The Set-Up ***** (1949, Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter, Wallace Ford) – Classic Movie Review 2,388

Robert Wise’s great 1949 fight game movie The Set-Up stars Robert Ryan in a knockout performance as a has-been fighter who won’t take a dive.

Director Robert Wise’s great 1949 fight game movie The Set-Up stars Robert Ryan as a has-been fighter who won’t take a dive. Ryan’s knockout performance elevates this extremely punchy film into a boxing classic. The late, great Audrey Totter co-stars as Julie, his wife who supports him.

Robert Ryan plays Stoker Thompson, a 35-year-old has-been boxer, whose manager Tiny (George Tobias) is sure he will continue to lose fights, so he takes money for a dive from mobster Little Boy (Alan Baxter). He is so certain Thompson will lose that he doesn’t tell him about the set-up. But at the start of the last round of the vicious boxing match with the much younger Tiger Nelson (Hal Fieberling), Stoker learns about the fix.

It’s a thrilling, eye-catching movie, with glorious film noir cinematography by Milton R Krasner and an atmospheric RKO studio production with sets designed by Albert S D’Agostino and Jack Okey. There is imaginative, hard-hitting direction by Wise, whose extraordinary career also pulled in The Sound of Music, West Side Story and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Krasner won the Best Cinematography award at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival and Wise the FIPRESCI Prize.

Art Cohn’s realistic and evocative screenplay exploring the sordid corners of the boxing underworld is based extraordinarily on a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March. A movie based on a poem? Today most people in Hollywood read nothing except the trade papers. The script is really economical – the film is just 73 minutes long, yet it is a major movie – there’s no flab on this prize-fighter.

Also in the cast are George Tobias, Alan Baxter, Wallace Ford, Darryl Hickman, Percy Helton, Hal Baylor, Kenny O’Morrison, David Clarke, Philip Pine, Edwin Max, Herbert Anderson, Heinie Conklin, Paul Dubov, Dave Fresco, Bernard Gorcey, William E Green, Donald Kerr, Mike Lally, Arthur Leonard, Frank Mills, Ben Moselle, Tommy Noonan, William J O’Brien, Frank Richards, Billy Snyder, Arthur Sullivan, Charles Sullivan, Harry Tenbrook, Ralph Volkie, Charles Wagenheim and Constance Worth.

Dore Schary, the uncredited executive producer who started the project at RKO before his 1948 move to MGM, is credited with giving the film a real time narrative structure, three years before the device was used in High Noon.

[Spoiler alert] The film makes many changes from the poem: the boxer’s name is changed from Pansy Jones to Stoker Thompson (understandably) and his race from black to white; he’s gone from being a bigamist to being devotedly married, and Jones’s beating and subsequent death on a subway track is turned into Thompson’s alley beating and a shattered hand.

March complained: ‘They evaded the whole basic issue of discrimination against the Negro.’ Wise said it was because RKO had no Afro-American star actors under contract. RKO paid March only $1000 for the rights and didn’t ask him to adapt his poem despite his decade of screen-writing experience.

Audrey Totter died on December 12 2013, aged 95.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,388

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