From Wallace Beerg's boozing Champ to Robert De Niro's Raging Bull to Denzel Washington's knockout performance in The Hurricane, Oscar falls for the sweet science

John Garfield tries to explain to his mother why the fix is in. Robert Ryan refuses to lose as his trainer slinks away. Jimmy Cagney staggers around the ring, blinded by the resin on his opponent's gloves. Paul Newman tells his trainer, "I'm going to go out in this round and bust his head open." The mangled Sylvester Stallone mouths "I love you," to Talia Shire. The bloodied Robert De Niro taunts his victor, "I never went down, Ray, you never got me down."

To those scenes, we can now add Denzel Washington as Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, unleashing all his rage on Joey Giardello. There are enough memorable rounds in boxing movies to fill a thousand cards. Since Thomas Edison put Gentleman Jim Corbett in front of his camera in 1894, more than 400 fight films have been released, exponentially more than any other sport.

Part of the reason is practical: It's far easier filming a fight scene in a ring than it is a baseball or football game, and the action can carry the movie. But the real fascination is with the beauty of the beast. Legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon called boxing "the red-light district of sports." There's that aspect, but there are also the eternal paradoxes of boxing's angry dream: innocence and corruption, opportunity and rejection, pride and prejudice, the glory and the gutter. And don't forget the leather and the blood.

Almost every leading man worth his mouthpiece has played a boxer. Here's just a partial list of actors who have slipped on the gloves: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Buster Crabbe, Curly Howard, Danny Kaye, Fred MacMurray, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, John Payne, Robert Mitchum, Robert Taylor, Tony Curtis, Anthony Quinn, William Holden, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban, Elvis Presley, Gerard Depardieu, Alain Delon, Jacques Tati, Ryan O'Neal, Clint Eastwood, Mickey Rooney, Mickey Rourke, Jon Voight, Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Tom Cruise, Damon Wayans -  even Ingrid Bergman did a little boxing in The Bells of St. Mary.

Given the quantity and the quality of the list, it's a little surprising that only eight actors in boxing roles have been nominated for Academy Awards. (Actually, it would be nine if you count Victor McLaglen, a former heavyweight who went six rounds with Jack Johnson and won an Oscar for 1935's The Informer.) In retrospect, Cagney (City for Conquest), Newman (Somebody Up There Likes Me), Quinn (Requiem for a Heavyweight), Ryan (The Set-Up), Cameron Mitchell (Monkey on My Back), and Keach (Fat City) all should have gotten nominations. But as much as Hollywood loves boxing, the Academy tends to relegate boxing actors to Oscar's undercard. Here, then, are the eight (before Washington) who broke through.

"I'm gonna lay off the booze - word of honor. I'm not gonna gamble anymore." - Wallace Beery to his son (Jackie Cooper) in The Champ (1931)

The setting was a racetrack, and the plot, in which an ex-heavyweight champion battles bottle, betting, and better fighters to hang on to the son who 'is devoted to him, could have easily turned to mud. But under the direction of King Vidor, Beery and Cooper were so affecting as the Champ and Dink that everyone left the theater crying. The climactic scene, in which Dink watches his father die, is one of the great tearjerkers of all time.

At the Academy Award ceremonies for 1931-32, Fredric March had already been presented with the Best Actor award for his dual role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but when an Academy official recounted the votes, he discovered that Beery was just one vote shy, which, according to the rules, was close enough to declare a tie. The award validated the career, r of the larger-than-life and louder-than-a-foghorn Beery, who had started out in the circus and made his name in comedy.

"There is a design in everything. You were meant to be a champion. You are." - Claude Rains to Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

This was hardly the gritty drama that would come to define the boxing genre. Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a metaphysical comedy in which Montgomery plays Joe Pendleton, a saxophone-playing, airplane-flying heavyweight whose soul is plucked away by a rookie angel just before his plane crashes. But then the angel's superior, Mr. Jordan (Rains), informs him that Joe would actually have lived and become heavyweight champ, so they set about finding a replacement vessel. Montgomery, who lost out to Gary Cooper (Sergeant York) as Best Actor, was something of a Renaissance man himself and the father of "Bewitched"'s Elizabeth Montgomery. A gifted comedian, he was not very convincing as a boxer - he just didn't have the physique. But then this was less about the sweet science and more about sweet chariots.

If you've seen Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait (1978), you'll recognize the plot, with the action transferred to the football field. But the ting seems the better venue for the story, if only because in boxing, the body is more disposable than in other sports. As the angel, played by Edward Everett Horton, points out, "Your body! After all, what is it? Just a physical covering, that's all--worth chemically 32 cents."

"What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies." - John Garfield to the gangster in Body and Soul (1947)

Until Raging Bull came along, this was the boxing movie to which all other boxing movies had to answer, and for good reason. Garfield plays Charlie Davis, a Jewish prizefighter whose mother just wants him to get a good job. But when his father is killed, Charlie turns pro and rises to the top, beating real-life welterweight Canada Lee in the title fight. Charlie also falls into the clutches of a gangster and a floozy, but redeems himself in the end by winning a fight in which he's being double-crossed.

Garfield financed the movie himself and literally risked his life, reportedly suffering both a concussion and a heart attack during filming. The realism of the fight scenes was heightened by cinematographer James Wong Howe, who donned roller skates to better capture the action. Thanks to the gritty plot, the gutsy performances, and the pioneering camera work, Body and Soul ushered in a golden-glove age of boxing movies.

Still, Garfield lost out to Ronald Colman in the melodramatic A Double Life. Garfield did die of a heart attack a few years later. He was no doubt sparring in his grave when another boxing movie called Body and Soul was released in 1981, starring Leon Isaac Kennedy. The only redeeming thing about that one was a cameo by Muhammad Ali.

"Nice guys don't make money." - Kirk Douglas in Champion (1949)

Midge Kelly is not a nice guy. Based on the story by Ring Lardner, Champion traces Midge's rise from serving food in a California roadside cafe to middleweight champion. He also abandons his wife, ditches his trainer, gets mixed up with the Mob, and beats up his disabled brother. The power of Douglas' performance is so great that his victory at the end feels like our victory.

Douglas was a collegiate wrestler and was thoroughly convincing in the ting, especially in the spectacular fight that closes the movie. And while the Oscar went to Broderick Crawford for All the King's Men, Champion made Douglas a star. To this day, you can hear Midge braying, "For the first time in my life, people cheering for me."

"I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody--instead of a bum, which is what I am..." -  Marlon Brando to his brother Charley in On the Waterfront (1954)

Brando never sets foot in the ting in the movie. But his Terry Malloy is still one of the most believable fighters to inhabit the screen. Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, the Oscar-winning Waterfront is the story of an ex-boxer who once took a dive before ultimately standing up to a much bigger opponent.

There are a few real boxers in the movie, including Two-Ton Tony Galento, who, after watching a snitch get thrown off a roof, utters the immortal line, "[The canary] could sing but he couldn't fly." But the most evocative scene takes place in a cab, as Terry reminds Charley (Rod Steiger) of the time he told him, "Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson`"

At the urging of Father Barry (Karl Malden) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie-Saint), and after the murder of his brother, Terry exposes the evil of the dock union before a crime commission. Because Kazan and Schulberg testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, there is an element of self-justification in the plot. Still, you can't help buying Brando's "one-way ticket to palookaville."

"He bulls me up against the tent side of the ring and slam, wham...and he must have used a two-by-four.... That's what I'm gettin', and I'm gonna get it the same saying yes or no so it don't matter what I do." - James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (1970)

Jack Jefferson is loosely based on Jack Johnson, the charismatic and persecuted black heavyweight whose exploits polarized America in the 1910s. The Great White Hope gets to the heart of the racial divide, telling the tragic story of Jefferson (Jones) and his white mistress, a role that earned Jane Alexander an Oscar nod in her first screen role. (Jones lost to George C. Scott in Patton; Alexander to Glenda Jackson in Women in Love.) The movie is based on Howard Sackler's free-verse play of the same name, and it's always felt a little too theatrical. Still, Jones is pretty good as a boxer; his own father, after all, was a prizefighter. What he really captures is the magnetism of the great heavyweights. Just as no other sport produces more movies, no other sport has produced more demigods, from Johnson to Jack Dempsey to Joe Louis to Rocky Marciano to Ali to George Foreman to Mike Tyson.

"You got to be a moron to be a fighter." - Sylvester Stallone in Rocky (1976)

It's too bad Rocky Balboa became such a bungalow industry for Stallone, because there's a sweet, fairy-tale quality to the original that had audiences on their feet. Stallone himself is funny, winning, and real. The boxing, however, is a comic strip of Pow! and Bam! that obliterates the art that the directors of the cinematic fisticuffs of the '40s and '50s created. But you're more than willing to go along with the emotions expressed by Bill Conti's rousing score.

Stallone, who was beaten by Network's Peter Finch for Best Actor, wrote the script in three days, inspired by the career of tomato can Chuck Wepner. Following in the best tradition of "Casey at the Bat," he had the courage to let Rocky lose. Unfortunately, that led to Rockys II-V, and challengers Mr. T, Hulk Hogan., and Dolph Lundgren.

"What'd I do? What'd I do?" - Robert De Niro after taking a dive in Raging Bull (1980)

Raging Bull, based on the rise and fall of Jake La Motta, had elements of all the great boxing movies before it: the moral dilemma of Body and Soul, the savagery of Champion, the relentless climb of Somebody Up There Likes Me, the deliverance of The Set-Up. De Niro threw himself into the role, getting in such fighting trim that La Motta claimed he could turn pro. Then De Niro put on 60 pounds to portray him in later life. For his daring performance, he won the Best Actor Oscar--the first actor in trunks to win it outright.

Director Martin Scorsese matched De Niro's brilliance frame by black-and-white flame. The most brutal shot in a brutal movie was a simple pan to blood dripping from the ropes. If you claimed this was the best sports movie ever, or the best movie of the '80s (even though it lost to Ordinary People), you would get no argument here. La Motta himself paid the movie its most telling tribute: "When I first saw the movie I didn't like it. So one day I went to see it with my ex-wife...I said to her, 'Was I really like that?' She said I was worse."

Maybe because Raging Bull scared other directors off, or because the fight game itself is less compelling than it used to be, there weren't many boxing films from 1980 to 1999. Given the success of The Hurricane, that may change. Once again, we can sense the sacrifices a man will make so his angry dream can come true. We can see the blood on the screen, yet we can't look away.