Somewhere in the Night (1946) is one of those noirs whose leads are so uncharismatic that the film would just lie flat on the floor if it weren’t for the intriguing assemblage of weird minor players who add a lurid pulp atmosphere.
These stills feature the remarkably menacing Lou Nova, a thespian whose previous career is as obvious as the squashed nose on his face. He doesn’t do a great deal in the film apart from loom, but he looms awfully well. In his 20 or so films, he played “Henchman”, “Fighter” “Second Muscleman” and guys with names such as “Butch”, “Bluey” and “Igor”. I imagine most of the roles involved a fair bit of looming. In Somewhere in the Night, however, he had the chance to loom under the atypical name of “Hubert”, which he must have enjoyed.
Anyway, if the internet has anything to do with posterity, it’s not for his acting but his boxing that he’ll be remembered. Fans of old-time boxing have digitised hundreds of bits of ephemera so that we may never forget that, in February 1944, Lou was reported as turning Ben Moroz into “a bloody mess” and that, in December 1939, Lou was in “one of the most disgraceful fights staged since the days of the barroom brawls”, during which, Tony Galento thumbed Lou’s right eye until it reached a “terrible condition”. Ancient copies of the New York Times tell us that, in January 1941, “the sturdy Californian [that’s Lou] hammered Pat Comiskey almost beyond recognition” and that, in June 1939, Lou left Max Baer with “the left side of his face battered out of shape after ten rounds of the most excruciating fighting he had ever undergone”. Apparently, Baer was “bleeding so severely from a severe laceration of the lower lip he could hardly breathe”.
How severe. Is modern boxing journalism quite so vivid? I doubt I’ll try to find out.
YouTube has a clip of that last fight, which is more revolting than you’d expect anything televised in 1939 to be. Interestingly, Lou looks incredibly like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull. But it might just be the enormous boxing trunks.
Lou quit acting at the age of 55 and seems to have spent the rest of his life having lunch with fellow members of the Cauliflower Alley Club, a group of retired boxers and wrestlers who had gone into the movies. The lunches must have filled up entire restaurants with these grey-haired sides of beef, as just about every boxer from the 30s seems to have ended up in Hollywood. The random sample of guys in the fight clippings above played such characters as “Fingers”, “Truck”, “Tiny”and “Bobo” between 1945 and 1960 -- the golden age of the looming lug.
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