SOURCE: Reviews of Day of the Fight and Flying Padre, in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 47, No. 563, December, 1980, pp. 248-49.

In the following reviews, Combs offers positive assessments of Day of the Fight and Flying Padre.

A commentator relates some facts and figures about the sport of boxing—nine million dollars are spent annually by fight fans in the U.S.; of the 6,000 professional boxers, only 600 make a living at it and only 60 a good living—and comments on the spectacle (“the primitive, vicarious, visceral thrill of seeing one animal overcome another”). One boxer, New York middleweight Walter Cartier, is then followed through a day of preparations for a fight. He wakes at 6.00 a.m. in the three-room apartment where he lives with an aunt; goes to communion with his identical twin Vincent (a lawyer who acts as his manager and spends the last days before a fight constantly...