Fair Warning: Leave your handkerchiefs home at your peril! King Vidor looked down on The Champ as one of the dues-paying "conventional films" sandwiched between his more experimental efforts, but allowed as how "it turned out well." His denigration fails to credit the early-sound camera fluidity, the winning sentiment and sly wit. "Foolproof" was Vidor's shrewd characterization of Frances Marion's story of a hard-drinking has-been boxer bolstered in his comeback attempts by his endlessly faithful and resourceful son. (The picture won Marion her second Oscar.) Heavyweight Wallace Beery and half-pint Jackie Cooper play perfectly off each other, slipping into private pig latin in one of several improvised sequences. The climax is Vidor's great moment of stops-pulled melodrama. The Champ remains the definitive entry in that under-recognized genre, the male weepie.-Scott Simmon