Ring Lardner Tonight: Part 2 of "Champion" -- In Milwaukee, Midge makes connections

The 1949 film version of Champion was a great vehicle for the young Kirk Douglas. I realize I've never actually seen it, probably because I've had the impression that beyond the use of the basic plot and character names, the film doesn't have much to do with Lardner. However, this doesn't appear to have been entirely Ring Lardner Jr.'s opinion -- see below.


"Ring was not a close observer of the Hollywood product. After seeing a handful of talking pictures, he made a firm prediction that films would return to their natural state of silence once the novelty had worn off."

-- Ring Lardner Jr., in his book The Lardners:
My Family Remembered (1976)

by Ken

Tonight we continue our seven-part traversal, begun last night, of Ring's chillingly dark short story "Champion."

As Bill Lardner (i.e., Ring Jr.) explains in The Lardners, his father thought of the movies -- whether as a screenwriter himself or for adaptations of his own work -- primarily as an occasional source of extra cash, of which the family was always in need. "The price Ring set on his services," Bill writes, "was generally in inverse proportion to his esteem for the medium," and recalls the story told by James Thurber in The Years with Ross that "when [Thurber's] daughter was born at Doctors Hospital in New York in 1931, a young intern said to him: 'There's a patient here who is a writer and he says he would rather write for The New Yorker for five cents a word than for Cosmopolitan for a dollar.' Thurber asked if his name was Ring Lardner 'and the man was astonished at my perception or magic or whatever.'"

After Ring died (in 1933), Bill Lardner writes, Ellis (Bill's mother) --

made several deals with movie companies. "The Golden Honeymoon" and "Haircut" were bought but never made. Alibi Ike became a vehicle for Joe E. Brown in 1935. After the war a new company founded by Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman produced creditable adaptations of two Lardner works. The first, So This Is New York, based on The Big Town and starring Henry Morgan, was their initial production and failed so miserably at the box office it nearly sank the company before it was fully launched. The second, Champion, put the company across and made a star of Kirk Douglas.

FOR PART 2 OF "CHAMPION," CLICK HERE.

RING'S "CHAMPION" -- THE WHOLE STORY

Part 1: We make the acquaintance of young Michael Kelly
Part 2: In Milwaukee, Midge makes connections
Part 3: In Boston, Midge makes his mark
Part 4: In New Orleans, Midge reads some mail
Part 5: Back in his hometown, the champ knows how to deal with a sponger
Part 6: Back in Milwaukee, the champ rearranges more old arrangements
Part 7: In New York, the champ meets the press
Postscript: How "Champion" found its way into book form

THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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