| Day of the Fight | |
| Director: | Stanley Kubrick |
| Producer: | Stanley Kubrick Jay Bonafield (uncredited) |
| Starring: | Walter Cartier Vincent Cartier |
| Narrator: | Douglas Edwards |
| Music: | Gerald Fried |
| Cinematography: | Stanley Kubrick |
| Editing: | Julian Bergman Stanley Kubrick (uncredited) |
| Distributor: | RKO Radio Pictures |
| Runtime: | 12 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $3,900 |
Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short-subject documentary film financed and directed by Stanley Kubrick, who based this black-and-white motion picture on a photo feature he shot two years earlier for Look magazine.[1]
Day of the Fight shows Irish-American middleweight boxer Walter Cartier during the height of his career, on April 17, 1950, the day of a fight with middleweight Bobby James.
The film opens with a short section on boxing's history and then follows Cartier through his day as he prepares for the 10 P.M. bout. Cartier eats breakfast in his West 12th Street apartment in Greenwich Village, goes to early mass, and eats lunch at his favorite restaurant. At 4 P.M., he starts preparations for the fight. By 8 P.M., he is waiting in his dressing room at Laurel Gardens in Newark, New Jersey, for the fight to begin.
We then see the fight itself, which Cartier wins in a short match.[2] [3] [4]
Kubrick and Singer used daylight-loading Eyemo cameras that take 100-foot spools of 35mm black-and-white film to shoot the fight, with Kubrick shooting hand-held (often from below) and Singer's camera on a tripod. The 100-foot reels required constant reloading, and Kubrick did not catch the knock-out punch which ended the bout because he was reloading. Singer did, however.
Day of the Fight is the first film credit on composer Gerald Fried's resume. Kubrick did not pay him for his work in scoring the production. "He thought the very fact that my doing the music" for the film "got me into the profession was enough payment", Fried told The Guardian in 2018, although he conceded in the same newspaper interview that Kubrick's point was accurate. A childhood friend of Kubrick, Fried later composed the score for the director's Paths of Glory (1957) and three other films.[8]
Since the original planned buyer of the documentary went out of business, Kubrick was able to sell Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for $4,000, resulting in only a net profit of $100 for him after paying the film's $3,900 in production costs.[9] However, the physicist and author Jeremy Bernstein, who in November 1965 conducted a 76-minute interview with Kubrick for The New Yorker, documented that the project was actually not a break-even endeavor, that it instead lost $100.[10] [11]
Day of the Fight was released as part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series and premiered on 26 April 1951 at New York's Paramount Theater, on the same program as the film My Forbidden Past. Frank Sinatra headlined the live stage show that day