The Set-Up
Short description
Stoker Thompson is an aging boxer whose once-promising career is winding down. His manager, Tiny, assumes Stoker will lose his upcoming bout against the younger Tiger Nelson, so he quietly accepts money from a gambling figure named Little Boy to fix the fight, without telling his fighter. Stoker's wife, Julie, wants him to retire rather than keep climbing into the ring, though he still believes he has something left. When Stoker learns what has been arranged behind his back, he refuses to go along with it and fights for a win, setting up consequences beyond the ring.
The Set-Up was released in 1949 and runs 73 minutes, with Robert Wise directing from a screenplay he wrote with Art Cohn and Joseph Moncure March. It is the first of 13 films Wise directed in chronological order, ahead of The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. Robert Ryan leads as Stoker, with Audrey Totter as Julie, George Tobias as Tiny, Alan Baxter as Little Boy, Wallace Ford as Gus and Percy Helton as Red; 68 cast members are credited. Richard Goldstone and Dore Schary produced for RKO Radio Pictures. On IMDb it holds 7.8/10 from around 11,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.4/10 from about 184 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 6.4/10 from 13 reviews, so audiences rate it more warmly than critics did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film had a significant influence on Martin Scorsese when he was creating *Raging Bull*.
- In the original literary source, which was later adapted into the screenplay for this film, the boxer was named Pansy Jones (in the film he is known as Stoker Thompson), he was Black, not White, and was a polygamist (rather than the devoted husband he appears to be in the film). The fact is that RKO Studios simply did not have a Black actor under contract at the time who could be cast in the leading role. Of course, James Edwards (1918-1970) was in the film’s cast, but the studio executives felt he was not well enough known to the public to play the main character.
- The blind man who attends the fight and has the events in the ring described to him by his companion is based on a man who attended boxing matches in San Francisco and was once seen there by screenwriter Art Cohn (1909-1958).
- One of the first films where the depiction of an event takes exactly as much screen time as it would in real life.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
