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THE WILD PARTY AND THE SET-UP
Epic narrative poem
- GenresPoetry
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
20 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Moncure March
7 books13 followersAfter 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 13, 2018
Why isn't Joseph Moncure March a bigger deal? Predating the Beats, predating film noir, roughly contemporary with Damon Runyon and F. Scott Fitzgerald, his two "epic poem" novellas in verse blend hard-boiled crime literature with a loose, percussive and flexible rhythm that the Beats and a generation of black thinkers after them would shape into the basis of hip-hop and spoken word. March may only have written two novellas (collected here) and a handful of small film projects, but his ghost looms large nonetheless.
May 1, 2020
The Set-Up by Joseph Moncure March is a lengthy narrative poem telling the story of Pansy Jones, an African American fighter who, due to a 10 year prison stretch, misses his chance at the big time. In a deal with a gangster, his managers arrange a thrown fight, but reluctant to share the pay-off and certain Jones will lose the fight anyway, do not tell him about the set-up. Though written in rhyme, March’s poetry keeps to no regular rhyme scheme or meter; he can sound like a sort of Dr. Seuss gone to seed at times. Here is a passage from a description of the fighters’ dressing room:
Another Antique –
The toilet.
No modern touch to spoil it.
Pitch black.
You had to go in
With your nose done up in a clothes-pin.
Wash your hands?
Have a drink?
Observe this handsome
Stopped-up sink.
Here is your shower –
It’s on the fritz.
If you don’t like it, –
Move to the Ritz.
Go in like a little man:
Come out as quick as you can.
Trust to your smell
Instead of your sight –
And be god-damned thankful
There is no light!
However, the short lines and constant rhyme keep the story moving forward, and the way March picks out details of character and setting struck me as highly cinematic, a kind of verbal montage, building a scene out of a series of short descriptions. The climactic fight with Sailor Gray, where the rhymes become less insistent, is viscerally described, and kept me turning the pages as one brutal round succeeds another:
They circled:
Pansy broke the ice.
His left snapped up
Briskly,
Twice.
Gray rushed.
Pansy danced away.
“Ah – gowan!
Get to ‘im, Gray … !”
“Jesus Christ! –
Whadda yuh say- !”
“Watch dat left … !”
“Come on, let’s go!”
“Block dat left!”
“Jesus, you’re slow … !”
“What duh hell are yuh waitin’ for … ?”
Gray’s eyes glittered:
He was getting sore.
His fists circled:
He crouched to attack.
Pansy hooked:
Gray’s head jerked back.
And just as it jerked,
Pansy let fly
With a hard straight right
To the Sailor’s eye.
The crowd yelled.
Gray crouched,
Covered.
Pansy danced back out of range:
Hovered.
Pansy’s race is not an essential element in March’s story; with the multiethnic mix of fighters that share the dressing room, the story could just as well have a white fighter at its center, which is the case in the film version. The fighter is now re-christened with the more macho cognomen of Stoker Thompson, and played by Robert Ryan in a great performance. The biggest change from the poem is the addition of Julie, the fighter’s wife, played by Audrey Trotter, who provides both an outside observer with distaste for the brutality of the sport and an emotional anchor for the character of the boxer. Though numerous details have been changed in the adaptation, the film remains true to the themes and broad narrative of the poem. This film too might almost have made use of the title The Big Clock: the opening and closing shots concentrate on a large clock dial hanging in front of the fight arena, emphasizing that the duration of the action is exactly that of the film’s running time.
At the time this film was made (1949) it would probably been impossible for a Hollywood film to feature an African American actor in this role, but the race is represented by James Edwards as the fighter in the main event preceding Stoker’s bout. Except for a brief vignette when Pansy’s managers unsuccessfully proposition two barflies, the poem is a strictly masculine affair, where the film adds Audrey Trotter as the wife of Stoker, who, unwilling to watch her husband be beaten yet again, wanders through the streets and dives surrounding the arena as the fight card progresses, catching occasional reports on the boxing matches from radios in newsstands and lunch counters. She provides a second point of view character in the film, one most female and, no doubt, many male viewers will find more sympathetic in her distaste for the brutality of her husband’s sport; her scenes, set in the seamier side of a city at night, provide some variety, if not much contrast, from the action in the fight arena, where the fight fans are shown as a collection of the most sadistic and gluttonous spectators at a display of bloodshed since the heyday of the Roman coliseum.
Another Antique –
The toilet.
No modern touch to spoil it.
Pitch black.
You had to go in
With your nose done up in a clothes-pin.
Wash your hands?
Have a drink?
Observe this handsome
Stopped-up sink.
Here is your shower –
It’s on the fritz.
If you don’t like it, –
Move to the Ritz.
Go in like a little man:
Come out as quick as you can.
Trust to your smell
Instead of your sight –
And be god-damned thankful
There is no light!
However, the short lines and constant rhyme keep the story moving forward, and the way March picks out details of character and setting struck me as highly cinematic, a kind of verbal montage, building a scene out of a series of short descriptions. The climactic fight with Sailor Gray, where the rhymes become less insistent, is viscerally described, and kept me turning the pages as one brutal round succeeds another:
They circled:
Pansy broke the ice.
His left snapped up
Briskly,
Twice.
Gray rushed.
Pansy danced away.
“Ah – gowan!
Get to ‘im, Gray … !”
“Jesus Christ! –
Whadda yuh say- !”
“Watch dat left … !”
“Come on, let’s go!”
“Block dat left!”
“Jesus, you’re slow … !”
“What duh hell are yuh waitin’ for … ?”
Gray’s eyes glittered:
He was getting sore.
His fists circled:
He crouched to attack.
Pansy hooked:
Gray’s head jerked back.
And just as it jerked,
Pansy let fly
With a hard straight right
To the Sailor’s eye.
The crowd yelled.
Gray crouched,
Covered.
Pansy danced back out of range:
Hovered.
Pansy’s race is not an essential element in March’s story; with the multiethnic mix of fighters that share the dressing room, the story could just as well have a white fighter at its center, which is the case in the film version. The fighter is now re-christened with the more macho cognomen of Stoker Thompson, and played by Robert Ryan in a great performance. The biggest change from the poem is the addition of Julie, the fighter’s wife, played by Audrey Trotter, who provides both an outside observer with distaste for the brutality of the sport and an emotional anchor for the character of the boxer. Though numerous details have been changed in the adaptation, the film remains true to the themes and broad narrative of the poem. This film too might almost have made use of the title The Big Clock: the opening and closing shots concentrate on a large clock dial hanging in front of the fight arena, emphasizing that the duration of the action is exactly that of the film’s running time.
At the time this film was made (1949) it would probably been impossible for a Hollywood film to feature an African American actor in this role, but the race is represented by James Edwards as the fighter in the main event preceding Stoker’s bout. Except for a brief vignette when Pansy’s managers unsuccessfully proposition two barflies, the poem is a strictly masculine affair, where the film adds Audrey Trotter as the wife of Stoker, who, unwilling to watch her husband be beaten yet again, wanders through the streets and dives surrounding the arena as the fight card progresses, catching occasional reports on the boxing matches from radios in newsstands and lunch counters. She provides a second point of view character in the film, one most female and, no doubt, many male viewers will find more sympathetic in her distaste for the brutality of her husband’s sport; her scenes, set in the seamier side of a city at night, provide some variety, if not much contrast, from the action in the fight arena, where the fight fans are shown as a collection of the most sadistic and gluttonous spectators at a display of bloodshed since the heyday of the Roman coliseum.
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January 4, 2013this explains so much - what was underneath the Jazz Age - seriously tough
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews