The Set-Up

by Joseph Moncure March

Written in 1928, The Set-Up is a long narrative poem about the boxing underworld - a hard-boiled tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets. When the work was first published it made the bestseller list, and in 1949 it was turned into an award-winning film featuring Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. This reprinting of the original, unchanged 1928 poem features dynamic, specially commissioned artwork by Erik Kriek that vividly conveys the story of Pansy, an up-and-coming black prize fighter who takes on all comers. When he was in the ring, "It was over before you knew it. He'd carve you up like a leg of mutton. And drop you flat with a sock on the button." Pansy's complicated love life leads to a spell in prison and his career subsequently takes a nosedive; but he continues to box until the fateful night his fight managers and opponent triple-cross him and he meets a grisly end at the hands of a vengeful gang.

Genres: Poetry

184 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1928

About the author

After serving in World War I and graduating from Amherst College (where he was a protégé of Robert Frost), March worked as managing editor for The New Yorker in 1925, and helped create the magazine's "Talk of the Town" front section. After leaving the magazine, March wrote the first of his two important long Jazz Age narrative poems, The Wild Party. Due to its risqué content, this violent story of a vaudeville dancer who throws a booze and sex-filled party could not find a publisher until 1928. Once published, however, the poem was a great success despite being banned in Boston. Later in 1928, March followed up The Wild Party's success with The Set-Up, a poem of a skilled black boxer who had just been released from prison.

In 1929, March moved to Hollywood to provide additional dialogue for the film Journey's End and, more famously, to turn the silent version of Howard Hughes' classic Hell's Angels into a talkie — a rewrite that brought the phrase "Excuse me while I put on something more comfortable" into the American lexicon. March stayed with Hughes' Caddo Pictures studio for several years, temporarily running the office, overseeing the release of Hell's Angels, and getting into legal trouble after an attempt to steal the script for rival Warner Bros.' own flying picture Dawn Patrol.

March worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood until 1940, under contract to MGM and Paramount and later as a freelancer for Republic Pictures and other studios; he wrote at least 19 produced scripts in his Hollywood career. His most prominent late script is probably the left-leaning John Wayne curio Three Faces West, a knockoff of The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between Okies and Nazis.

With his third wife, Peggy Prior (a Pathé screenwriter) and her two children, March returned to the East Coast in 1940. During World War II, he worked at a shipbuilding plant in Groton, Connecticut, and wrote features (mostly acid assessments of the movie business) for the New York Times Magazine. In later years, he wrote documentaries for the State Department and industrial films for Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Monsanto Company, American Airlines, and others. Several films starring industrial films icon Thelma "Tad" Tadlock, including Design for Dreaming (1956) and A Touch of Magic (1961) were made from March's rhyming scripts. March died in 1977.

March revised both The Set-Up and The Wild Party in 1968, removing some anti-Semitic caricatures from both works. Most critics deplored these changes, and Art Spiegelman returned to the original text when he published his illustrated version of The Wild Party in 1994. (The Set-Up has not been reprinted since 1968.)

Works and legacy:
Both of March's long poems were made into films. Robert Wise's 1949 film version of The Set-Up loses the poem's racial dimension by casting the white actor Robert Ryan in the lead, while the Merchant Ivory Productions 1975 version of The Wild Party changes March's plot to conflate the poem with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal.

The Wild Party continues to attract new readers and adaptations. In 2000, two separate musical versions played in New York, one on Broadway, composed by Michael John LaChiusa, and the other off-Broadway, composed by Andrew Lippa, with mixed critical and popular success. The Amherst College library's large collection of March's papers includes unpublished poems, scripts, and a memoir entitled Hollywood Idyll.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really packs a punch (pun intended) with this striking use of language and narrative structure. Based on what other reviewers thought, this isn't as strong as his other book length poem, "The Wild Party," so now I'm really curious about that one now.

[Franc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is hardboiled narrative poetry, and the only poem I know that's the basis for a film-noir, Robert Wise's The Set-Up 1949.

Sample line: “The arena reeked with age, It smelled like the bottom of a monkey cage.”

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sure, "The Set-Up" isn't quite as good as "The Wild Party," but nobody writes like Joseph Moncure March. Hero to the Jazz age and cult idol of the Beat Generation, his hard-boiled noir-infused epic poem/novellas are a style no one has even dared to attempt with any seriousness since then. If the story is slight (a washed-up black boxer isn't informed that his fight is fixed and that he's expected to go down), the delivery and the unique use of language more than makes up for it.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find this to be nearly as successful as The Wild Party in a number of ways. I didn't think the rhythm worked as well, the characters weren't as interestingly developed, and the story dwelled too long on the fights before the main event and avoided exploring further in what way Pansy was falsely accused that sent him to jail. I did think the ending was good and the depiction of the bigotry of the era was handled well too.