Best movies like Joe Palooka in the Counterpunch

A perpetual dreamer talks his wife into moving with him from their home in Australia to South Africa, where he hopes to discover gold and finally become wealthy.

A sportswriter forms a ring triangle with a fight manager's daughter and her Mexican-American boxer.

Boxer Tommy Nelson is accused of killing his manager. While detectives Bud and Lou investigate they come across an invisibility formula with which Tommy injects himself rather than face the police. This sparks an idea for trapping gangster Morgan by having Lou fight champ Rocky Hanlon, with Tommy's invisible help.

The story concerns two agents, one Mexican (PJF) and one American, who are tasked to stop the smuggling of Mexican migrant workers across the border to California. The two agents go undercover, one as a poor migrant.

A boxer (William Bishop) jailed for murder proves his girlfriend's (Ann Richards) wealthy father and a ward boss framed him.

The tale of the cigarette-maker Carmen and the Spanish cavalry soldier Don Jose is translated into a modern-day story of a parachute factory worker and a stalwart GI named Joe who is about to go to flying school. Conflict arises when a prize-ring champ captures the heart of Carmen after she has seduced Joe and caused him to go AWOL.

A broken-down alcoholic prizefighter struggles to keep custody of his adoring son.

Federal Service Agent Justin Vanier has been assigned to infiltrate the mysterious Virtual Arts Academy in search of Eric, a fellow agent. In this high-tech facility, the maniacal leader Warbeck is training assassins to become even more efficient killing machines using virtual reality. Penetrating the organization as a new recruit, Justin finds Eric, and together with the idealistic Vicki must bring down Warbeck before he succeeds with his deadly plans

A young man falls in love with a beautiful blonde. When he sees her being forced onto a luxury liner, he decides to follow and rescue her. However, he discovers that she is an English heiress who ran away from home and is now being returned to England. He also discovers that his boss is on the ship. To avoid discovery, he disguises himself as the gangster accomplice of a minister, who is actually a gangster on the run from the law.

Joe Palooka is a naive young man whose father Pete was a champion boxer, but his lifestyle caused Joe's mother Mayme to leave him and to take young Joe to the country to raise him.

After losing heavyweight contender Al Costa to mob boss Florini fight promoter Knobby Walsh recruits small town boy Joe Palooka to take his place. First in the series.

Joe Palooka encounters gangsters and tries to alert the law.

Joe is scheduled for the big fight as usual. This one has more fight sequences than plot.

In the second film of Monogram's Joe Palooka series, Joe is 'used', by two state senators scheming to obtain oil-rich lands, in a publicity campaign to get the land transferred to the state, supposedly for a park. When Joe learns that he has been used as a dupe he becomes disillusioned and leaves the prize=fighting profession. But, his manager, sparring partners, and fiancée manage to expose the land-grab scheme, clear Joe's name and discredit the crooked politicians.

The third of the Monogram series based on Ham Fisher's "Joe Palooka" comic strip, opens with Knobby Walsh, the manager of Joe Palooka trying to talk his way out of a traffic citation, and the story leading to that point is told in flashback as narrated by Walsh. Heavyweight champion Joe, after knocking out an opponent who later died in his dressing room, feels responsible and threatens to give up boxing. But the dead fighter's fiance thinks he died as the result of a drug that was given to him by a gang of gamblers, who made a rich haul betting on Palooka. Joe, Knobby and the police unite to run down the gamblers, but not before Joe also is nearly murdered by the same means...a poisoned mouthpiece. Elyse Knox is along as Joe's sweetheart Anne Howe, although Anne and Joe had long been married in the comic strip.

Joe Palooka goes blind during a fight. An operation restores his vision, but he's told not to fight for a year. His trainer Knobby has picked up another fighter, but gangsters are pressing him to fix fights. Joe decides to risk his eyesight to save Knobby's honor.

Newlyweds Joe and Anne Palooka are delayed in their honeymoon plans by the helpful Humphrey Pennyworth and by considerably-less-helpful manager, Knobby Walsh.

Joe Palooka and two friends are taking hostage by three criminals.

A crooked boxing promoter tries to shake down Joe's manager by setting up a rigged fight in Humphrey Pennyworth's hometown.

Gangsters frame Joe on a drunk charge and a murder rap so they can put their own fighter into a big event. Joe investigates in an attempt to prove his innocence.

Jobless sportswriter Eddie Willis is hired by corrupt fight promoter Nick Benko to promote his current protégé, an unknown Argentinian boxer named Toro Moreno. Although Moreno is a hulking giant, his chances for success are hampered by a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw. Exploiting Willis' reputation for integrity and standing in the boxing community, Benko arranges a series of fixed fights that propel the unsophisticated Moreno to #1 contender for the championship. The reigning champ, the sadistic Buddy Brannen, harbors resentment at the publicity Toro has been receiving and vows to viciously punish him in the ring. Eddie must now decide whether or not to tell the naive Toro the truth.

A female detective investigates the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman.

Arthur Wells, an impoverished poet, impersonates a big-game hunter in an attempt to locate the missing link. However, the poet has an aversion to animals...tame or wild.

A federal agent goes after a hijacking ring that uses beautiful women to help it hijack the rigs of unsuspecting truckers.

Insurance agent Jesse Arno is posing as a sailor while on the trail of a gang of waterfront thieves, supposedly headed by Tip Banning. Arno is aware that a gang member has been murdered by Rhino, Banning's simple-minded right-hand man, but says nothing when he is questioned by the police, who are unaware of his real profession. Banning, knowing that Jesse knew who the killer was, admits him into the gang.

A ring veteran turns a Texas tenderfoot into a winning fighter.

An up-and-coming heavyweight fighter, George Wilson, arrives in Vulcan City, a small mid-western town over-run by racketeers, to fight a heavily-favored Frankie Sebastian. George arrives but his manager Dolan is nowhere to be found. But Ma and Pa Karlsen, owners of Karlsen's Kozy Kottages motel and restaurant take him under their wing. He meets Miss Gormley who is also there to meet the no-show manager who is blackmailing her brother. Dolan still hasn't arrived by the date of the fight but, to the surprise of sports-promoters Tom Healy and Dominic Guido, George shows up and wins the fight. This wins him the friendship of trainer Al Muntz and the enmity of Willie Foltis, a punchy ex-fighter and a Healy henchman. This leads George to a fight with "Soldier" Freeman, whose manager Scotty Cameron has made arrangements for the favored-Freeman to take a dive, so he and Healy and Guido can clean up betting on the underdog. But Honest George has other plans.

A pre-World War II saber-rattler that finds a munitions inventor kidnapped, a federal agent killed and a beautiful refugee mysteriously missing as Washington's deadly game of espionage and intrigue thunders on...as the FBI hunts the nation's invisble foes! They may have been invisible but their accents and billing names von Morhart, William Vaughn (William von Brincken already hiding under another name before hostilities were formally declared), Frederick Gierman and Walter Bonn---provide clues aplenty as to their country of origin and paymaster.

A former prizefighter tries to help his son pay off his gambling debts.

Loud-mouth hamburger flipper, Cooky, thinks he can box. His big chance comes when everyone else quits the gym when it is inherited by a dame.

Joan Daley, a New York booking/press agent, attempts to recruit two local stand-ins, Jinx Terry and Lois Morgan, when the Cuban sister-act, Marianela and Rosita she as booked into the nightclub for which she works fails to materialize. Complications arrive when the real Cuban sisters show up.

Joe Riley is a boxing referee whose life-code is the same as the sporting rules of the prizefight ring. Two Golden Glove (a tournament for amateur prizefighters) contestants Nick Martel, a tough, pugnacious kid from Chicago who has had to fight for everything he has in life, and Bob Gilmore, from the other side of life's tracks, are also competing for the affections of Riley's daughter, Patty.

G-Man Ted Riley is ordered to investigate happenings at Diamond Island, where a bogus Major Gray is reported engaged in manufacturing a new brand of secret gas for his own purposes. Riley blows up his motor boat just off the island and is picked up by Gray's men. On the island he discovers chemist Professor Baker (John Cowell) and his daughter, Anne, are held captive by Major Gray.

Mexican club singer Lita Valdez is amazed to find that her younger brother Alberto is a talented boxer and is even more thrilled by his consistent success in the ring. Till he is forced to fight Jerry O'Leary, the man she loves. Caught between her devotion to both men, Lita tries her best to have the match canceled, but there is much more to the boxing racket than she had ever imagined...

The lone surviving thief of a violent armored car robbery is sprung from a high security facility and administered an experimental drug.

An ex-con man and his five trained Dobermans help a Treasury Dept. agent stop a racketeer and his gang.

Big Town Girls have dating service jobs long enough to learn that a society matron needs a boxer to perform at a party. They talk a waiter into playing the part and a series of accidents and tricks sends him on a boxing career.

A government agent goes undercover in order to apprehend a saboteur who caused a plane crash.

A federal agent sets out to track down his partner's killers.

Story of how a group of incorruptible federal lawmen helped put 1920s' Chicago gangster Al Capone in prison.

An amateur boxer's girlfriend inspires him to face a ring pro entered by a gangster.

For the first time, Brandon Beckett (Collins), Richard Miller (Zane) and Sgt. Thomas Beckett (Berenger) join forces in Colombia to take down a brutal drug cartel. When a deadly sniper with advanced, never-before-seen weaponry targets local Special Agent Kate Estrada (Danay Garcia), our elite team is in for the ultimate battle in this explosive, game-changing action thriller.

A young boxer finds his life turned upside down when he meets with sudden success in the ring.

Americans Tommy Baldwin and Joe Dugan are hired to transport a fabulous diamond from Shanghai to San Francisco. They will be paid handsomely on success or killed on failure. The diamond is stolen as they take possession of it.

The true story of underdog boxer, Chuck Wepner, who gets a shot to fight the champ, Muhammed Ali.

Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson is a 1993 film made by acclaimed American documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. Though Tyson was in jail serving a sentence for rape, Kopple used existing interviews with the boxer, as well as her own extensive interviews with those closest to Tyson, to explore the man's history. The film traces Tyson's story from his troubled and tumultuous upbringing, through his rapid ascendancy in the ranks of the boxing world and his subsequent struggle with the trappings of fame. Fallen Champ earned Barbara Kopple a Directors Guild of America award as Best Documentary Director of 1993.

A federal agent's life is in danger when he's exposed while investigating a parole scheme.

Johnny Brownell, former Confederate officer turned Federal agent, is sent to Texas during the reconstruction years to obtain evidence against a gang of raiders who have been making life difficult for the local carpet-baggers. He saves the life of Shorty Kendall, an unreconstructed rebel about to be hanged, and this wins him the gratitude of Belle Chambers, a widow whose husband was killed in the Civil War who hates all Yankees with a fever.

El Puma, a Mexican desert guide, escorts an archaeological expedition headed by Professor Lucius Lloyd through the Indian badlands of Mexico. Marian, the professor's niece accompanies the party as only she can translate the Aztec writings in the diary of her father, murdered on a similar expedition six years previous. The professor is murdered by a knife, and the weapon is recognized as the property of El Puma. Magpie, a Federal Investigator, knows that El Puma is really "Lightnin' Bill' Carson, a former federal agent who has been missing since Marian's father was slain. The reluctant Magpie believes that his old pal is guilty. Carson sets out to prove otherwise.

Red Ryder KO's a fight racket with sidekick Little Beaver (Little Brown Jug) and a new friend.