Was boxing ever honest? We doubt it. How could a sport with the scoring done in secret be anything but a scam? Body and Soul tells the story of a champion boxer named Charley Davis whose rise has occurred under the thumb of organized crime and who is now required to lose his title to a brash, 20-year-old upstart. That doesn’t sit too well with Charley, who may be corrupt and mob-owned, and who has wrecked everything good in his life for money and a femme fatale, but whose talent is real. One of the first and best boxing movies, Body and Soul—with John Garfield as Charley, Hazel Brooks as the femme fatale Alice, and Lilli Palmer as his loyal girlfriend—is a nearly flawless classic. After his performance here, and in the previous year’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Garfield’s film career should have been long and decorated, but in 1950 he was blacklisted during the Communist witch hunts that swept Hollywood, and by 1952 he was dead from a heart attack. Body and Soul premiered in the U.S. today in 1947.