Here’s the set-up to 1949’s The Set-Up. On one side Stoker, an ageing boxer convinced he has one more shot at glory. On the other Tiger, an upcoming young fighter in the pocket of a local gang boss. The boss, via an intermediary, asks/commands Tiny, Stoker’s manager/trainer, to get Stoker to throw the fight. Tiny is convinced Stoker will go down anyway so he doesn’t bother to pass on the message that Stoker is to take a dive in the third. Tiny is not just a coward – he avoids an awkward confrontation with Stoker – this way he also doesn’t have to share any of the sweetener with his boy.
The Set-Up is one of the best boxing movies ever made, and for a lot of reasons. If you watch it on DVD with the commentary track on you’ll hear Martin Scorsese heaping praise on it, and repeatedly saying how, when he made Raging Bull, he went out of his way not to make it like The Set-Up.
Why’s it good? The brilliant cast. Robert Ryan as the ancient Stoker – “where’s your wheelchair,” someone in the crowd shouts as he climbs into the ring. Stoker is meant to be 35. Ryan was actually 40 at the time, and those extra five years make a valid contribution to the role. Ryan had also been a boxer in his college years, is lean and sinewy and knows his way around a ring.
His opponent, Tiger, is played by Hal Baylor, a successful amateur and pro boxer. There’s also Audrey Totter quietly just right as Stoker’s gal, a decent sort worried sick her guy is going to take another beating and wishing he’d give up. As Stoker’s manager Tiny, George Tobias gives off the smell of dirt and smalltime despair. Alan Baxter is sinister and slightly too well turned out as local big shot Little Boy (there’s a suggestion that he hangs around with manly men for a reason). Edwin Max is ferretty as the go-between oiling the wheels of the deal Stoker doesn’t know about.
The direction is by Robert Wise. This was one of his favourite films, in a career including Run Silent, Run Deep, Somebody Up There Likes Me and West Side Story. Unlike those, this is a B movie, and comes in at one hour 12 minutes. It also plays out in real time – Wise keeps showing us clocks. As the movie opens it’s 9.05pm, as the end credits come up it’s 10.16pm.
To act as a warm-up for the main event and provide some dramatic contrast, Wise start the film with almost lyrical snapshots. The boxers putting their gloves on and talking about their hopes and fears, Stoker one of the guys but also a decent man, perhaps just a touch punch-drunk. Julie wandering through Paradise City (irony) on her own, unwilling to take her seat at the fight. Long slow tracking shots lay out Leisure USA as the post-War economy booms and teenagerdom arrives. Penny arcades. A dancehall. DP Milton Krasner gives us moody noir lighting. He also did Scarlet Street and All About Eve. The Set-Up is a great looking movie as well as everything else.
And then, with 34 of those 72 minutes still to run, Stoker steps into the ring with Tiger and the two men start going at each other, at first in a furious frenzy, but working their way through the gears until they end up in exhausted desperation, still slugging away. Wise repeatedly cuts away to individuals watching the fight, each involved in their own tight mini-drama, and catches the fickleness of the crowd as punches convincingly connect and sweat flies off the faces of Ryan and Baylor. Eventually one man hits the canvas, dust bounces into the air, and the fight is over.
Wise used three cameras, one handheld, to catch the brutality of the chaotic fight, then put the footage together to a quickening pace in the editing room alongside editor Roland Gross. The set-up to The Set-Up is good, brilliant show-don’t-tell film-making. But it’s the pay-off – the fight – that the movie is about, and why it’s still remembered today.
The Set-Up – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2023
