Brady estimated the film's net profit at $750,000. Film scholar
Charles Musser claims that the film made a more modest $100,000. She argues a connection between the female reception of this film and the large female audience for
Rudolph Valentino two decades later, who was typically shown stripped to the waist and beaten in his films.
Some negative perceptions Streible calls this into debate, and suggests that the size of the female audience is predominantly self-generated
boilerplate. The film had been strongly opposed by the
Women's Christian Temperance Union, which tried to get legislation passed to prevent the film's transmission by mail. Their protests of fight films were second only to suffrage on their national agenda. Rector claimed that the film had "every defect known to photography" in the
San Francisco Examiner in attempt to quell the protests against a film falsely deemed unusable.
Alice Rix, known for a particular brand of "
sob sister" journalism (along with
Nellie Bly and
Dorothy Dix), claimed that when she viewed the film at the
Olympia Theatre, she counted only sixty women in an audience of a thousand, and found the
dress circle empty. She observed that they were mostly "dressed down," and that all were escorted by men and appeared uninterestedly watching a bloodless spectacle. She proceeded to describe the entire medium of motion pictures as "awful." By 1897, women were only beginning to see theater as a legitimate social space. Musser notes that
The Boston Herald went so far as to call the film the "proper" thing for ladies to see. Streible, citing the research of
Antonia Lant, contrasts paintings of women in theater audiences by
Mary Cassatt,
Claude Monet, and
Berthe Morisot with this drawing by making it appear that the fact that women were allowed to look was more important than that the act of looking being allowed to them. That the younger woman is leaning indicates that what she is looking at is, in fact, what is important to her rather than the simple privilege of looking.
Possible homoerotic interpretation Streible also touches on potential
homoerotic interest in the film, citing work on
strongman photos by
Thomas Waugh. He concludes that prizefighting, as opposed to
physical culture, was not associated with aesthetics or male beauty, Corbett excepted. The aesthetics of the boxing scene were better known for broken jaws and
cauliflower ears, such that one's
sexual orientation probably had little bearing on one's appreciation of the film, and of a sport surrounded by
homophobic press.
Irish interest Denis Condon discusses how class, rather than gender, affected audience response to the film in Dublin. The significance of the film's reception in Ireland derives from the fact that Corbett was Irish by birth and often contrasted to the English-born Fitzsimmons, who himself was the son of an Irish blacksmith, a fact that no newspaper noted at the time. He notes a surprising absence, in response to the film, of ethnic partisanship, in spite of the
St. Patrick's Day day of the fight, the Irish-English tension of 1898, and heavy antagonism of the Irish-American Corbett and the English Fitzsimmons, who is elsewhere described as Anglo-Australian. Audiences put aside political fervors and suspended their knowledge, pretending that they were watching a live performance. Irish women did not attend, possibly because
The Lyric Hall, where the film was shown, often featured live boxing and sexually risqué material, and thus considered an inappropriate place for a respectable woman, while another theatre nearby was regarded as more family-friendly. ==Legacy==