Monkey on My Back

Monkey on My Back (1957)

SHOCK by SHOCK...It Jabs Like a Hopped-Up Needle!

The painfully true story of welterweight boxing champion Barney Ross is detailed in Monkey on My Back. Cameron Mitchell stars as Ross, whose meteoric ring career is interrupted when he joins the Marines at the outset of WWII. A highly decorated hero, Ross contracts malaria oversees and is given morphine to assuage the pain. By the time he returns to the states, Ross is a confirmed drug addict. Before he can rise to the top again, he must hit rock bottom and his descent into the hell of narcotics dependency is graphically illustrated (so much so that the film was almost denied a Production Code seal). Though a cured Barney Ross served as technical advisor for Monkey on My Back, he ended up suing the producers for defamation of character -- and lost.

Date of release
1957-05-29
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Drama
Director
André de Toth

Casting

Interesting facts

Monkey on My Back is a 1957 American biographical film directed by Andre de Toth. It stars Cameron Mitchell as Barney Ross, a real-life world champion boxer and World War II hero. Though heavily fictionalized, the film deals with Ross's addiction to heroin.

Production

Film rights to Barney Ross's story were bought in July 1955 by Imperial Pictures, a company owned by Edward Small. At the time it was titled God Was in My Corner.

The Motion Picture Association of America demanded the removal of a scene in which Barney inserts a hypodermic needle into his arm. Producer Edward Small appealed the directive and then released the film without the Production Code seal of approval, claiming that he had not heard a response to his appeal for two weeks.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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