The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight is an 1897 documentary film directed by Enoch J. Rector depicting the 1897 boxing match between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada on St. Patrick's Day.

"[2] As noted by Seth Abraham, the president of Time Warner Sports, it was the first motion picture to ever depict the championship prizefight.

[1]: 22 The one-minute rests between each round were captured on film and when it was reissued it included a ten-minute epilogue of the empty ring at the end of the fight, into which members of the audience eventually stormed.

Corbett, along with his fans, was eager to win back the title he had vacated to Peter Maher, who then lost it to Fitzsimmons in Mexico.

[11]: 285  Producer William Aloysius Brady got an agreement from Rector that 25% of the proceeds of the film would go to him and Corbett; Fitzsimmons and his manager, Martin Julian, would receive $13,000.

"[16] The film premiered on May 22 at the New York Academy of Music and played into June, where it was presented with live running commentary.

[9]: 199 Local debuts: When the film was shown in Coney Island, it was advertised under the title Corbett's Last Fight.

[9] As Miriam Hansen put it, "it afforded women the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action.

Brady had honed Corbett's image as an educated gentleman in order to improve his appeal to bourgeois audiences.

[26][10]: 140  Streible notes that this reputation as a matinee idol and "ladies' man image," in addition to the bare-gluteus trunks, about which he could find no contemporary commentary, may have drawn women audiences to the film.

[27] 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.

[1]: 39 Streible also touches on potential homoerotic interest in the film, citing work on strongman photos by Thomas Waugh.

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.

[1]: 41 Musser, in his discussion of subsequent feature-length fight films, that subsequent to The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight, no boxing film drew comparable audience numbers and that women stopped attending in significant numbers.,[9]: 208  reinforcing Streible's theories of hype and female interest in Corbett the matinee idol.

[10]: 144  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.

[10]: 141 Quick to compete, Siegmund Lubin created a film the same year known as Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons Fight, staged on a rooftop with two freight handlers from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

[29] The August–September issue of Phonoscope noted that the manager of the opera house turned over his $253 profits to a state senator who, after time to deliberate, eventually refunded the patrons' money.

Prices for reserved seats ranged from twenty-five cents up to one dollar, assuring middle and upper class attendance.

[1]: 26 Rector intended to go into long form dramatic films, but was dismissed as a crank, although he continued to be involved in the technical side of motion picture production.