Hollywood’s treatment of the prizefight game has long tended toward the sentimental. Boxing has often been portrayed as a moral melodrama involving heroics and character, as in that early-1930s handkerchief-soaker, The Champ (remade in 1978 by Franco Zefferelli with Angelina Jolie’s dad as the star). More infrequently it has turned its attention to the seamier, violent, even inhumane aspects of the sweet science.

Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin, “Between the end of the “Chatterley ban”/And the Beatles’ first LP.” D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous story of Lady Chatterley, written and banned in the 1920s, exists in three different versions. The French film Lady Chatterley is based on the second of the three versions, “John Thomas and Lady Jane.” (The title refers to the pet names the lovers playfully give to each other’s private parts.)