El luchador

Fight scenes-wise, this was "Rocky" almost 30 years before there ever was a "Rocky." It was the same kind of unrelenting (and unrealistic in that no matter how bad the beating the good guy was getting, the good guy couldn't lose) boxing action that Sylvester Stallone likes so much.

But, don't get me wrong, I liked this film. It was good stuff. 'Rocky" was drama, romance while this was film-noir.....and solid film-noir, too.

Robert Ryan, playing a 35-year-old aging rank fighter, gives it his all against an up-and-coming kid, not knowing that he supposed to take a dive. He finally finds this out (his manager didn't tell him) and by then, he was not going give up trying against his opponent.

There are so many punches thrown in this four-round bout it will make your head swim. The best part of this film, to me, was the cinematography, which was outstanding. Kudos to director Robert Wise for the photography. There are a lot of nice facial closeups in here, all of which look sharp on the recent DVD transfer.

Humor is thrown into this film-noir as we see a variety of boxing fans, from the bloodthirsty woman to a fat man always eating to another guy acting out the action while in his ringside seat. They provide some much- needed respite from the grim story. Ryan, as he usually was, is interesting to watch. The ending of the film is a tough one and, I found tough to watch at times.

Note: the film was done in "real time" - a 72-minute period in the life of the boxer Ryan portrays.

I love Robert Ryan films. Whether playing a scum bag or a hero, his gritty and realistic performances have always impressed me. One of his better films is this boxing flick. Ryan is an old washed-up boxer who is expected to take a dive. Through much of the film, you really don't know what he will do--throw the fight or try to salvage some of his dignity. And, I gotta say that the boxing scenes are brutal and realistic--it really HURTS to watch the fight. If you like the films THE HARDER THEY FALL or REQUIEM TO A HEAVYWEIGHT, then is this movie for you! In fact, try watching all three to get a look at the less glamorous and seedy side of boxing.

Robert Ryan is a victim of "The Set-Up" in this 1949 film also starring Audrey Totter, George Tobias and Percy Helton. Ryan plays Stoker Thompson, a 35-year-old prize fighter who is still trying to make it. Totter is his wife, who wants him to quit before he's crippled and/or brain-damaged. In fact, she's not even sure she can watch him fight anymore, though he begs her to come to the arena. What he doesn't know is that his handlers have accepted money for him to take a fall. They don't bother telling him because they believe he's going to lose anyway.

Hollywood has long had a love affair with the fight business. It's easy to see why - it's a visual sport and one-on-one, and there's always a story to tell, either about a loser or an egomaniacal winner. "The Set-Up" is a fascinating film brilliantly directed by Robert Wise, with the boxing match done in real time. The action switches back and forth from the arena to Stoker's wife walking through the dark city trying to sort out her feelings and ultimately ripping up her ticket to the match. Meanwhile, Stoker keeps looking out the window at his apartment window - when he sees that the lights are off, he believes she's coming to the fight.

The fight itself is incredibly realistic and brutal, and the focus is on what can only be described as sadists sitting around the ring yelling, truly man at his most barbaric in Wise's approach. The entire experience - the fight and the audience reactions - is very uncomfortable. The match is difficult enough to watch, but the aftermath is worse for the tension factor alone. Interestingly, Wise lets us see the violence in the ring and let's us imagine some of the violence outside of it later.

For a time in his career, Robert Ryan had kind of a gentle giant thing going occasionally. A very prolific actor, he could be pathetic, as he is here, or take on a character with mental or emotional problems with ease. As his career continued, he played increasingly more angry and violent men. Toward the end of his career, however, he portrayed John the Baptist and Nolan in "The Man Without a Country." He's terrific here as a sad, desperate man going for the glory when he's just about washed up; he is in a business with no humanity, yet he sticks out because he is kind and reeks of goodness. Audrey Totter is very good as his wife, who loves him and wants more for him than being beaten up. Tobias and Helton give great performances as men whose souls left them a long time ago. The rest of the cast is equally good.

This film makes a profound impression on the viewer, and if you're not interested in fighting, you definitely won't be after this film. If you're a fan of the sport, you'll perhaps ask yourself why. No matter what, you won't be unaffected.

If your taste runs to happy endings and beautiful people than stay away from The Set-Up. But if gritty and realistic drama is your taste you can't do better than this noir classic about the world of boxing. The Set-Up anticipated Rod Serling's Requiem For a Heavyweight by a decade as it deals with the same issues about a boxer at the end of his career.

Anthony Quinn might very well have seen Robert Ryan in The Set-Up when he played Mountain Rivera in Requiem For A Heavyweight. Rod Serling must have seen it as well. Both films deal with a boxer at the end of his career, but who has a lot of pride. Manager George Tobias and trainer Percy Helton get an offer from gambler Alan Baxter who is backing an up and coming heavyweight contender Hal Baylor. Ryan is just another step up the ladder, a ladder when Ryan was younger he was climbing. Tobias and Helton agree to take a dive, but no one can broach the subject to Ryan.

Which sets it all up for the final match and the aftermath where Ryan betrayed by all hangs in on nerve and pride alone. What happens afterward is for you to view, but don't expect the same kind of resolution that Requiem For A Heavyweight gave.

A really big surprise here are George Tobias and Percy Helton who normally play comic parts are quite serious here as a pair of fight game characters. The performances are so atypical of the work you've come to expect from both.

Ryan's amateur boxing career no doubt stood him in good stead for this role. He makes a rugged looking boxer who's been through the ring wars over and over again. That helps him in this latest encounter.

The sets are gritty and realistic, in fact I've never seen an urban area done so well until Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm debuted six years later. Preminger also might have been influenced by The Set-Up when he made his classic.

Although unnoticed at first, The Set-Up has slowly built a reputation as one of the great noir films out of RKO and one of the best boxing films ever made. For myself it certainly influenced a lot of people.

This is an awfully hard and brutal movie, produced at the end of the brief, rather high end Dore Schary regime at RKO (1946-48), just prior to Howard Hughes' purchase of the studio, which led to the company's slow, agonizing decline that forced it, or rather its new owners, to close it down ten years later. It's the story of an aging boxer, over the hill but still harboring a measure of optimism, really a sort of pride. In this tragic role Robert Ryan is superb. Tough, compassionate, deeply ethical, realistic, and yet with just enough of the dreamer in him to keep him emotionally afloat, Stoker Thompson represents the best qualities of the so-called common man. In an earlier, more heroic age, he might have been a knight; but alas we do not live in such a time, thus his personal qualities go unnoticed by all but his wife. In this role, Audrey Totter is almost as good as Ryan. Some of her scenes are unforgettable, as when she tears up the ticket to her husband's fight and throws it over the bridge into the steam of an oncoming train; or when she watches a bunch of silly teenagers "play" at boxing with a couple of performing puppets, which at first amuses her, then horrify her when she realizes her own and her husband's fate in this little "play" scene.

The film is a masterpiece of design and composition. Director Robert Wise never made a better picture than this. The movie, like High Noon, plays out in real time, and as a result has an air of urgency to it. Adapted from a poem by Joseph Moncure March, which tells essentially the same story, but with the main character a black man, Wise and scenarist Art Cohn take considerable liberties here that purists' might not care for. In the poem the setting is New York, while in the movie it's a tank town called Paradise City, a far cry from New York even if it's in fact less than a hundred miles away, upstate, or in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. The film never makes this clear. Here and there hints are dropped that the setting might be California. It doesn't matter. The Paradise City boxing arena is a place for young guys on their way up and old guys on their way down. It's a million miles from Madison Square Garden, and that's all that counts.

The film's settings are beautifully realized; and Milton Krasner's photography is no less brilliant. The central street, all blinking lights, and yet shadowy and black in odd places, is a perfect visual metaphor for the action of the film; while seldom have the denizens of a small city looked more menacing. Men in garish ties and fedoras jostle each other on the sidewalk as they pass by. They are a hard, apathetic breed, and hungry for sensation. Inside the arena we see humanity at its least admirable, as there is an undercurrent of sadism in even the most innocuous-seeming fight fans, such as a blind man ("go for his eyes!). We sense that these people come not so much to see a favorite boxer win as a hapless boxer lose.

In the center of all this is Stoker, a man with character surrounded by people who couldn't care less. As his handlers, a porcine, toothpick-chewing Percy Helton, and a thick-witted George Tobias, are superb. In a somewhat smaller role, Edwin Max, in pinstripe suit, with pencil-line mustache's, and what look like three soggy Salada tea bags under each eye, is visually perfect as a small-time something, not even hood, just a guy who runs around and does things for the big guy, played by Alan Baxter, a sort of anti-Stoker, a man without qualities who goes to great lengths to show that he has class and principles, when in fact he has neither. The man is a monster, and he doesn't even have guts. When Stoker punches him in the face he lets his goons do the dirty work.

The interior lives of the two main characters in this film suggest an affinity with the humanistic stoicism Hemingway, while the surface is closer to Weegee and Walker Evans. Overall, though, the movie is pure RKO; its courage-in-the-face-of-adversity theme suggests, almost uncannily, this odd man out among the major studios' history and future, and the best qualities of those who worked there.