AMERICA AT LARGE: "In the case of Primo Carnera, as we would learn in time, the fix was always in, right up to the championship of the world win from Jack Sharkey. But when the mob who owned him had made their point, the handcuffs were removed from his opponents, and he was defenceless, thrown to lions like Max Baer and Joe Louis." - Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures

THAT THE invitation to last month's world premiere at the Madison Square Garden Theatre promised a reappraisal of Primo Carnera was intriguing enough to drag us there. Who might have supposed there was another side to Carnera? The simple answer is there probably wasn't, but, determined not to let the facts get in the way of what he perceived to be a good story, the Italian director Renzo Martinelli plunged ahead with his tale of what was described in a press release as "the true meaning and greatness of the humble giant".

Martinelli's "Carnera" film is subtitled The Walking Mountain, which is, one supposes, what happens when somebody translates "Ambling Alp" - Primo's nom de guerre - into Italian and then back into English.

Schulberg, who recently celebrated his 94th birthday, got his first look at Carnera at the first of his back-to-back fights against Young Stribling at the Royal Albert Hall in 1929.

Some years later he incorporated Carnera's ring career in his novel The Harder They Fall, which in 1956 would become Humphrey Bogart's final film. Another Hollywood film loosely based on Carnera, Requiem for a Heavyweight, appeared in 1962.

Since The Harder They Fall and Requiem for a Heavyweight are usually included on any list of the best boxing movies ever made, it is probably only appropriate Carnera should also be the subject of what might be the worst. Although Harder and Requiem were ostensibly fictive treatments, they are from an historical standpoint more accurate in their portrayal of Carnera than is Martinelli, who represents Walking Mountain as biography.

When The Harder They Fall hit the screen in 1956, Carnera, apparently seeking a quick buck, attempted to sue Columbia Pictures (he lost), but in an interview after Schulberg's novel initially appeared in 1947, Primo told the American sportswriter Jack Sher, "That book, yes, I've read it. It is all true. But I wish he had come to me. I would tell him so much more."

If Martinelli hoped to alter the prevailing view with his $7.6 million film, he's apparently going to have to rely on DVD sales to achieve that end. Three weeks after the New York premiere, Carnera isn't playing in a single theatre in America. It opened for theatrical release in Italy last week and, according to the magazine Variety, took in €139,000 at 244 locations - an average of €569 per cinema.

Part of the problem with Carnera: The Walking Mountain is that it was cast with (mostly) Italian actors whose voices were redubbed in American-accented English. The result is Andrea Iaia, the 6ft 9in behemoth who portrays an orthodontically improved version of Carnera, makes the title character sound like he could be from Indiana, while an American, F Murray Abraham (as Leon See) speaks in a vaguely Gallic tongue.

(If Martinelli takes some serious liberties in his depiction of Carnera, he is pretty much on the money with See, who reportedly had sold more than 100 per cent of Carnera, mostly to the mob, before he shipped him off to America, where he would eventually become the most undeserving heavyweight champion in boxing history.) The generally accepted view is that Carnera was either a willing stooge of the mob or a naïve victim of boxing's netherworld. Martinelli's attempt to reconstruct him as a man who (according to the film's website) "had principles and values that were never compromised" is entirely unpersuasive, primarily because it is based on one lie after another.

In Carnera's pro debut against Leon Sabilo in Paris, Sabilo is introduced as "the champion". Sabilo had in fact had nine professional fights, and had lost eight of them.

The Young Stribling fights that served as Schulberg's introduction to Carnera are distilled into one, which Primo wins. The two men actually exchanged disqualifications in London and Paris a month later. The record-keeping website BoxRec.com includes the same notation after each of them: "This bout was probably fixed."

After relocating to America, Carnera was dispatched on a barnstorming tour where he knocked out a succession of obliging victims in the absence of scrutiny from New York's more knowledgeable fight writers. In the first nine months of 1930 he won 23 consecutive fights in backwater arenas all over the country.

(In Los Angeles he was asked what he thought of Hollywood. "I knock him out in the second round," replied Primo.)

Owney Madden, the Irish-American gangster who controlled Carnera's career, doesn't even appear in the film - and his name is mentioned only once.

In Martinelli's version of history, Carnera apparently never loses a fight prior to winning the heavyweight title from Jack Sharkey in 1933. In actuality, he had lost six times by the time he fought Sharkey, and the legitimacy of that title fight, widely assumed to have been prearranged, is not called into question.

And, following what appears to be a five-minute renewal of a childhood flirtation, the woman who would become Mrs Carnera, Giuseppina Kovavic, materialises in Long Island City for the Sharkey fight, whereupon the victorious Primo, still battered, cut, and bleeding, proposes as he stands in the midst of the deliriously cheering ringside audience.

In the movie, they marry before Carnera's first defence, against Max Baer. In actuality, Carnera made two intervening defences - and he and Giuseppina didn't marry until 1939.

The 1934 Baer fight may have been the first legitimate one of Carnera's unfortunate career. Baer (portrayed by the Italian Antonio Cupo in a performance that owes a debt to Jack Nicholson as The Joker in Batman I) knocked down Carnera a dozen times in 11 rounds before it was stopped, but in the film Primo is a victim not of his own ineptitude but bad luck in the form of a broken ankle.

In Carnera Primo and Guiseppina, dead broke, sail back to Italy in steerage (all that's missing is the theme from Titanic) and he never fights again. In fact, Carnera, who had yet to marry, was dispatched to South America to rehabilitate himself with a few wins before returning to New York to fight Louis, who stopped him in the sixth.

And while you wouldn't know this from watching The Walking Mountain, Carnera fought beyond his 40th birthday, and retired in 1946 after his third consecutive loss to one Luigi Musina. He and Guiseppina then returned to America, where he took up a more honest line of work - professional wrestling.