off as shlocky?

Yordan's script also excels in how it defines antagonism in the world of The Harder They Fall. The way Willis is shown to have lost his way simply by being complicit in the greed and corruption that ruins the life of Toro Moreno. Willis gets his wealth but at the cost of another human being. Meanwhile, motivating central antagonists Nick Benko and the other boxing managers is a sense of greed that leads them to dehumanize the boxers they're supposed to be helping. The way they dismiss the needs of Moreno registers as all too realistic as is the excellent twist that they've arranged their finances in a way that makes it legal to pay Moreno nothing. The only downside to the way Yordan frames the baddies in The Harder They Fall is how Benko is coded as a villain because he mentions his distrust for immigrants. That moment is only bad in how it discouragingly reminds one that such an opinion that was widely-regarded as wicked in 1956 is now the de facto rhetoric spewed by the President of the United States.

Anywho, the well-written screenplay is brought to life through assured direction by Mark Robson and especially impressive cinematography by Burnett Guffey. In the boxing match sequences, Guffey lends evocative contrasts between pitch-black backgrounds and the brightly-lit boxing rings that convey the idea that Toro Moreno is playing these rigged matches against a black void threatening to swallow him up at any moment. Of course, the star of this attraction is Humphery Bogart, playing the kind of morally-complicated noir protagonist he had refined to a tee. It's no surprise, then, that Bogart is exceptional here, particularly in his well-timed deliveries of a number of dryly comic jokes.

Bogart's work as Eddie Willis proves to be great on its own merits but it also provides a fitting close to his career as a leading man. The latter sentiment proves extremely true in a final scene where Bogart's Willis decides to leave a legacy in the form of writing up a piece exposing the corrupt practices of powerful boxing managers like Nick Benko. In doing this, Willis ensures he's leaving something behind that can be remembered for trying to make a difference rather than just going along with the duplicitous status quo. Through The Harder They Fall's closing scene, one can also see Bogart cementing his own positive legacy, specifically as a performer who could lend such humanity to relatably downtrodden souls of the silver screen.