American popular culture witnessed a change in the Hollywood boxing fiction films during the late 1930s. These films formed a meaningful trend by absorbing conventions from the gangster film in response to reinforced censorship codes and by riding the wave of the Joe Louis phenomenon absorbing the Popular Front political values associated with the heavyweight boxing champion. Beginning with Kid Galahad in 1937, these films reshaped their conventions into an ensemble of traits that marked the boxing film genre for the next 50 years. These films appropriated and refashioned a critique of the ethos of opportunity and the ambitions of the ethnic outsider from the gangster film. In addition, they reinforced the thematic opposition between body and soul, the material and the spiritual, central to the genre by appropriating the art motif as a manifestation of spirit.
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