Requiem for a Heavyweight. On the
training table lies a bloody mess. After 17 years in the ring, that's what's left of Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn). "Look at this eye," the doctor snarls at Mountain's manager (Jackie Gleason). "That's sclerotic damage. A couple of good rights to that eye, you can buy him a tin cup and some pencils. Or maybe some day he'll bang his head on a bathroom door and bleed to death. No more.
That'll be my recommendation to the commission. Tell him to buy a scrapbook."
The manager hates to tell him, and not only because Mountain is a big, dumb sweetheart of a guy who looks up to the older man like he was maybe the Marquis of Queensberry. No, what is really eating the manager is the thought of all that geetus he owes to a very powerful and very nasty gambler. Without Mountain, how can he pay? And if he can't pay . .. Gruffly, the manager breaks the bad news to his man. Mountain is stupefied. "Wh-whut I gonna do now?" he mumbles. "I mean, all I know ta do is fight."
The question, as Rod Serling asked it in his famous television play and as he asks it again in this capable cinema adaptation, is sure to touch the spectator's heart. Unhappily, the answer to the question hits the customer in the kisser like a supersaturated crying towel. But to some extent the performances make up for the plot. Gleason has the loud uncertain blare of a tinhorn who can't face the music. Julie Harris, as a U.S. Employment Service counselor, suggests with diffident charm that the U.S.E.S. of adversity can sometimes be sweet. And Quinn, though his dese and his dose and his freeform nose get tiresome after awhile, nevertheless gives a heartfelt interpretation of a decent human being taken up by an inhuman racket as casually as if he were a cigarette: when the racket has used him up it drops him; and because there still seems to be a spark of life left in what's left of him, it steps on him and slowly, thoroughly, grinds him into the gutter.