Every moody, shadowy crime film of the postwar has gotten the noir label stuck on it, and so every Noirvember, I find myself in a one-sided argument with streaming service and recommendation list curators: yes, sure, it’s excellent, but is it really noir?
The Set-Up breaks several rules but somehow feels like it belongs in the genre anyhow; it’s as if it’s engaged in conversation with all the choices it doesn’t make and all the outcomes it doesn’t have, as if it’s trailing a shadow behind it. That could be glib and postmodern, but The Set-Up has its heart in its throat. It’s anxious about its shadow. All the characters can feel how close it is. That bleak fear keeps the film feeling like a legitimate part of the noir family tree, even if it’s on an offshoot that’s seen a little more sun.
Robert Ryan stars as Stoker Thompson, a boxer who, at 35, is already broken-down and over-the-hill. He’s been losing so many fights that his manager, Tiny (George Tobias), thinks it’s safe to rig one of his bouts without even telling him. What’s it matter? Stoker will go down in the third round whether he knows the fix is in or not. And this way, Tiny doesn’t have to cut him in on the payoff from the rival boxer’s gangster backer, Alan Baxter’s terse Little Boy.
But there’s a complication: Stoker’s wife, Julie (Audrey Totter), can’t take another night of watching her beloved husband get beaten to a pulp. She knows he’s racking up more damage than he can afford to take. All she wants is for him to quit while he still knows her name, and if he doesn’t, maybe she won’t stick around to watch his decline. Stoker is fighting for that empty seat, for that ticket she’s not using. If the ring is all he has left, he wants to leave it with honor. And if his wife has left him, he wants to beat the shit out of this arrogant, coxcomb-haired kid. He may stay on his feet longer than Tiny imagined.
The photography here is crisp and precise; noir often has an expressionist streak, exaggerating its characters’ emotions and perceptions until they become the whole world. Frames are rat-traps poised to snap shut. The Set-Up is far less stylized, with only one sequence—Julie’s walk through the visual cacophony of a neon- and ad-saturated downtown, which feels like a thousand grasping hands are intruding on her dark night of the soul, for good and for ill—feeling like a creation rather than a capture. Often—aided by its real-time approach—it has more of a documentary feel, with TCM host Eddie Muller even pointing out in his introduction that some of the minor characters—like the blind fight fan—are drawn from life. It’s staged, but it looks real. Parts of it are real, but not these parts, not like this. No wonder Wise cast Weegee in a nearly invisible role.
That sense of you-are-there reality generates its own rat-trap tension. This is not a world shaped by the characters; it’s an uncaring, icily indifferent world that could go on, like an engine, and mow them all down. It’s a reason to hold my breath, because not only is it not nice, it’s not controllable and it’s not predictable. It’s not even a certain slide to doom.
Ryan was often cast as a heel; here he’s a good man but—crucially—a limited one. He’s a weary, battered gentleman, a knight in dented armor he can’t figure out how to remove. When he’s with the other fighters, he’s almost sweet, and there’s the sense that, even on his way out of the sport, he’s a kind of low-key hero in this dingy locker room. He’s the man everyone wants a kind word from, the man they can count on for a goodness and softness that’s all too rare. This is a realistic movie, so that means something. He has friends. He’s likable, and people like him. But the realism also means that niceness only goes so far, and sometimes, kindly bolstering a poor boxer’s delusions of grandeur means the guy goes into the ring again and gets his brains turned to scrambled egg. He’s likable, but no one waits around after his fight. They have their own places to be. And he loves his wife, who loves him back—but he can’t give up the fight for her. Or he won’t.
What fate does he earn, dramatically? How far will his strengths and weaknesses, his choices and lack of choices, take him? What ending is right for a story that contains both a panicked, bumbled flight from a decision’s cold aftermath and a small, sad, heartfelt dinner of canned soup and a hamburger kept warm under a dishtowel? Where does the grubbily real meet the grandly hyperreal?
The Set-Up answers all that in a way that feels honest and right, if a tad too neat. It clasps hands with its shadow.
The Set-Up is streaming on HBO Max and Watch TCM.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Three, Episode Eleven, “Measures”
Two connected threads here: chasing the three million dollars, and more importantly, the system around Quarles closing in on him. Evil can exist within a system so long as it doesn’t fuck with it. In fact, Duffy is seeing a way to climb the ladder by taking out Quarles; I love that Duffy basically is just some guy, with no history and nothing to him outside of quips (he’s a very Shieldian character).
Meanwhile, Michael Ironside just wanders onto the show, even before the credits! It’s very Justified that he doesn’t actually do anything outside of some boss speeches and one-liners (favourite: “Why don’t you guys just walk away, let nature take its course?”).
Also: the father/son dynamic between Art and Raylan is becoming text.
Biggest Laugh: Art’s official explanation for why Raylan fired a round into the ceiling.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Ladies, before we get to the bottom of who it is that you think that I look like…”
Top Ownage: Lot of good stuff here, but I have to go with Quarles killing the drug dealers.
Two for the Seesaw – Omaha lawyer Robert Mitchum, in the throes of a divorce, starts over in NYC and meets Bronx born Jewish dancer and divorcee Shirley McLaine. Romance and heartbreak ensue in this adaptation of a 50s play by William Gibson (not THAT William Gibson). Directed by Robert Wise – it’s a Robert Wise day, clearly – the movie never entirely escapes its stage origins, even if some great shots of Mitchum wandering the streets of the city are added. I give Gibson and the people who adapted it credit for not forcing a happy ending on things, but that doesn’t mean it ever really becomes gripping. Mitchum is solid but a bit too distant and reserved to care about. McLaine is in her element, playing a similar sort to her character in The Apartment but with somewhat more agency, and somehow the sister of the whitest man in Hollywood gets “New York Jew” right. (Again, credit to the filmmakers for leaving the character’s name the very Yiddish Gittel and for putting a Hanukkah lamp on her mantle.) Interestingly, the chemistry between the stars was real, as they carried on an affair for three years.
Frasier, “Hungry Hearts” – Half of this Frasier getting caught between his boss Kenny, who on a whim asked a woman out on a date, and Kenny’s wife, who Frasier ends up thinking is the other woman. Low grade farce, but pretty well done, even if I don’t buy that Frasier was into the (oddly nameless) woman. But the other half is Daphne and Niles confronting her sudden weight gain after she twists her ankle and falls. Fat jokes are not funny. Ever. And even if the show doesn’t fat shame Daphne, treating her weight gain as a problem to solve is not very body positive. Beyond that, I will never like turning Jane Leeves’s pregnancy into obesity as an excuse to send her away to a spa. It just rubs me the wrong way, and no doubt required some extra padding since most women don’t get that fat in pregnancy. The eighth season really is a mess.
The X-Files, “Home”
My wife wasn’t familiar with this episode’s reputation, but as soon as she saw the Peacocks’ house, she said, “What in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre is this?”
As she also noted after the credits rolled, this episode became a trendsetter for genre TV, leading to similarly brutal, rural homages like Torchwood‘s “Countrycide” and other stories where investigations into the otherworldly wind up peeling back the skin of this world and finding the weirdness is innate, too, and old.
We don’t see Mulder and Scully facing the horror of that realization too–they’re down-to-earth and have no illusions about what people get up to; if anything, Mulder is a bit impatient with the case in some places, only really getting intrigued when he suspects a chromosomal abnormality had allowed all three Peacock brothers to father a single child–but it’s embedded in the whole character of Sheriff Taylor. He thinks that Home–I can’t decide if this name is obnoxiously on-the-nose or beautifully plain, so let’s go with both–is a peaceful, uncorrupted place, and so it is, if you can ignore the Peacock house and decide that anything that’s happened in it isn’t your business and that it will never affect you. All the racism and sex scandals and assault and brutality have been here all along, ignored because they’ve been assimilated as just how things are. That’s just the Peacocks. That’s always been the Peacocks.
Sheriff Taylor gets, accordingly, the best and most nostalgia- and safety-demolishing scene in the episode, as the Peacocks break into his house in the night–all as a crooned cover of “Wonderful! Wonderful!” plays from a classic car–and murder him and his wife. It’s a scary, thrillingly shot sequence, one of the tensest the show has ever done; the choice to have the bed pulled up completely at the end is so much better and more visceral than simply having one of the Peacocks pull the wife out from underneath it. (Nice symmetry here with two different women hiding under two different beds.) Thematically appropriate, too: we’re turning over all the rocks here. There is no cover anymore–until the end, where it turns out that the sheer space of America will offer plenty of cover after all.
Your final sentence nails what makes this ending so good – a lot of these episodes leave on an ellipsis, but this is something worse and with only geographical boundaries.
Oddity (2024) – For all it’s faults, including one all too predictable plot turn, I really enjoyed the style on display and how Damian McCarthy sets up a series of misdirects and often elegant reveals, especially in the delightful final shot. Good, low-budget horror.
Such a classically done final shot. This really does have style to burn, and it also fits the horror rule that anything can be forgiven as long as you’re scary enough, and I can get myself creeped out just thinking about that tent scene.
Agreed, I keep thinking of the word “elegant” for this movie’s best moments, even when that plot clumsiness shows.
God damn is that beginning good.
The great beat of the scary former asylum patient offering to stay while she calls the cops!
Live Music – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart supported by Cassie Ramone. Two solidly pretty good artists that fall short of completely winning me over for some reason. Pains… were an absolute sensation with a load of my friends when they first showed up many years ago but I never quite got it. Years later, I still don’t – I hear a band with decent songs but a little lacking in personality.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Safe Conduct” – (world’s biggest shrug emoji)
Shrugs on a train.
Really curious to read the write-up for this one because surely I missed something? I know they had to write a lot of stories to pack out their mammoth seasons but… what was this supposed to be?
Will be watching this later, but did cheat and looked up the credits. Looks like a great cast – or at least a familiar one – is wasted.
Your guess is as good as mine. It’s just so insubstantial, despite a lot of elements that could shine. A dash of romantic Cold War suspense could work, but this falls quite flat even though nothing is executed in an egregiously bad manner. It’s just … fine.
We’ll have at least two more standout episodes before this season finishes up, at least.
Adding that I just found a list of someone’s top episodes of AHP that has this as their third favorite of all time. It’s far from being even my third favorite of the season!
Whoa!? I did kind of feel like I was genuinely missing something rather than it just being a complete failure. But it was still one of my least favourites so far.
Woo, live music? I loved Pains of Being Pure At Heart’s self-titled but didn’t really follow along after a certain point.
They played the debut in full and then the rest of the set was other early stuff, so I figured if they were going to win me over then this was the best chance. But they just don’t quite click with me for some reason. Still an enjoyable set though!
Ehhhh live music.
An excellent little film that is definitely noir. Weird how I abhor boxing but like movies about boxing. And note the presence of James Edwards (who I pointed out recently on AHP) as Luther Hawkins. Noteworthy for a more or less respectful and stereotype-free portrayal of a Black man and for launching Edwards’s career.
It’s fascinating to me how it gets around the classification problem of having a happy endings and still winds up feeling solidly noir: I think it’s because the worst thing that could happen to him is also the best thing that could happen to him.
Edwards is great here: he pops, so I can see why this made people sit up and take notice. And it’s really nice (as with his small role on AHP) to see his character written as an ordinary but noteworthy part of the world, as opposed to a joke or an essentially invisible bit of background.
If the film remained truer to its source material (meaning, if 1940s Hollywood would have permitted the existence of black protagonist led movie), Edwards probably would have played Ryan’s role. The conflict between the boxer and his long suffering fiancé would have had a much harder, eh, punch if this had been filtered through a racial lens.
Year of the Month update!
This December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rope
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
And there’s still time write about any of these 2018 movies, albums, books, et al this month!
Nov. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nov. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Venom
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
Excellent write-up. The heightened realism here may be down to the movie as adaptation of a long poem? In which the protagonist is a black guy, which changes things considerably. But as you note Ryan (who had real boxing experience) is great here and the training room stuff is just phenomenal, that mix of camaraderie and body-and-soul-crushing grind is what makes this darker than noir in some ways, Sorcerer but for palookas instead of jalopies.
The poem was mentioned in the TCM intro, and I need to dig up a copy now.
“Sorcerer for palookas” is the best description. It feels like a longer view of all these guys would see them all either burning out or fading away as gruesomely as the poor never-was who gets hauled away to the hospital.
Ooh, this is the Joseph Moncure Marsh poem. I’ve never read it, but I love his earlier The Wild Party, which I have a Speigelman-illustrated version of I got as a gift 30 years ago and have read at least a dozen times.
“The Set-Up breaks several rules but somehow feels like it belongs in the genre anyhow; it’s as if it’s engaged in conversation with all the choices it doesn’t make and all the outcomes it doesn’t have, as if it’s trailing a shadow behind it. That could be glib and postmodern, but The Set-Up has its heart in its throat. It’s anxious about its shadow. All the characters can feel how close it is. That bleak fear keeps the film feeling like a legitimate part of the noir family tree, even if it’s on an offshoot that’s seen a little more sun.”
When I think of the classical boxing picture as a genre best represented in THE CHAMP, GOLDEN BOY and BODY AND SOUL), Its central conflict is often centered around mixed loyalty to family and/or community and individuality and personal success. They pose questions as to whether masculine identity is shaped by social dynamics or a uniqueness in skills and drive to self realization, and on what side the protagonist stakes his choices.
THE SET UP is very noirish in the sense that the question of loyalty is pretty much moot, as everything is fixed, everyone is on the take, and the penalties are pretty fucking dire if you don’t adhere to the rules. Julie is left in the position of having a choice to stay in a marriage whose outcomes terrify her and leaving in order to alleviate that anxiety, but where would she go? Stoker has psychologically forged an identity around a chosen profession (and a great call on his comportment with other fighters) that can’t fathom the degree to which it’s values are antiquated. As you point out, the film’s world offers a plethora of characters and local “color” but limited options for social integration, making fateful outcomes all but certain. If THE SET UP is in conversation with other films, it’s that any hope for narrative reconciliation doesn’t come from social/environmental change but through the more deterministic framework of analytical psychology.
Yes, it’s striking how much of the local color–all those faces in the crowd that we come to know over the course of the film–are inaccessible to Stoker, let alone to Julie; there’s recognition but no relationship. (The way the fans’ “loyalty” flips throughout, because what most of them are really loyal to is bloodshed, is certainly notable.)
It’s interesting to think about the fan relationship to boxing. I am a casual boxing fan, but I can’t stand MMA because it has none of boxing’s artistry or visible strategy (I have no doubt that MMA has strategy, but it’s not casually apparent) while it appears *dramatically* more violent. (My understanding is that it’s actually less dangerous than boxing, but it’s hard to believe it.) And it is more popular, one imagines, specifically because it appears so brutal.