Body and Soul · reception & legacy
1947 · Robert Rossen
How Body and Soul has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A box-office hit in 1947 that earned John Garfield an Oscar nomination — then the blacklist gutted almost everyone who made it (Garfield, writer Polonsky, Rossen, Canada Lee, Anne Revere). Today it's canonised as the definitive boxing noir and a monument to the Hollywood left that HUAC destroyed.
What's debated
The perennial cinephile bout: is this the greatest boxing film, or does The Set-Up — or Raging Bull, which studied it — take the belt?
Its footprint
Garfield's closing shrug — 'What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies.' — is one of noir's most quoted lines, and the film is the template practically every boxing movie since has worked from. Scorsese and his crew studied its fight photography when making Raging Bull.
Where it stands
A cornerstone of both the noir and boxing-film canons — Garfield's defining role, and a 'you must have seen this' for anyone tracing where Rocky and Raging Bull came from.