Cinderella Man Analysis

The Great Depression: An Analysis of the Film “ Cinderella Man” The Great Depression was a period of great struggle for many people throughout the entire United States. Many men had trouble simply being able to put bread on the table for their large families. The 1930s was a challenging time for the household man because any kind of work was tough to find. Cinderella Man, a movie that details the life of the professional boxer James J. Braddock, a rich man who turned poor, seems to portray the events and struggles of the Great Depression accurately. Braddock’s character represented the ups and downs he and other people were experiencing in the United States at the time. The movie begins with the Braddock family living a comfortable life; a beautiful, spacious house and a picture-perfect family. However, after the Stock Market crash, the family lost everything and immediately had to downsize to something they could afford. They moved to a below ground level apartment, where they could barely keep the electricity and gas on. With a broken hand and no investments, Braddock could no longer fight in the ring. However, for many people like Braddock at the time of the depression, an injury was not an impediment to not go to work. Braddock was seen spending little time dwelling on the fact he had lost his job and instead covered his broken hand with a cast and made his way to the docks in hopes of being one of the few lucky men to be chosen to work. This scene allows one to see just how desperate men were to find a job. Men were seen fighting and yelling at the top of their lungs to be heard and chosen to support their families. Jobs were hard to get, and food was even harder to afford. Food scarcity was depicted as one of the other problems all families had to deal with during the depression. In the movie, the Braddock family was seen eating a simple breakfast of ham without even having enough to go around the whole table. Additionally, James’s wife makes the little milk leftover from the day before render a little more by adding water to it, something that most Americans nowadays would not drink even if they were paid to do so. These scenarios are good indicators of just how scarce food was during the Great Depression. It depicts the everyday hardships many families had to go through. Parents wouldn’t even eat just to leave the little food they had for their children to consume. James’ youngest son is seen stealing a sausage from the butchery in another part of the movie. This act explains the desperateness of the starving people and the fact that small children, incapable of understanding what stealing was, wanted to help and bring food to the table in whichever way possible. Food scarcity was one of the reasons crimes such as theft increased during the great depression. Many people lost faith during the Great Depression. In almost every scene, there are small clues of how life slowly made many Americans hopeless. An example of this is shown in the way some people lost faith in God. James, at one point, said to his wife, “I’m all prayed out.” Some people left their spouses. Others sent their children off to live with a relative. The priority for everyone was simply to stay alive. Many people relied on welfare; James himself relied on welfare at one point in his life. However, as soon as he had earned enough money, he gave the government back all that he had borrowed. His humility and gratitude shows what kind of a guy he was and why he was so well-liked among the poor class. In conclusion, The Cinderella Man is an accurate film portraying many Americans’ hopelessness and struggle during the great depression. It details the use of many events and items specific to this period. Radio, relief centers, and going to the docks to look for jobs. The Stock Market Crash had an enormous impact on this period, but in the end allowed our country to evolve into what we are today.