Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short-subject documentary film financed and directed by Stanley Kubrick, who based this black-and-white motion picture on a photo feature he shot two years earlier for Look magazine.

"He thought the very fact that my doing the music" for the film "got me into the profession was enough payment", Fried told The Guardian in 2018, although he conceded in the same newspaper interview that Kubrick's point was accurate.

[9] Since the original planned buyer of the documentary went out of business, Kubrick was able to sell Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for $4,000, resulting in only a net profit of $100 for him after paying the film's $3,900 in production costs.

[10] However, the physicist and author Jeremy Bernstein, who in November 1965 conducted a 76-minute interview with Kubrick for The New Yorker, documented that the project was actually not a break-even endeavor, that it instead lost $100.

[11][12] Day of the Fight was released as part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series and premiered on 26 April 1951 at New York's Paramount Theater, on the same program as the film My Forbidden Past.