A washed up boxer is booked in to fight in a dark, smoky boxing club (one that doubles up as a wrestling auditorium/aquarium) in Paradise City. The punters wave handfuls of greenbacks in the air, shout abuse at the (comparatively) ageing pugilists, "where's ya wheelchair?", and fill their faces with hot dogs, potato chips, and even ice lollies as two journeymen stagger around the ring attempting to punch the living daylights out of each other for a modest purse.
Robert Wise's 1949 The Set-Up (Internet Archive) is hardly Raging Bull and as a film noir (witness the hats, the swing music, the smoke filled bars, the five o'clock shadows, and the loosened ties, even bowties, as shorthand for debauchery) it is hardly Double Indemnity or Laura. It's not a classic but it was, in its own modest - and slightly dated - way, a rather enjoyable chapter of my ongoing journey into the world of noir.
Based on a 1928 narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March and with a soundtrack by the Russian composer Constantin Bakaleinikoff, the action takes place over one evening and in no more than three or four rooms and two surrounding streets. The Set-Up, truth be told, would have probably worked just as well, better, as a play.
Bill 'Stoker' Thompson (Robert Ryan) is carded to fight the younger and more fancied Tiger Nelson (Hal Fieberling) that evening but, as he catches up on a pre-fight catnap in his hotel room, we see gamblers laughing at how old (thirty-five!), past it, and useless he is. His manager, Tiny (played by George Tobias as a cigar chomping wise guy straight from central casting), is equally cynical about Stoker's ability so when he's offered a backhander to ensure Stoker loses the fight, he accepts it - and is so sure that Stoker will lose he doesn't even bother telling him about it.
Why cut him in on the deal when he'll lose anyway? He's lost A LOT of fights in the past so why would he win this one? Even as Stoker tells himself and his worried wife Julie (Audrey Totter) that he 'feels' he's gonna win this one. You can probably guess how this pans out but that's not the point so much as how the leading characters react when and if the unexpected/inevitable happens.
Before the fight, Julie tries to talk Stoker out of it - and out of the fight game entirely - fearing for his health. For the first time ever, she refuses to sit ringside and, instead, walks the local streets catching commentary on the transistor radios blaring from tobacconist concessions. Inside the auditorium, the advice from Stoker's corner is, of course, dubious at best.
But when Stoker starts turning round what appears to be certain defeat, Tiny, and his brilliant assistant Red (Percy Helton), start to get very worried. The local gangster Little Boy (Alan Baxter) doesn't look happy with this turn of events and his hired goon Danny (Edwin Max) appears to be a man only too happy to exact violent revenge.
It's a diverting little movie with some amusing moments (a boxer called Gunboat (David Clarke) who reads children's comics before his fights and calls women not just 'dames' but also 'mice') and spivs who dress like members of Kid Creole and the Coconuts the morning after a big night on the mojitos, as well as a cameo from the photojournalist Weegee and a debut silver screen appearance from James Edwards (who later appeared in the likes of Kubrick's The Killing and James Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate) as up and coming boxer Luther Perkins.
It's not one that will linger long in the memory but in building up a picture of what a film noir is, could be, and still can be it is an important part of the jigsaw. Director Wise went on to make films as highly rated as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and The Andromeda Strain so clearly went on to better things. My journey into film noir will do too. I ain't down yet.
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