Rent The Set-Up (1949)

Slightly Later the Same Night - The Set-Up review by CH

Soon after 10 pm, Robert Ryan is in a downtown hotel room and thinking about time. That is, at thirty-five, he is approaching the end as a boxer - especially as he is due to face a man a dozen years younger (Hal Baylor) when it is his turn to enter the ring, unaware that he is part - literally the fall-guy - of the eponymous set-up.

In all this, he is urged to chuck it in by his girlfriend, the brilliant Audrey Totter, and take up a new life, however humble. Directed by the ever-adaptable Roberty Wise, The Set-Up (1949) is a far cry from the film for which he is best known, The Sound of Music. Its seventy minutes are the exact time of events between that room and the end of events across the road in a ring whose audience is the frequent object of leaping and murderous yelling montage (women in particular). Here are all the tropes of classic noir, including a dodgy manager (George Tobias) and vulgarly-besuited mobster (a splendid Alan Baxter). The lighting, the pace are managed wonderfully, with sufficient shots of timepieces to keep one aware as Audrey walks the town - a moment on a railway bridge is matched by every moment of all this, inside and out.

The wonder is that it was adapted by Art Cohn from Joseph Moncure March's verse novel, one which is now harder to find than The Wild Party, which was itself filmed in the mid-Seventies. There are signs that verse novels are making a return. Is it too late for a film version of Vikram Seth's wonderful depiction of San Francisco in The Golden Gate?

Boxing Noir. - The Set-Up review by Steve

The boxing film was always an apt metaphor for the Hollywood left in the era of film noir. They expose the corruption of the system as the boxers fight each other rather than those with power. Their willing participation in their own exploitation and destruction made the sport a potent symbol for the myth of the American dream..  

This is is the best of these. Robert Ryan plays a no-hope puncher nearing the end, vaguely aware he will never be a champion. His next bout has been fixed by his manager, who doesn't even tell him because he thinks his man has no chance anyway.  He is literally the fall guy. He fights, but he fight isn't fair. He has been sold.

 The film plays out in real time over a terse, tense 70 minutes. Ryan (a boxer in college) is magnificent as a decent man who has never been corrupted by the hell he lives in, and so must destroyed physically. The outcome is heartbreaking. Audrey Totter is also very moving as his suffering wife.

The fight game is powerfully evoked: the brutal contests; the punch drunk veterans ; the wealthy racketeers. Hard-up punters pay rich promoters to see other poor men beat the hell out of each other. The hostility of the crowd towards the losers is so powerful and shocking. Robert Wise places us in the seats, among these voyeurs, another one of the mob.