Golden Boy is a 1939 American drama romance sports film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou and William Holden.

Joe enters the semi-final match against Chocolate Drop (James “Cannonball” Green) determined to win, but when he knocks out his opponent in the second round, killing him, both his and Lorna's attitudes change.

[9] In 1982, Stanwyck returned the favor during her acceptance speech for an Honorary Oscar at the 1982 Academy Award ceremony, saying of Holden, who had died in an accident a few months earlier: "I loved him very much, and I miss him.

According to Nugent, Golden Boy is at its best when it diverges from “stage bound” patterns and applies cinematic methods to convey “the Odets allegory.” The climatic and tragic boxing match, which occurs off-stage in the play, appears in the film as “a savagely eloquent piece of cinematic social comment” showcasing the social milieu that attend these fights: “T]he mugs, the gamblers, the fashionable set, the race groups, the sadists, the broken-down stumble-bums rolling their heads with the punches...these are the memorable things in the picture, the truly cinematic things.” Though “scarcely first-rate motion picture” Nugent concedes that Golden Boy “is the sort of film we can endorse heartily in spite of its shortcomings.”[14][15] The score by Victor Young was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

[17] Director Mamoulian ignored the larger social issues of “modern capitalist society” and proceeded to reduce the central theme to that of an individual’s struggle to “choose between his spiritual or animalistic impulses.”[18][19] By entering into a Faustian bargain, concert violinist cum professional boxer Josef “Joe” Bonaparte “loses his soul and wreaks destruction on the lives of others in his quest for self-fulfillment.

[23]Spergal concludes that Golden Boy is an expression of Mamoulian’s misanthropic outlook that informs his themes: A cinematic metaphor that defines Hollywood “as a place where artistic sensitivity and appreciation are wasted on people who crave only bread and circuses…”[24][25]