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In the film version of Rod Serling's successful teleplay, Anthony Quinn as the beaten-up boxer Mountain Rivera is at his best since La Strada in a performance of feral intensity and stumblebum poetry, set to a jazz score. Requiem is a portrait of a cruel dark world where the heart is held ransom to survival, but Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney are fabulously human as they verbally tussle over their adopted monster Mountain. The most startling character has to be the gambling boss Ma, master, or mistress, of frightening innuendo and the sure promise of punishment, in voice and demeanor a cross between Rod Steiger and Truman Capote and we hope not your mom. With some of the most beautiful black-and-white of its era, Requiem makes film noir existentialism look like a welterweight genre. And with cameos by Cassius Clay in his prime and Jack Dempsey in seedy retirement, it announces itself as a quintessential boxing/anti-boxing film, but, again, it is so much more. This is the sixties, see, and things are gonna matter. The fifties are over and you're lucky to walk away with your brains. (JB)