You’ve most likely never heard of director Michael Ritchie‘s underrated boxing film Diggstown and that kinda makes sense. The movie flopped at the box office, lost huge money on its theatrical run, practically disappeared and is now buried to the back lower shelves of the vast digital rental realm. But if you’re looking for a something fun, a little offbeat, a bit unexpected, and busting with inspiration, this is a good pick for you.
The story is fairly simple. After release from prison, conman Gabriel Caine (James Woods) heads to nearby Diggstown, where his partner Daniel Patrick O’Shannon “Fitz” Fitzpatrick (Oliver Platt) has already put the hooks in for their next scheme. Their target is John Gillon (Bruce Dern), a cagey businessman who runs the town, obsessed with boxing and gambling. Fitz, under the illusion that he’s drunk, claims he knows a man who can knockout any ten men in the city in a single day, a fighter named Honey Roy Palmer (Louis Gossett Jr.). Never having heard of him, Gillon takes the bet, and soon some very big money is on the table, the mob involved, and a few tricks are up everyone’s sleeves.
You’re probably thinking this all sounds rather predictable and you’d be mostly right, Ritchie’s film less about substance and more about ticking off boxes in getting to the rousing end. However, there are some genuine surprises in the mix, with Woods very good as a hustler spinning plates in all corners of the room and Gossett Jr. delivering, if you’ll excuse the wording, a few well-timed emotional hits. Adapted from Leonard Wise‘s book The Diggstown Ringers, Steven McKay‘s screenplay is targeted and economical, leaving no room for much else than the bet, including the likes of (Heather Graham), who has a nearly no screen time playing a love interest but not really, thank goodness. You’ll understand why.
Fact is, the film feels mostly perfunctory, if not entertaining, until we get to the part where it’s time to make sure the audience knows that what Gillon has coming to him is well-deserved. Enter the Busby brothers, Hambone (Duane Davis) and Slim (Raymond C. Turner). They are two of the fighters up against Palmer, but what Gillon doesn’t know, are also bribed by Caine to take falls. When Gillon realizes what’s happening, things in Diggstown take a turn, as these two black men come face-to-face with jarring cruelty.
Honestly, it’s a little hard to watch, the light and breezy film so suddenly diving deep into race and racial hate crimes under the guise of betrayal that it nearly trips up the momentum. How these men are spoken too, what ultimately happens to one of them, and the manner it which it’s played out is as potent as say, several key moments in films like Mississippi Burning or even A Time to Kill. As I write this, it feels like something that would turn anyone off from watching a sports comedy-drama, and there’d be no blame in doing so, but what it truly does is make the movie all the more impactful. Gillon is a bad guy and while we are rooting for our criminal pals to win the bet, especially with the very likable Honey Roy Palmer in the ring, it isn’t until the Busby brothers come along that Diggstown truly finds its swing and puts Gillon in the proper shadows as a villain needing a takedown.
Nowadays, something like this might not get made in a film like Diggstown, certainly a step forward, but at least the filmmakers properly keep it as motivation for the remainder of the film. It shifts everything and actually makes the story work at all, the arc in all this that in the peripheral of these white men and their playful gambling are hardworking black men with few opportunities, taken advantage of by both sides of the bet. This is what Palmer understands most and what his fight becomes truly all about, even as the film itself leans back again onto the outcome of Caine and Gillon rather than what this boxing feat means to Honey Roy.
That message is mostly blurred as the happy ending comes about, someone comically offered to land a significant punch as justification for a terrible atrocity, but for what the film is, the time it was made, and the change it potentially inspires in the story itself, it does as it intends. Mostly. As it was happening, as I watched the fate of the Busby brothers–as the film delicately sidesteps addressing the deeper systemic reasons for why it was happening, even as it is undeniable as it’s being seen–it turns Diggstown into an entirely different movie.
Diggstown doesn’t have the plotting of a true sports movie, lacks the ambition of a transcendental drama, and comes up short as a straight-up comedy. However, it does have heart and a terrific cast with underlying themes that deserves exploration. I know well after the laughs were over and the rush of a fantastically well-earned finale, it was the Busby brothers that stayed with me, their tragic involvement in this and the unmentioned but certainly knowable reasons as what led them to be part of it that have stayed with me. Watch it for that.