a5c7b9f00b Gangsters try to get a boxer to throw an important fight. Frankie, a young prizefighter, wins a fixed boxing matchpart of a crime boss&#39;s plan to have him build up a following and then have him throw a championship fight. Later, while training, Frankie meets Maryshe is going to church with her family, and he begins a romance with her. The crime boss orders Frankie to stay away from Mary, while continuing to arrange for Frankie to win more fights. Just before Frankie&#39;s fight with the champion, he and the boss have an argument. Their plans to fix the fight are overheard by Mary&#39;s young brother, which soon leads to a tense situation. The Big Chance were it not for the presence of 13 year old Mickey Rooney in a supporting role would have been consigned to the Hollywood dustbin years ago. The film was produced by a poverty row outfit called Eagle Studios and it shows.<br/><br/>Johnny Darrow who plays the lead is a young boxer who&#39;s being built upa contender by a crooked promoter with a series of set up wins. The promoter Matthew Betz has it in mind that Darrow get a match with the champion and then it would be Darrow&#39;s turn to dive. Just make it all look good.<br/><br/>Things do go awry when Darrow meets and falls for country girl Merna Kennedy who starts keeping company with him even though she has a bible beating father who when he first meets Darrow objects to him doing road work on the Sabbath. Kennedy&#39;s younger brother Mickey Rooney comes to idolize Darrowwell, all of these people not realizing Darrow is not on the up and up.<br/><br/>The Big Chance will follow in the normal parameters of boxing films. If this had been done at Warner Brothers James Cagney would have been the star. Its lack of production values don&#39;t warrant it given much of a rating. However with the presence of the eternal Mick in the cast The Big Chance will be preserved and seen for generations. This B-feature has a solid if largely familiar setup, and the story line is all right, though rather predictable. But in many other respects, this could have been a better movie. The production values are quite weak, and most of the characters are strictly one-dimensional cardboard figures. The script has a couple of good moments, but many more dry stretches.<br/><br/>The story centers on a young boxer who is made the beneficiary of a series of fixed fights, so that a crime boss can get him a championship fight. Along the way, the boxer gets a girlfriend of whom the boss disapproves, and she and her younger brother cause complicationsthe big fight approaches.<br/><br/>There&#39;s little new in the story, but such a story can easily lead to enjoyable drama with a decent cast and production. But except for Hank Mann, who does a solid jobthe boxer&#39;s loyal trainer, and a very young Mickey Rooney, who shows some energythe girlfriend&#39;s younger brother, the cast is adequate but generally nondescript.<br/><br/>The production values are also noticeably low. Except for a briefly entertaining verbal exchange during the opening bout, the boxing scenes don&#39;t work well at all,they consist mostly of low-quality stock footage being edited together in a generally unconvincing fashion with shots of the actors attempting to lookif they are boxing. The script also misses some opportunities, prematurely resolving some potentially interesting tensions, and wasting time on a digression with a vamp hired by the boss, which leads to little of dramatic interest.<br/><br/>It does move fairly quickly, and it lasts less than an hour. And there are certainly worse things you could do with your time. But there are a great many movies, even those with limited budgets, that work much better than this one does.
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