Kirk Douglas first appeared last fall in "Letter to Three Wives." In that film he played a pensive English teacher. His second appearance gives him a chance to show off his musculature as Midge Kelly, a lightweight boxer who is nearly normal until he steps into a ring. Douglas is a competent boxer and a fine actor in "Champion."

The producers have shifted the emphasis of Ring Lardner's famous short story so that it is not Midge Kelly, but the "boxing game," that comes out the villain. In the original, Kelly knocks down his crippled brother and his mother, and throws a fight in the first two pages. None of this lovable character delineation appears in the movie; instead Midge becomes a man who just can't lose--an animal who refuses to fall down, either by agreement or because of terrific punishment. He wins his last fight after being beaten silly because he gets sore in the fifteenth round; he dics afterwards of a brain hemorrhage-- ending his career not as a heel, not as a has-been, but as just one thing; the champion, if dead.

The actual fighting scenes are better than anything in recent films. Douglas must have spent a long time learning to hit people and be hit, for he is never, as was Lardner's Midge, "stopped by a terrific slap on the forearm." The women in the movie are less convincing--the spectator is never more moved by them than is the hero, who shuttles from one to the next with singular unconcern. They aren't very important, anyway: once Kelly begins fighting, he is always a fighter and only sporadically a human being.

Male support is consistently top-level. Arthur Kennedy and Paul Stewart, as the crippled brother and manager of the champion, make perfect foils for Douglas. Their humaneness and concern are in sharp contrast with his simple-minded machine destruction; their relative smallness, in spite of their warmth, shows all the more his brutal greatness.

"Champion" loses the acid of Lardner's prose, although length is probably as much at fault as anything. It also indulges in a handful of coincidences and cliches that weaken an otherwise tight structure. Perhaps the most difficult problem facing a critic of this movie is its basic black-and-white. journalistic character: you can't get involved because the hero doesn't draw sympathy. Director Mark Robson has shaded the film impersonally and perfectly. It is a tribute to his direction that the one strong emotion the audience feels is the desire to haul Midge Kelly up off the floor every time he gets knocked down. That is the strength of the film-a strength which overmatches its impersonality.