One punch away

The Set-Up, RKO 1949 (71 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, includes a kibitz version featuring Wise and Martin Scorsese commenting as the film runs.

A fist with a hammer strikes a ringside bell. Two boxers in black leather hightops dance briefly within the ropes. One kisses canvas.

It is 9:05 p.m. on a clock and all atmosphere and attitude in Paradise City. The town fight club advertises “Boxing Wednesdays. Wrestling  Fridays.” A crowd is milling around the ticket window. Dreamland is a neon chop suey joint next door to the club. Hotel Cozy is across the way. 

A seedy fight manager named Tiny (George Tobias) crosses to the Ring Side Cafe to take $50 from a mob fixer (Edwin Max) to ‘insure’ that Tiny’s fighter, Bill ‘Stoker’ Thompson (Robert Ryan), will take a dive after round two of his four-round bout.

The camera comes through lace curtains blowing in one of Hotel Cozy’s second story windows overlooking the square, into the room Thompson shares with his wife Julie (Audrey Totter). The painter Edward Hopper and his wife could be in the next room. An alarm clock says 9:11 p.m. Thompson is an over-the-hill boxer fighting for his self-respect. He still doggedly chases a title but Julie wants him just to retire. ‘I’m only one punch away,’ he tells her. ‘Don’t you see, Bill? You’ll always be just one punch away,’ Julie says.

Tiny has not told Thompson that the fight is fixed. He is sure that Thompson has no chance of winning and plans to pocket the fighter’s cut of the fix money.

The fight scenes are raw. Ryan boxed for Dartmouth as a student. There is an animal lust and greed on the spectators’ faces. The atmosphere of the Paradise City arena has the feel of the George Bellows painting ‘Both Members of This Club’.

The camera watches a blind man with his ‘eyes,’ a companion who tells him what is going on. A fat man in the front row stuffs his face with fast food each time he appears. A man listens to a Boston Red Sox baseball game with a large radio on his shoulder next to one ear. Well-dressed middle-aged men and women get physically involved in the spectacle from their seats, screaming ‘Kill!’, and there is side-betting and backchat among the guys and dolls in the crowd.

Thompson, unaware of the set-up and hungry to come back, holds his own against ‘Tiger’ Nelson (Hal Baylor). He angrily redoubles his effort when his panicked manager tells him midway through his bout that the mobster Little Boy (career meanie Alan Baxter) has paid him to take a dive.

The rest of this efficient and meticulously shot movie is pure film noir. A beautiful sequence of shots follows Julie, who cannot bear to watch her husband battered in the ring, kill nervous moments during his bout in the streets of Paradise City. Julie gets away from the barkers, sharpers and jitterbuggers, down steps to a place overlooking a tunnel through which streetcars lit with destinations ‘Echo Park’ and ‘Temple Street’ blaze past into the narcotic Los Angeles night. 

And Little Boy does not like losing, especially when he paid to win.

An unusual feature of this film is that it takes place in real time: the time of the narrative corresponds to the film’s 72-minute running time, from right before to right after Thompson’s match, with shots of a variety of clocks at regular intervals between 9:05 p.m. and 10:17 p.m.

The source of the story is a forgotten but worthy long narrative poem of the same title by Joseph Moncure March published in 1928 (though March’s protagonist is an African-American named Pansy Jones). The poem begins, ‘Pansy had the stuff, but his skin was brown/And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown.’

Two asides: the young African-American actor James Edwards cast in a minor role as a trim and winning black fighter named Luther Hawkins, and the famous New York tabloid photographer Arthur ‘Wee Gee’ Fellig is the ‘time caller’ who strikes the ringside bell with a hammer.