It is impossible to consider the fight scene as we know it without touching on most of the major cinematic turning points of the past half-century: the increased tolerance for screen violence that followed '60s landmarks like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch; the pervasive influence of martial-arts films, which peaked in the '70s; the late-'80s and '90s ascendance of digital technologies like nonlinear editing systems, which encouraged more copious and more experimental editing; and computer-generated effects, which allowed imagery to be manipulated and fabricated outright.

There is, of course, a rich tradition of movie fights predating all these developments, going back to the broadly physical silent-era antics of Keaton and Chaplin. Golden-age Hollywood had no shortage of fight specialists. John Wayne and Marlon Brando got into lots of memorable scraps. And there were plenty of exemplary craftsmen—like Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller, and Don Siegel—who handled fast-paced set pieces with vigor and economy. William Wyler's epic Western The Big Country (1958) contains an especially vivid old-school tussle with a perspective that could hardly be further from the majority of modern fights. In the half-light of dawn, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston step out into the fields to settle a score. While present-day fights jostle close to the action, the point of this ingenious scene, viewed mostly from afar, is the sheer vastness of the surrounding landscape, which dwarfs the men and reduces their grievances to cosmic insignificance.