The Set-Up (1949)
Directed by Robert Wise
Expecting the usual loss, a boxing manager takes bribes from a betting gangster without telling his fighter.
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What critics compared The Set-Up to
Just don't confuse "Southpaw" with a really good example of the genre and its ringside dramatic possibilities, whether old ("The Set-Up," "Champion") or newer ("Raging Bull" or the less grandiose "The Fighter").
And despite speeches about Hope’s graduation from the School of Hard Knocks, he doesn’t function as a bristling working-class hero or antihero, like the fictional protagonists of Golden Boy , Body and Soul , The Set-Up , and Champion.
As a boxing movie, this is every bit as grim as The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City (1972), and as an underlit look at a seedy American subculture, set mainly in a few lairlike locations, it's as dark and doom ridden as the 1961 The Hustler (with which it paradoxically shares a 'Scope format) and Eastwood's own Bird (1988).
With its down-and-out characters and dramatic interplay of darkness and light, the film has the texture of a somber palooka noir like Robert Wise's The Set-Up, but it's touched by a dogged optimism that's anathema to the genre.
Together with older brother Billy ( Tom Burke ), he runs a crooked Bangkok boxing club — an archetypal den of sin borrowed from “The Set-Up” and its film-noir ilk, where the fights are rigged and the whole operation serves as a front for more serious crime.
And its fondest fans can point to exceptions — “Body and Soul,” “The Set-Up,” “The Harder They Fall,” “Raging Bull” and even the first “Rocky.”
This territory has been traveled before in everything from Champion and The Set-Up to Rocky and The Cinderella Man , but in Gavin O’Connor’s direction and pungent screenplay the melodramatics are integral, the pace and timing never slow, and the big fight action in the cage contains some of the best staged combat sequences I’ve ever seen.
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The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
Presaged by the Group Theaters 1939 production of Golden Boy, postWorld War II boxing films like Body and Soul, Champion, and The Set-Up were all about class struggle, specifically the brutality of the capitalist system and the pathos of the proletariat; with few exceptions, Hollywood boxers were tragic figures until Sylvester Stallone changed the game, upping the genres ethnic ante and opting for a Cinderella structure, to create one of the greatest success sagas in American movies.
That's because we've already seen many of the boxing movies – from "The Set-Up" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me" to "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" – that "The Fighter" draws on.
…almost as if Wright is channeling his inner Robert Ryan in 1949’s boxing melodrama The Set-Up and is being paid to take a dive.