The Set-Up

It’s no surprise that Robert Wise’s The Set-Up is based on a poem because the film has the rhythm, circularity, and completeness that one associates more with the verse of the English Romantics than with standard crime films. With the action taking place in real-time and contained to essentially one intersection in an unnamed city, the moral conflict of the protagonist, over-the-hill boxer Stoker (Robert Ryan), feels to the viewer both personal and universal. The aging Stoker is about to box a match that may be his last, one he hopes will be a glorious swan song, but what he doesn’t know is that his own manager Tiny (George Tobias) has bet against him. When it looks like Stoker may actually win, Tiny tells him to take a dive or Little Boy’s (Alan Baxter) thugs will come calling for their pound of flesh; this forces Stoker to choose between his self-respect and his safety (“Don’t you see, Bill? You’ll always be just one punch away”). Audrey Totter plays Stoker’s wife Julie, who can’t bear to watch so stays in the hotel room and later takes a stroll across a bridge, stopping to watch trains pass below and possibly reflect on the prospect of suicide. Lacking any musical score whatsoever, Wise and his crew employ brilliant composition, lighting, and editing to tell the story as intimately as possible (the fighters’ bodies glow in the fluorescent from above, Ryan’s weathered face is juxtaposed with the youthful up-and-comers in the locker room). Ryan’s exhausted, beaten body lying in the gutter in front of “Dreamland” is one of the most symbolic images of the noir cycle.