The mid-forties saw a trend toward urban dramas, the most realistic among them depicting the social conditions of the slums. In Champion Without a Crown, for the first time one heard the language of the streets on the screen. Champion could have come out of Warner Brothers in the thirties, the era of Mervyn LeRoy and Raoul Walsh; or perhaps this is Mexico's Rocco and His Brothers, as it depicts the rise and fall of a boxer who emerges from the slums. His mother and sweetheart watch as success, and a short-lived affair with a woman of the upper classes, only serve to underline his class affiliation. Galindo's progressive critique, it has been noted, concerns itself realistically with the dignity (as opposed to the nobility) of the poor, and more broadly with the "Mexican inferiority complex" (significantly, in this film Kid Terranova is cowed by a Mexican-American boxer who throws English at him like punches).