Boxing features in more Hollywood movies than any other sport - and this was certainly true in the era of classic Film Noir. Where does this fascination come from - and how have Noir boxing movies rung the changes over the decades?

Sergio is joined by Steve Hunt, host of the superb Boxing Movie Podcast and author of the new book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History. Together they look at five of Steve's favourite noir boxing films.

KID GALAHAD (Curtiz, 1937)

THE SET-UP (Wise, 1949)

CHAMPION (Robson, 1949)

KILLER'S KISS (Kubrick, 1955)

THE HARDER THEY FALL (Robson, 1956)

To listen to Steve podcast, please visit: https://boxingmoviepodcast.alitu.com/

You can find his homepage at this link: https://www.stevehuntboxing.com/

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-boxing-movie-podcast/id1742325024

Steve's book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History, is now available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon in the UK (https://shorturl.at/h02Bc) and from McFarland (https://shorturl.at/8i5ll) in the US.

Will the real "Mr Arkadin" please stand up?

For the podcast's first foray into audio noir, we tip our hat to Orson Welles - whose birthday it was this past week - and look at the strange case of his noir maudit, MR ARKADIN. Also released as CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, we will consider the many iterations of the film (following in the path of Jonathan Rosenbaum's seminal essay, The Seven Arkadins, first published in Film Comment magazine in 1992). Incredibly, the various versions - including radio dramas and novelisations as well as variant edits of the film, has now risen to a total of 10 separate Arkadins!

We will also present the full audio drama from which the film was primarily derived, Man of Mystery, one of 8 (or 9) episodes that Welles was known to have written for his The Lives of Harry Lime radio series (first heard round the world from 1951 to 1952).

The entire Harry Lime series of 52 half hour episodes is available for download from the Internet Archive at this link: https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime

To read Rosenbaum's original essay, please visit his homepage at this link: jonathanrosenbaum.net/

David Fincher's seminal neo-noir thriller SEVEN is now thirty years old. A surprise commercial success and critical hit, this dark, powerful, densely-layered and genuinely scary and challenging thriller proved to be a hugely influential Neo-noir.

And then, there was that box ...

To celebrate, Sergio is joined by Dr Laura Mee, Principal Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire. She primarily researches horror cinema and adaptation and is the author of two books: Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and a book on THE SHINING in the Devil's Advocates series (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Dr Mee has written on films including AMERICAN PSYCHO, ROOM 237, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and The Conjuring series.

She is the co-founder and co-convener of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies' Horror Studies group, a UK network of horror scholars who host regular online events on a wide range of horror topics - you can find more information at baftsshorror.weebly.com. With colleagues Shellie McMurdo and Kate Egan, she is the co-editor of the Hidden Horror Histories book series from Liverpool University Press. (https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2023/10/27/hidden-horror-histories-call-for-proposals/)

Dr Laura Mee research profile: https://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/en/persons/laura-mee