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

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.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Set Up by Joseph Moncure March is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and a fabulous work of art – you find multiple notes on films from The NYT 1,000 list on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20...



10 out of 10

The Set Up is a splendid, if tragic film

Robert Ryan makes the most contribution to the tremendous success of this chef d’oeuvre – albeit the whole team matters and I think I will get back to this further down – as the thirty-five years old boxer Bill 'Stoker' Thompson, an unlikely hero, perhaps even a role model (if we leave the brutal sport aside) reminding us of Raging Bull
He was a phenomenal, outstanding thespian, one of the other major magnum opera in which he has a leading role is The Wild Bunch https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... also on The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and on my personal list of 200 favorites, marvelous, if bloody

Robert Ryan was also a civil rights campaigner, he kept his real name – Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and many others felt they had to change identity, because of antisemitism - Robert Bushnell Ryan ‘served in the United States Marines as a drill sergeant, winning a boxing championship,’ and this ads authenticity to his role as a boxer
Bill Stoker Thompson has had a bad streak, as his wife Julie Thompson, portrayed with exceptional talent by Audrey Totter, at thirty-five, he is old in his métier – though in these days, due to progress in medicine and science, many fight in their forties, or at least that is my impression – and he has to face a much younger opponent

Gus is his manager and Tiny his man in the corner, the former has talked to some hoodlum representing a mobster, Little Boy, and he has agreed to lose the next fight, getting money from the gangster, sharing some with Tiny, but keeping the boxer out of the loop, on the assumption that he has lost so much, there is no need to do anything
Tiny wants Bill Stoker to know, but Gus does not want to share his dirty money, meanwhile, Julie Thompson is horrified by the idea that her husband keeps getting those terrible blows – spectators in the arena are shown with extreme accuracy enjoying the spectacle of pain – and she refuses to come to the fight

The fighter wants her there, he keeps looking to the window of their room, which is near the arena, to see if the lights are switched off, for that would be the sign she is coming to see him, except when she comes out, she approached the entrance, but cannot step in: it will be a gruesome show, many blows, blood and suffering
Yes, there is the athletic aspect of it, but science has shown that getting hit in the head is damaging, in American football and elsewhere, ergo the helmets and movies like Trauma, which try to highlight the risks dangers, in boxing, they wear protection, at least in the Olympics, although not in professional, high stakes battles…

https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20...

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence
Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best poem I’ve ever read. It has some of the best writing I’ve seen (though the written accents were hard to read at times), the noir atmosphere is heavy, the characters are all distinct and interesting, and it will overall leave me thinking for a while. Even though I’m not a sports guy by any means, the fights pulled me in and I got really invested in them. Such a shame the movie whitewashed 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.