Knockout Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story
The story of the hugely successful boxing promoter Frank Maloney who became Kellie Maloney is a remarkable one, if not a wholly convincing one.
Image courtesy of Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment
The chief value of this film lies in it being able to tell its story in a way that makes it feel up-close and personal. Despite Kellie Maloney having become a presence on television both as an interviewee and by appearing in Celebrity Big Brother in 2014, not everyone will approach this film aware that Kellie had been born a man in 1953. Her Irish parents had moved to London and she had not only grown up there as Frank but in that identity went on to achieve fame. Frank had wanted to be a boxer but his build was not suited to that and subsequently he became a promoter who had a notable success particularly when he acted as the manager of Lennox Lewis who would become a world heavyweight champion. He had a daughter named Emma from his first marriage which ended in divorce, but he subsequently had two further daughters, Sophie and Libby, by his second wife, Tracey. Nevertheless Kellie, thinking back to when she was Frank, tells us here that for as far back as she can remember she had dreamt of being a woman.
Extreme devotion to his work may have helped Frank to suppress this feeling and when he did eventually turn to a computer to learn about trans people, he told himself that he was just looking in order to check that he was not in fact transgender. His first open acknowledgment that he was appears to have occurred when he found himself in Bangkok and opened up on the subject to a sympathetic ladyboy. It was much later after surviving a heart attack and visiting a therapist named Jan Upfold regarding his need for anger management that he accepted that a key source of the strain in his life and marriage came from denying his deep sense that he should have been born a woman. Revealing that to Tracey would in time lead to the end of his second marriage partly influenced by his insistence that not only his mother and Emma should be told of his situation but also his two younger daughters. All four of them contribute to the film by expressing their particular viewpoints.
This documentary looks at Kellie's life both on the personal level and with regard to the career in boxing. On the latter subject we learn of his eventual resignation from being Lewis's manager, of his discovery of a new fighter, Darren Sutherland, who tragically committed suicide and of a later return to that calling now as Kellie including his work with the boxer Cathy McAleer. But not surprisingly the strongest focus in the film’s second half is on the subject of the gender reassignment and in particular the final operation following an earlier facial one. Here Kellie Moloney is bravely honest owning up to a traumatic reaction to the key surgery which led to a mental health struggle, albeit one that she got through. Earlier, having been threatened by the press eager to make headlines about her situation, Kellie, as she was by then calling herself, had got in first by giving her story to the Sunday Mirror (this was in 2014) and telling her story on various television programmes. The publicity that this entailed may have added to the strain felt by the family but Kellie firmly believed that going public to this extent was helpful to others in her situation, one which led her to describe her final operation as something born of necessity so that bravery did not come into it.
Like many documentaries, this one lingers a little too much in its later stages although a filmed conversation after the end credits deserves to be seen. A more serious misjudgment, however, lies in the introduction of re-enacted scenes as acknowledged by the cast list in the end credits. Maloney’s boxing career means that much authentic archive footage is available and duly appears here. Yet it is sometimes uncertain just how wide-ranging the re-enactments are, a fact illustrated, for example, by the credit for Chad Verdi Jr as Darren Sutherland. Furthermore, there are numerous cases of brief illustrative shots being inserted (one of the most overt ones comes when Frank describes an action he took as a young man working as a chef in response to a sexual assault: to actually see the knife being used in defence distracts due to the obvious artifice of this image). Doctoring up documentaries in this way only leads to questions as to whether or not the films in question are as reliable as they should be (here a less than wholly reassuring credit states that the film is "based on” the life of Kellie Maloney).
But, if these issues make the film imperfect, there is no doubt that Kellie Maloney’s participation in it is itself a further example of her belief that telling her story is beneficial, not only to others in her situation but by way of providing an opportunity for a general audience to recognise her story as a human one with which they can empathise. To engage in that way is to challenge transphobia and, regardless of any weaknesses in the film, one is left admiring Kellie Maloney for continuing to speak out, just as one also warms to the contribution here from the Broadway star Alexandra Billings, another trans woman who faces life positively.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Kellie Maloney, Tracey Maloney, Emma Maloney Young, Sophie Maloney, Libby Maloney, Joe Dunbar, Alexandra Billings, Jan Upfold, Harold Knight, Cathy McAleer, Eugene Maloney and a reenactment cast including Chelsea Brickham, Amy Wade, Sissy O’Hara, Fred Sullivan and Chad Verdi Jr.
Dir Rick Lazes, Tom DeNucci and Seth Koch, Pro Chad A. Verdi, Rick Lazes, Nick Koskoff, Seth Koch, Chad Verdi Jr and Paul Luba, Screenplay Tom DeNucci and Seth Koch, Ph Branden Maxham, Pro Des Alison Melillo, Ed Robbie Savage Jr, Music David Bateman, Costumes Maura McCarthy.
Verdi Productions/Art Factory Films-Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment.
90 mins. UK. 2024. UK Internet Rel: 5 August 2024. Available on Icon Film Channel and in cinemas from 9 September 2024. Cert. 15.
