The Crowd Roars (1938)

From the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, Tommy "Killer" McCoy is an up and coming light heavyweight boxer, which belies his path as a child in possibly becoming a singer as a church choirboy, albeit one who always had a natural talent for fighting. He was pushed into boxing as a child by his selfish father, Brian McCoy, as a way to earn money solely to support Brian's drinking and gambling habits at the expense of Tommy's long suffering mother, Laura McCoy. As such, Tommy has a love/hate relationship with his father, who still hangs onto his son as his meal ticket. Tommy is known as a left handed boxer solely due to injuring his right hand during his first bout of some renown, while in reality he has a punishing right punch. It is this dichotomy that Tommy enters into a secret partnership of circumstance with racketeer Jim Cain, where Tommy, always the underdog in being half a boxer with only a left hand, will box largely with his left and win his bouts with a lucky right. Both Tommy and Cain plan to use this scheme to win big and be able to get out of their respective rackets, Tommy who knows nothing else but boxing. Complications ensue when Tommy meets and mutually falls in love with Sheila Carson, who can see Tommy's humanity underneath the boxing surface. Sheila is Cain's daughter who knows nothing about her father's racketeering or his association with Tommy, while Cain wants to protect that secret and break up any burgeoning relationship between his daughter and his boxer, who he does not believe is good enough for his daughter.