THE news that a movie on the life of Marvellous Marvin Hagler is now in the works should come as no surprise, given how epic and dramatic a life it was both in and out of the ring.

Taken in conjunction with the fact that a movie on the life of Britain’s Prince Naseem Hamed — Giant — is currently in production and being shot in Leeds, it confirms that the boxing movie as a genre is alive and kicking.

On a broader level, the relationship between cinema and the sport of boxing is one that stretches back all the way through the history of the silver screen. Boxing, movie producers have long recognised, is a sport littered with men and now increasingly women whose lives are steeped in drama, tragedy and personal struggle, champions both actual and fictional deserving of the accolade of having their stories told.

The result has been a slew of classic and iconic films starring some equally iconic actors.

In the 1950s two such classic boxing movies set the standard. The first was Requiem for a Heavyweight, starring Anthony Quinn as the fictional character of Harlan “Mountain” McLintock, a washed-up fighter who finds redemption away from the ring. The original TV version starred Jack Palance in the title role, while a later British TV adaptation made the name of a young Scottish actor by the name of Sean Connery.

The second classic boxing movie of the ’50s was Somebody Up There Likes Me, the story of middleweight legend Rocky Graziano, played by Paul Newman in 1956.

Moving on, probably the most evocative and realistic boxing movie ever made was Raging Bull, starring Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta. Made in 1980, it regularly ranks in critics’ all time top 10 movie lists.

The Hurricane starring Denzel Washington hit the screens in 1999. It tells the story of the life of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who fought a long and ultimately successful battle against wrongful imprisonment for murder, and is also up there in the classics stakes.

As is Cinderella Man, the 2005 movie inspired by the life of Depression-era fighter Jim Braddock with Russell Crowe in the title role.

No mention of great boxing movies would be complete, of course, without referencing the Rocky franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. It’s a franchise deserving of its very own category, both for good and not so good reasons.

Out of the six made, only the first and last are worthy of being considered classics — or at least in this writer’s opinion. The first instalment of the series, it should be noted, was loosely inspired by Ali’s fight against the hitherto anonymous heavyweight journeyman Chuck Wepner.

The fight took place in 1975 and it was remarkable because of the fact that Wepner, a massive underdog, managed to last the full 15 rounds. Stallone, the story goes, was a starving actor at the time and, having watched the fight, was inspired to write Rocky.

With such an enduring history as a subject for dramatisation, boxing has proved that it lends itself to the mechanics of storytelling. Anyone who took the time to explore the life and background of even an average fighter in any gym anywhere in the world would understand why.

The extreme nature of the sport demands the kind of dedication, training and discipline that most other sports do not.

More importantly, the mental fortitude that is required to climb between the ropes to trade punches with an opponent who has trained just as hard and is every bit as determined to win, this separates boxers from most other athletes. The fear involved, the effort required to control this fear, is so immense that it can only rarely be manufactured.

So, yes, the common currency of the majority of fighters is struggle and conflict, a background of dysfunction and hardship of a type your average social worker is at a loss to comprehend and which, as any student of drama will tell you, is the stuff of movies.

Drilling down deeper, though — placing the dramatic element aside for a moment — we cannot avoid the role of the dominant ideas of the ruling class when it comes to the repeated harvesting of boxing as a major plank of movie-making. Because what is capitalism if not a value system as well as an economic one? And what underpins this capitalist value system if not the apotheosis of the indivdual and the Nietzschean primacy of the will mythos when it comes to the direction of human affairs?

The individual is more important than the collective, we are conditioned to believe, and the struggle to rise from the collective rather than with it is the very ethos of the ideal capitalist man and woman. Prizefighting — professional boxing — captures and embraces this ethos, offering up a metaphor not for life but life lived in a capitalist reality, in which the acme of meaning and purpose is achieving the ability to buy anything you want whenever you want it.

The message thus being promoted with these movies is that the focus should be on changing our lives on an individual basis rather than changing the system on a collective one.

What was it that Cuba’s legendary heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson said again when refusing the offer of $1 million to defect and fight Muhammad Ali in the mid 1970s? Oh yes, that’s it: “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?”

Boxing today needs more Teofilo Stevensons.