It's been a while since I've come close to throwing up in a movie theatre. But it was touch and go for a moment in Million Dollar Baby, the newest film from Clint Eastwood that examines the sweet art of bashing people's faces in.

In one scene, Clint Eastwood as cut man Frankie Dunn has to reset his boxer's broken nose while she bites down on a towel. Supposedly, women have a higher pain threshold than men and in this case, that's a good thing. Million Dollar Baby is a fine addition to the boxing movie pantheon that has been graced by Scorsese's Raging Bull, Rocky, The Champ (1979) with Jon Voight (and the 1931 version with Wallace Beery), Girl Fight and soon to be released Cinderella Man starring my imaginary boyfriend Russell Crowe. You gotta love a brute, even if she's only five feet tall and 105 pounds soaking wet.

The story is simple. Clint Eastwood is Dunn, a washed up cut man who owns the Hit Pit, a gym that has also seen better days. Morgan Freeman is Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris, an old time fighter with one eye who cleans up the place and bickers with his friend. The pair of them are well matched, shuffling off together into old age. But when Frankie loses his contender to another manager, he very reluctantly takes on a not-so young female fighter by the name of Margaret Fitzgerald.

Horrifying exhilaration

There is usually only one ending available in a boxing movie. Like its predecessor, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Million Dollar Baby is old school, kind of like its author, one F.X. Toole, whose nom de plume was as colourful as those of the characters in his stories (Odell Blue, Mookie Bodeen, or Dangerous Dillard Fightin Flippo Bam-Bam). Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner was Toole's first book, and supposedly took 40 odd years to get published. Toole spent years working as a real cut man and he describes his love and respect for the sweet science as “the magic of men in combat, the magic of will, and skill, and pain, and the risking of everything so you can respect yourself for the rest of your life.”

Boxing movies are a particular painful pleasure. They offer the human struggle at its most basic and brutal and Eastwood's movie does this with horrible grace. The scenes where Maggie Fitzgerald comes storming out of her corner and knocks her opponents out with ruthless efficiency are horrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Boxing movies have their cliches and this is one of the things you either like or dislike about them. Million Dollar Baby has them all, the fighter with few skills and a big heart, the villain who fights dirty, the spit, the blood, and the sweat, all the liquid stuff that binds us. Its very conventionality is what makes it so compelling; we've seen this before, but it still gets us every time. Like a kidney shot, or a blow to the sciatic nerve, it will bypass your brain and get you right in the gut. You might puke or cry, but some fluid is going to come out of you either way. I took my brother, and we both cried like, well...babies, million dollar or otherwise.

Dangerous Jack Johnson

This movie is also beautifully shot, using light and shadow to obscure and reveal the characters. Often you see only a character's eyes while the lower half of their faces is in shadow. It's an old fashioned effect, but it works. The only part of the film where Eastwood loses his touch is with Maggie's white trash family. Variously obese, overly tattooed and welfare dependent, these people are so thoroughly awful you can be forgiven for thinking poor people -- ICK!!

Another point of contention might be Billie the Blue Bear (a variation on Ilsa the She Wolf) a German ex-prostitute who is played by the real boxer, Lucia Rijker. Like Laila Ali, she has the massive shoulders and thick body of a true fighter, and she is played as pure evil. An Axis nasty versus the Gaelic cutie. She looks like she'd eat little Hilary Swank for breakfast. Although Swank does hold her own in the physical department (she deserves her Golden Globe just for learning to skip so well) she gets Maggie's blend of poverty bred pride right. She grins like a dog that's been beat too much, but when she gets a chance, this puppy bites back. All the people who have kept her down get their comeuppance.

Poor blacks and cracker whites have been fighting their way out of poverty and No Hope, USA, since the turn of the century, when Jack Johnson was the first black man to win the world heavyweight title in 1908. Ken Burn's documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson follows the fighter's ascent and descent, but the strange thing is how little has changed since the Chicago Tribune famously described the fight as "a contest between the white man's hope and the black peril." The great white hope has yet to arrive although there have been stories like that of the Cinderella Man, Jim Braddock.

Braddock was a down-on-his-luck fighter with a pack of kids to feed and fragile hands, who got one last shot at the title in 1935. It is classic tale of the underdog triumphant, like Seabiscuit, but on two legs. The film, directed by Ron Howard from a script by Akiva Goldsman, looks something like Gladiator in satin shorts, but we'll have to wait until June to find out if he was a tomato can (boxing slang for a bum) or not.

Clint’s dark trilogy

Why do we love the figure of the solitary warrior so much? Sports writers have weighed in on the subject for many a year and there are lots of stock answers. The lonely hero making his mark on the world is a classic North American folk hero, but genuine tragedy is something we don't see all that often in Hollywood films. Except from Clint Eastwood that is, who has it in his marrow; three of his recent films all arguably can be called that: Mystic River, The Unforgiven and now Million Dollar Baby in which he teams again with Morgan Freeman.

Like westerns or war pictures, (Eastwood's next film is Flags of our Fathers), boxing films are part of the American poetry of poverty and pain. Million Dollar Baby is a reminder that life is largely a tragic enterprise, something mainstream films often try to shield its audiences from. This film walks a fine line; one misstep and it would turn into bathos, but it never loses its touch and it transcends the material and becomes something almost beautiful.

Turning the blood and the sweat of the boxing ring into the mythopoetic is no mean feat, and only someone of Eastwood's age, experience and film pedigree could do it. He has become an American auteur of age and regret and one last shot. Like Morgan Freeman's half blind old man who can still knock your teeth out, and F.X. Toole, who died at 72 right before his first novel was published, Eastwood just keeps on heading out into the ring for one more round. That's true blue, baby.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee on Fridays.