Cinderella Man

The new movie Cinderella Man, besides being the type of drab treacle Oscar-bait that I avoid both on principle and on the finest medical advice, presents an All-American vision of good and evil that should make Jews shudder.

The titular hero, a nice Christian family-man, is the underdog White Knight in this most recent WHITEwashing of fact to come from Ron Howard. After he simplified "A Beautiful Mind" he did the same erasing with James J. Braddock and in his opponent Max Baer.

Because the "Cinderella Man" is the hero, his life is blocked off into a puritanical dreamvision of rectitude. As such, whomever his opponent would be would be presented in a similar simplistic way. History put Braddock against Max Baer, so Ron Howard had to depict Baer as a stone killer.

As this Slate article points out (Fight Snub - How Cinderella Man sucker punches the Jewish boxer Max Baer. By David Fellerath) and confirmed by the all-knowing Wiki, Baer was nowhere near a villainous type. In fact, Baer publicly flaunted his Jewishness in response to the rise of Hitler (as seen in the photo below) by putting a huge Jewish star on his trunks.

The opposition to Baer's Jewish was explicit in the news stories of the time. Personally - while I cannot bring myself to actually praise a person whose job entailed committing savage violence for money - I can still give Baer a modicum of respect and I can feel it an affront against a significant symbol of American Jewry.

This is yet another proof for my ongoing thesis that movies which deal with historical subjects should be held accountable for their lies. It is NOT benign when they change facts to fit Movie Magic. People get hurt.