First up on the screen is the studio logo, the RKO transmitter beeping its signal out to the revolving, black-and-white world. Then the names of the film’s stars appear, followed by the main title—The Set-Up—superimposed on a shot of a prizefight timekeeper, his hammer poised above the bell. At the precise moment he drops the hammer we cut to two fighters in the ring, circling and feinting, dancing in and out. No music on the soundtrack: only the boos and cheering of the crowd. All this is standard for 1949 Hollywood, right up to the credit line “From the Poem by Joseph Moncure March.”

As unlikely as it seems—in the long history of the cinema, how many pictures, let alone boxing pictures, can have been based on a poem ?—the line is perfectly accurate. In 1928 Joseph Moncure March published a book-length verse narrative which two decades later provided RKO with everything it would need for its film: a setting, a tough-as-nails title, and a story about two conniving fight managers and their aging black middleweight Pansy Jones. In March’s poem, the managers and a crooked gambler set Pansy up to take a fall but say nothing to him about it. Why should they share their fifty buck payoff? Isn’t Pansy going to lose the bout anyway? For a couple of rounds Pansy takes a beating, but then he realizes what’s going on, and out of some reserve of resentment or blind anger,

No boxing now—
To hell with that!
He leapt in striking
Like a savage cat,

he puts his man on the floor, for the count. But victory in the ring only leads to defeat on the mean sidewalks outside, as the vengeful gambler and his thugs gather around Pansy in the dark.

For the screen, RKO kept most of the original’s violent plot, tracked March’s rapidly shifting moods of contempt, fear, and foreseen defeat, even devised brilliant cinematic equivalents for his pounding verse rhythms. But RKO made alterations too, some minor, some major—alterations of the kind March himself grew cynically to know when in the 1930s he was employed as a scriptwriter for the studios and made artistic compromises of his own. The story of what Hollywood did with and to The Set-Up is complicated, as complicated and intriguing as March’s poem itself, and as much a mixture of dogged fidelity with shabby betrayal, of keeping the faith with making a buck. If, in the story of this adaptation, Art and Mammon seem to be fighting for the championship, neither side can be said to win in a knockout; it’s a split decision between them, like most decisions in this particular arena.

Joseph Moncure March was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from Central Park, close to Harlem. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment among papers now preserved at Amherst College, he introduces himself as a middle-class boy who could look out the window of his lawyer father’s house and see Italian street vendors settling quarrels with ice picks and tongs, or a white gang massing for an attack on a black gang (they were driven off). [1] When he was not attending his select private school or taking piano lessons, the young March played with slum kids and read with fascination Stephen Crane’s grim novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. He also learned the rudiments of what A. J. Liebling would famously call the sweet science. “I lived in a district where the citizens had an intense and scientific preoccupation in the art of bouncing their knuckles off somebody’s jaw,” he wrote. From an early age, he took it for granted that being expert with fists was important.

Never a particularly good student, March was sent to the Lawrenceville School for finishing. There he felt lonely and was sickened by the casual brutality of boarding-school life—the older boys sometimes made the younger ones fight in bare-knuckle matches—but he also discovered an interest in writing. Previously, poetry had been “something they did to you at school”; now he completed his first effort in verse, a six-line rhymed lyric about a soap bubble. [2] Later, according to his 1968 reminiscence A Certain Wildness, he was called on to pen his Class Ode, and argued passionately over its metrical details with his classmate Randall Thompson, the future composer, when Thompson set the Ode to music. [3]

The writing and the arguing kept up at Amherst, where March arrived as a freshman in 1916. He boxed (his coach was a black ex-prizefighter, Doc Newport), studied, and did conventional writerly things, such as producing poems and stories for the college literary journal and translating Horace into rhyming verse. He also got himself into serious trouble by publishing a satirical protest magazine. This was full of undergraduate scorn for compulsory chapel and the like, and it led to a confrontation with the Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn, followed by a forced apology to the college chaplain. The apology turned rapidly into another quarrel; there really was a certain wildness in March at this period, and an obvious impatience to cut through the gentilities of Amherst to get at life itself. In April 1918 he saved himself from expulsion and got at life in the most direct way possible by decamping for New York, then enlisting in the field artillery.

In a romantic gesture, March took with him to France two small volumes of poetry, by Keats and Shelley. Both books grew to seem “embarrassingly precious” amid the phosgene and the machine guns. He might have done better to take A Boy’s Will or North of Boston. Robert Frost, who had started teaching at Amherst in January 1917, was for March (and for generations of other budding collegiate writers) the essential guide in poetry. In particular, he stood for the “sense of form,” that special instinct or “delicate sense of balance,” as March called it, “that kept you from falling off on one side or the other: a kind of inner ear that kept listening until everything was exactly the way it should be …” March needed to cultivate a sense of balance. When he returned to Amherst in 1919, disturbing images of the war sometimes forced their way into his vision, screening out the mild Massachusetts landscape in a “kind of montage.” He flunked several classes but in 1920 was allowed to graduate honoris causa, in recognition of his army service.

After college, New York City. March went to parties in Greenwich Village, discovered young women, married in 1921, later divorced, wore Ivy League suits and sported a walking stick, crafted verse, worked for the publicity department of the telephone company, got by. In 1926, The New Yorker started printing short poems by him, usually unsigned, to fill a column. By then he had become the first managing editor of the magazine, a position he held only briefly, until—that wildness in him, coming out again—he quarreled with Harold Ross. No matter: March had a better use for his time and he had a little money to live on, thanks to an allowance from his father. The best of his New Yorker column-fillers, “Going Home,” had been a melancholy impromptu about a man and a girl coming back from a party at five a.m., looking up “as we passed the places / Where our friends were sleeping with white faces …” Now March determined on writing a book-length narrative poem about hardened partygoers drinking and having sex and finally, drunkenly, resorting to gunplay. Queenie: A Girl of the Sheets, March might have called it, but instead settled on The Wild Party. Beginning with the opening couplet,

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,
And she danced twice a day in vaudeville,

the poem introduced readers to a new-style heroine and an unusual way for poetic heroines to talk:

Her face was white as though newly plastered.
“You touch me—
I’ll kill you, you filthy bastard!”

Once March got Covici, Friede to publish The Wild Party, in early 1928, which took some doing, given its going-Stephen-Crane-onebetter frankness, readers turned out to be fascinated by his staccato rhythms and clever rhymes: poetry here seemed to be glamorously slumming in a narrative about cigarette butts and hangovers. In its handsome hardbound volume, with illustrations by March’s Lawrenceville classmate Reginald Marsh, The Wild Party was a success; Louis Untermeyer introduced it with a fevered enthusiasm that seems to pick up on the poem’s own wild energies (“vicious and vivacious,” “night-clubbed, bootlegged, sex-ridden, tabloid-jazzed New York”).

If March is remembered at all today, it is because of The Wild Party, a work which so perfectly captures the Jazz Age that it comes periodically back into circulation, a guide to 1920s dissipations that still can seem startling. Art Spiegelman reissued the poem in 1994 with seventy-five of his own black-line drawings, while in 2000, by unaccountable coincidence, two different stage adaptations of The Wild Party opened in New York, one by Michael John LaChiusa for The Public Theater on Broadway, the other by Andrew Lippa for the Manhattan Theatre Club. Years earlier, in 1975, Merchant Ivory Productions had bought the rights and made a film of the poem, possibly the least successful, not to mention least faithful, of all their literary adaptations (the action is conflated with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Raquel Welch appears as Queenie, there are musical numbers and a rhyming voiceover). Back in the 1920s, of course, March could foresee none of this afterlife for The Wild Party. After the success of one narrative poem he knew he had to keep his career going by moving on to new work; had not Untermeyer encouragingly called him a poet of genuine personality, knowledgeable about “his broads and his Broadway,” full of future promise?

March’s publisher provided an advance, and in a room on Fourteenth Street, looking out onto an air shaft, sitting at a kitchen table, the poet began thinking about boxing. The Set-Up would bring together many strands of his experience, the privileged background with its aspirations to poetry, those glances out the window to a more brutal world, fistfights in the streets or at school, the tutelage of Doc Newport, the tutelage of Robert Frost, what he saw in the fight arenas of 1920s New York, even a developing social conscience. From the start, March knew that the central figure would be black, a “Negro fighter who had already been defeated by race prejudice, but didn’t know enough to stop fighting.” This decision meant that The Set-Up would put the racial stereotypes of the period on full display, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in March’s own narration. At one point he would write that

[Pansy] made you think
Of the missing link.
He looked like something
To catch and cage:
Like something that belonged
In a Jungle Age.

These repellent lines seem to incorporate the very race prejudice the poem is ostensibly contesting. March no doubt typifies the sort of liberal who attacks an injustice without fully understanding his own involvement in it, who is more a denizen of his time and place than he knows. But it is important to see that the attack on prejudice in The Set-Up is heartfelt and relentless. From the opening couplet (“Pansy had the stuff, but his skin was brown; / And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown”) onward to the end of the narrative, March sustains his assault. He endows the poem’s villains with a truly virulent racism, and endows its black hero with pride and guts. At the end, Pansy “the jungle jinx” is destroyed, but he has learned to counter racism by the only means available to him and thus achieved a kind of tragic stature.

In all its considerations of blackness, whether regressive or progressive, the poem draws on the fame of Jack Johnson, the best-known black American of the early twentieth century. In 1926, the Broadway play Black Boy had starred Paul Robeson as the great and notorious heavyweight champion, notorious among other things for his involvements with white women, and for his imprisonment in Leavenworth on a Mann Act conviction (March would eventually make Pansy a bigamist and send him to the penitentiary for a five-year term: he checked with his father to make sure five years was the right sentence). As for fight-fixing, that was familiar enough in the 1920s. Hemingway’s short story on the subject, “Fifty Grand,” had come out in The Atlantic Monthly in 1927 and probably provided March with one or two details for use in the poem—a Jewish gangster with a Central European accent, a couple of tough broads who backchat with the fight crowd.

The immediate source of The Set-Up, however, was a painting. The realist artist James Chapin was an old friend, and like March a disciple of Frost. In Chapin’s studio March gave the painter his poems to read, and there too, presumably, he first saw Negro Boxer. Chapin’s portrait shows a stolid black figure sitting in his corner between rounds and staring meaninglessly into the ring, eyebrows drawn down low on a much-pummeled face, boxing gloves reposing gently on his knees. Meanwhile his middle-aged white handler leans back on the ropes in a carefree, hard-to-read posture—is he gesturing to some pal in the crowd? Smiling at the mockery of the fight racket? Just enjoying the moment and the way the light gleams on his pomaded hair? Whatever Chapin’s intended meaning, March seems to have taken from the painting, so that later he could put it into his poem, a sharp awareness of the distance between those who fight and those who watch the fighting; those nakedly exposed and those covering something up.

That awareness underlies everything in The Set-Up, which March produced rapidly and published, again with Covici, Friede, in late 1928. The two conniving managers who fix Pansy’s fight, Cohn and MacPhail, “lice of the ring,” belong to the subhuman world of Herman’s bar,

A joint for sneaks,
Tin-horn sports
And gutter sheiks.

Here they spar with each other and with the gangster Tony Morelli, using insults instead of fists. March’s rendition of their dialect voices is crude but believable:

“You’re some boy, Tony!
Where you get it from—Macaroni?
Ha!
My Gott!
Vot lousy veather!”

Pansy—not the best of names for a fighter, and in the poem he gets insults about it—speaks in dialect too, an Amos ‘n Andy black voice (“‘Yas suh !’ he said: / ”At shirt am grand!’”) that March had tried out in one of his short New Yorker poems, “Rainy Day Taxi Blues.” Pansy’s speech is hard to take nowadays, but in the poem he says relatively little; he mostly acts. He strips in the dressing room, puts his gloves on, enters the ring, swings and jabs at his opponent Sailor Gray, takes punches in return, shrugs off abuse from the crowd, keeps on bobbing and weaving, absorbs low blows, falls, picks himself up off the canvas, is saved by the bell, comes out fighting, bloodies Sailor’s head, and under the lights of the ring, a more brutal but cleaner place than Herman’s bar, finally achieves the knockout of Sailor that ends the fight.

In the dressing room afterwards, in an eerie quiet, Pansy starts to think:

The echo of a roar
Swelled,
Died.
The silence rushed back
From every side:
Heavy,
Dense:
Implacable:
Immense.

Pansy knows what the price of his apparent double-cross will be, and putting on his street clothes, he goes out to pay it. The gang—Sailor Gray, Morelli, and others—surround him and start the beating. Pansy escapes momentarily when a cop looms up, only to be pursued again and trapped on a subway platform. Out comes a razor in the black man’s fist and slashes Morelli’s face, but it’s all too late, Sailor has wrestled Pansy over the edge, the black man is crouching helpless on the rails as the tunnel roars and light streams out:

The train screeched
And struck.
THE END

Here at the conclusion, and in fact everywhere in the poem, March’s short verse lines scream at the reader like tabloid headlines. Or they punch away at him: reviewers of The Set-Up outdid themselves in applying boxing lingo to literary critique (Untermeyer: “the words land with the impact of triphammer lefts and rights”; Marion Strobel, in Poetry : “the rhythms feint and lunge”). Unquestionably, the short lines keep everything brutally simple and moving right along. Meanwhile, roping line to line, the rhymes convey a sense of entrapment, the nightmarish claustrophobia of constricted spaces and big violent emotions, while underneath everything is a dull steady rhythm like the pounding of an angry crowd’s feet, all those paying customers looking down into the ring and screaming for action. There is no escaping Pansy’s fate; there is no getting away from March’s

Heavy,
Dense:
Implacable

style. What achieves this effect is nothing less than Frost’s “sense of form,” the instinct for words and their arrangement that keeps tinkering until everything is as it should be. The truly remarkable thing about The Set-Up is that in its best passages (there are clumsy or cliched ones too) an aesthetic notion like “sense of form” does not seem grotesquely out of place among the dialect voices, crummy setting, and bloody action.

As a whole, The Set-Up is urban, gritty, tough-talking, and wised-up, absolutely without illusions as to any chance of evading moral corruption and “Sudden disaster,” the “final hope-blaster.” In short, it is a noir poem. The cinematic term, still two decades away from its deployment by French critics, nevertheless seems right, because the poem’s images really are dark, literally and morally, and because March’s writing is so cinematic in technique. He and his reviewers freely acknowledged this, for both The Wild Party and The Set-Up. They noted phrases giving the effect of a receding photographic perspective, or images sharply isolated to make an emotional point. Untermeyer praised March’s omitting of commentary and his reliance on a “projection” of actor and action, or the way, for instance, that Herman’s bar is rendered in “cinematographic flashes,” as if in a slow pan across the decor. March himself confided in 1968 that his “school for storytelling” had been the cinema:

I had sat in theatres watching films like “The Last Laugh” and “Variety” over and over again, admiring their tremendous pace and economy, and the way the swift succession of images on the screen kept the story moving without any let-down. It didn’t take me long to recognize that cinema technique is highly selective: every image is significant; it fixes the audience’s attention on whatever is considered most important …

A 1928 letter to his father, written while March was in the midst of composing The Set-Up, is even franker about his indebtedness, indeed boyishly gushing:

I’m having an awful time keeping the narrative hard and swift moving, and still getting in all the necessary color. Also—thru necessity—am evolving a new sort of technique based on the expert lines of the moving pictures—god, those people are good! I don’t see how they do it. I learn something of value every time I see a picture, even if it’s rotten—and when it’s a really good one, my eyes pop out and I feel like taking up embroidery as a life work. [4]

After this, it comes as no surprise to learn that once The Set-Up made a hit, the poet left New York for Hollywood, ambitious to join those astonishing movie people.

Did someone at MGM, which put him under contract in 1929, pick up on the cinematic techniques of The Wild Party and The Set-Up ? Perhaps the studio simply took note of The Set-Up ‘s place on the bestseller list and hoped the author would produce equally profitable screenplays. March did well at first. He helped to shape R. C. Sherriff’s World War I play Journey’s End into a talkie, and then gave Howard Hughes the story for another war melodrama, Hell’s Angels, an early sound vehicle and first big hit for Jean Harlow, who must have seemed to March the platinum-blonde embodiment of Queenie. After that, he continued to work steadily for various studios and to earn good money, often Howard Hughes’s money, but the list of his writing credits makes for depressing reading: Hot Saturday, Sky Devils, Transatlantic Merry Go-Round, And Sudden Death, Hideaway Girl, Her Jungle Love … one forgotten and now unseeable film after another. Like other established writers in Hollywood, March scripted terrible pictures for the sake of a paycheck while hoping to do real creative work in his spare time, but the long verse narrative which he had promised to Knopf, The Undertaker’s Caprice, for which he had received a substantial advance, was going nowhere. In 1940, after writing four box-office failures for the Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures, a fed-up March decided it was time to go home to the East Coast. Living in New York City and Connecticut, he undertook free-lance writing and other jobs, still dreaming from time to time of Hollywood gold. A 1941 article for the New York Times, “One Minute on the Screen—or Two Days on the Lot,” shows a March equally cynical about and longing for the studio life, and as late as 1948 he was working on a script for something called Boum-Boum, the life story of a circus clown. But when in 1947 RKO decided to make a film of The Set-Up, paying March a little over a thousand dollars for the rights, he was not asked to write the screenplay.

Art Cohn wrote the screenplay, his first. Not much is known about Cohn, except that he began as a sportswriter, produced scripts for a dozen or so films, started a biography of the producer Mike Todd, and then died in the same 1958 plane crash that killed Todd. In any case his work on The Set-Up should be understood as part of a collaborative effort, a studio job, with story line contributions coming from many RKO people: possibly from the director Robert Wise, certainly from the producer Richard Goldstone and from the executive in charge of production, Dore Schary, who seems to have initiated the project just before he left RKO for MGM in 1948. In “One Minute on the Screen,” March wrote that incorporating higher-ups’ ideas into an original script was as difficult as “putting an elephant into a dog-kennel,” but such incorporations, not to mention others insisted on by rewrite men or actors or unit production managers, were standard Hollywood operating procedure.

Goldstone had produced only a half dozen prewar films, all of them Our Gang comedy shorts, but Robert Wise had an established and considerable reputation. This small-town Indiana boy, less well educated than March but just as much a movie fan, had started at RKO as a gofer, then slowly made himself into an editor, eventually earning a 1942 Academy Award nomination for the brilliant editing of Citizen Kane. By the mid-1940s he had directed among other films the Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation The Body Snatcher, starring Boris Karloff, The Curse of the Cat People, one of the producer Val Lewton’s horror masterpieces, and the noir thriller Born to Kill. It was a virtue of the old Hollywood studio system, something to set against its manifold vices, that it could so quickly put talented film people like Wise into action and keep them focused on the work at hand. For The Set-Up, which eventually took only nineteen days to shoot, RKO could call on several actors under contract and ready to go; on a director of photography in the business since 1917, Milton Krasner, who had plenty of noirish experience himself (Scarlet Street, The Dark Mirror); and on the film editor Roland Gross. To stage the actual boxing, RKO brought in the old welterweight champion John Indrisano. Even happenstance contributed to the project. Arthur Fellig, “Weegee,” the great tabloid news photographer, was domiciled in Hollywood to watch Jules Dassin transform his flashlit news pics into The Naked City and was willing to take on a few bit parts. In The Set-Up, Weegee plays the prizefight timekeeper, fedora on head, cigar in mouth, stopwatch and hammer in hands.

Timekeeping is of importance in The Set-Up, as eventually becomes obvious, but the first thing a viewer of the film notices, especially a viewer who has read the March poem, is that the hero has been domesticated. The aging boxer, now called Stoker Thompson, played by Robert Ryan, is far from being a bigamist like Pansy Jones. On the contrary, he is devotedly married, sharing a cramped and shabby room in the “Hotel Cozy”—which we enter through the window, in a crane shot like the famous through-the-nightclub-roof shot of Citizen Kane —with his long-suffering wife Julie, played by Audrey Totter, who wants him out of the racket. Just one more fight, he promises her, just one more chance to make a bundle … He sets off for the arena, leaving a ticket for her if she can bring herself to use it; later, in the ring, he will gaze in sad puzzlement at the seat she never fills. After his victory, Stoker is cornered in a dark alley and takes a savage beating, including the shattering of his right hand with a brick, but unlike Pansy Jones he survives, staggering out of the alley and into a semi-happy ending, his bloodied head nested on Julie’s bosom, his thickened voice observing “I can’t fight no more … Julie, I won tonight … ” “Yes, you won, dear, we both won tonight …” According to Goldstone, in an oral-history interview conducted many years after the film was produced, the filmmakers reasoned that if Stoker were killed, he would be “left without any problem. Whereas if he survived, he couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything, but had vindicated his manhood, it was a triumph rather than defeat, spiritually.” [5]

Stoker is white, not black, of course: the most egregious way in which the boxer is domesticated, made acceptable to a mass audience. On the director’s commentary track for the DVD edition of The Set-Up,[6] Wise observes blandly about the change that RKO had no Afro-American actors under contract, but this hardly seems convincing. After all, a black actor, James Edwards, does appear as a fighter in The Set-Up, momentarily sharing the dressing room with Stoker. What the studio lacked was not black acting talent but the courage to take a chance on a risky black character like Pansy Jones, and to buck industry convention. In 1944, turning a Raymond Chandler novel into Murder, My Sweet, RKO had unhesitatingly made a black milieu over into a white one, while other studios saw to it that their boxing dramas featured white stars, like John Garfield in Body and Soul, or Kirk Douglas in Champion.

In The Set-Up, RKO turned March’s fighting animal (“He leapt in striking / Like a savage cat”) into a more sympathetic figure, a victim rather than the victimizer-victim we see in Pansy. Stoker is an inarticulate but decent Joe; American males could view his tough-fisted triumph as their own, while simultaneously enjoying the sensation of being succored by a beautiful woman, of being worshipped by her tear-dropping eyes. Audience identification came at a cost, of course, which was homogeneity and a certain blandness. No one in the film is as Jewish or Italian or German as the characters of the poem; no one even says “dem” or “dese” or “dose,” terms banished from the original script, according to Richard Goldstone’s recollection, by a cautious Dore Schary. A more significant cost of whitening the hero was a distortion of history. Like all the other Hollywood boxing films of the period, The Set-Up downplays the extent to which American pugilism was energized, made viciously exciting, by racial rivalry, the contest of white man and black man in the ring. The original poem, for all its stereotyping of Pansy, had at least got that part of boxing right.

Predictably, March hated Pansy’s change of color. Invited by an editor of Ebony for a comment, he replied that the filmmakers

not only threw away the mainspring of the story, they evaded the whole basic issue of discrimination against the Negro… . Hollywood’s attitude to the Negro in films has been dictated all too often by box-office considerations: they are afraid of losing money in the Jim Crow South. If this is what made them change “The Set-Up,” they should be ashamed. [7]

The race change in the film is unquestionably a betrayal of something, of American history, of March’s original conception, of toughness of mind, of honesty as opposed to cautiousness, and not much can be said in its defense except that it permitted a brilliant performance by a big-time star of the 1940s.

Robert Ryan had boxed with great success as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, which meant he could handle the fight scenes with complete convincingness. Ryan could also act, moving seamlessly between interpretations of Stoker as hero, Stoker as palooka. Onscreen the actor repeatedly lets himself fall into a dulled stupor but then brightens a few seconds later, as in a sequence when Stoker looks out the window, sees the light in the hotel room go off, thinks Julie is coming to the arena after all, and turns smiling to his locker, smacking his hands together with slap-happy fighter’s glee. Later, when Stoker looks at himself in a mirror, taking inventory of all the scars or estimating what he’s got left, Ryan deftly underplays the action and stretches out the moment. He appears to start to say something, then lets his mouth hang open, stoically or maybe just vacantly silent. By this sort of thing, Goldstone commented, “we were very, very subtly starting to convey … that [Stoker’s] brains also are a little addled by this time. He is not rational … he’s taken too many punches himself.”

The Set-Up is in general a film of expressive and brilliantly photographed looks. Faces in the fight crowd are shown in close-up, carefully individualized, so that as we hear their hoarse-voiced catcalls we also see the shine of their sweat and the nastiness of their excitement, that of the women particularly, though a white-suited blind man (he has a crony with him to narrate what’s happening in the ring) rivals them in prurience. The shots of the crowd are like the shots of the lynch mob in Fritz Lang’s great melodrama Fury (1936), an unforgiving portrayal of small-town pathology. By contrast, in quieter moments of The Set-Up, we’re given looks of a different kind. Wise’s camera pans slowly over the faces of all the fighters in the dressing room as they contemplate the has-been Gunboat Johnson, stretched out unconscious on the trainer’s table, his features beaten down into a meat-slab and his brains scrambled by too many punches. The fighters’ faces show dread, though no one word, “dread” or any other, really comprehends what the film is able to show, in a few seconds of screen time, by way of wordless emotional response to a wrenching human situation.

All through The Set-Up, we see confirmed the oldest of truisms about film, that it tells its stories best in images, in what can be shown —a crowd’s blood lust, the boxers’ awareness of what’s coming to them in the end—as opposed to what is spoken or narrated. Art Cohn’s dialogue in The Set-Up is ordinary, occasionally mawkish, as in a dressing-room speech about religious salvation (“a million to one chance”) delivered by a second-rate, Bible-toting fighter. That final line of Julie’s about both of them winning tonight, dear, is all too characteristic of her dialogue and of the way Cohn imagined her, one-note and little-womanly. How Robert Wise, or Wise and the cinematographer Milton Krasner, imagined her, is somewhat different. In a long sequence their Julie is shown wandering the streets outside the arena, trying to decide whether to use her ticket. A sustained tracking shot follows her down the sidewalk as she dodges the grifters and the rubes, then pauses at the door of a penny arcade—“Dreamland,” as a neon sign announces (Wise said that though The Set-Up was a modest feature, it was “A- or B+ in terms of budget,” and in the street details and the Dreamland set you can see how well the budget was spent: the studio system again, at its best). There is almost no dialogue here, only the miscellaneous sounds of human beings having cheap fun on a hot summer night. Julie walks dispiritedly on to a quieter spot, a hilltop lookout beneath which streetcars and buses plunge into a tunnel. She bends over the stone parapet and gazes idly at the traffic; and in that look, the actress’ slumped shoulders, her closed-up face, the sound of the streetcars dully clattering on the tracks below, the sheer meaningless banality of the moment, is instantaneously conveyed a mood of entrapment or hopelessness or fated defeat—what Graham Greene, in a film review, once called the “ordinary recognizable agony.” A woman like Julie could not express the agony in phrases, any more than her beaten-up prizefighter of a husband, but she is fully capable of feeling it, and the camera of depicting it. She slowly tears her fight ticket up, dropping the pieces on the tracks below, as Wise shows in a brief overhead shot: sad confetti.

As for the prizefight itself in The Set-Up, that too gives opportunities for showing. The exchange of blows between Stoker and his opponent, here called Tiger Nelson, a brash kid, stays very close to the original. What March conveyed in the short sharp rhythm of his verse, Wise conveys in the photography—three cameras, one of them handheld, were used—and especially in the editing, which synchronizes with the fighters’ darting movements and constantly crosscuts to the crowd or the smirks of Stoker’s handlers (when he’s on the ropes) or their scowls (when he lands an uppercut on Tiger’s chin). The camera moves closer to the fighters or pulls slightly back, but always keeps a ringside, just-outside-the-ropes perspective, locating us uncomfortably in that screaming crowd. In their unrelenting violence the fight sequences of The Set-Up do ample justice to that part of March which wanted to offend, which made him write verse after verse about blood and pain. Arguably, indeed, the film is truer to the boxing action than poetry ever could be. After all, even with short lines and simple direct verbs, it takes a moment to get through

The Sailor missed.
Before he could stop,
Pansy whirled
Spun like a top.
His shoulders humped.
And in he jumped,

whereas the punches and the counterpunches of the film take place in a fast blur (Goldstone: “the reason for the whip pans was to increase the tempo of the action. To give a feeling of rush, of building speed, increasing speed”), always accompanied by the yelling of the crowd, the glare of the arena lights, the smoky air, the thud of gloves, the sprays of sweat or blood. There could scarcely be a better demonstration of simultaneity as an essential technique of film. Possibly it was this quality which made Martin Scorsese so admire The Set-Up. In a DVD commentary he describes the editing of the film as being lean and tough, “like a fighter,” and notes that on the set of The Aviator, his biopic about March’s old patron Howard Hughes, he arranged a special screening of The Set-Up for the cast. In Scorsese’s own boxing melodrama, Raging Bull, he took viewers much further into the ring than Wise had cared to, trapping them there to share Jake LaMotta’s ordeal, but Raging Bull can hardly improve on Wise’s film in its depiction of punches moving fast and doing damage.

Wise must consciously have chosen to keep his camera behind the ropes—that is, to keep the ropes in constant view—if only to emphasize the constricted space where Stoker and Tiger go at it. Throughout the film Wise emphasizes constriction: the tiny congested set for the dressing room, where fighters and seconds are always elbowing each other out of the way; the alleyway dead-end where Stoker is finally cornered; Stoker and Julie’s little room in the Hotel Cozy. All this shows a sophisticated sense of form, and what the form communicates is a feeling of entrapment and claustrophobia. Stoker has nowhere to go (for a long minute, the film shows him caged in the darkened arena, trying locked door after locked door); his enemies come on inexorably or mechanically, like the streetcars Julie watches.

The most important of all the film’s constrictions is temporal rather than spatial, however, and achieved by a device apparently thought up by Dore Schary. At the opening of the action, a crane shot leads us toward the Paradise City Athletic Club, past a city clock showing 9:05 p.m. At the end, a reverse crane shot pulls us back from the club past the same clock, now showing 10:17 p.m. Seventy-two fictional minutes have elapsed, which is the actual running time of the film. In 1952, with High Noon, real-time filming would be much ballyhooed by critics, but Schary and Wise used the device first, three years before Fred Zinnemann, and just as deliberately and openly as Zinnemann did, with plenty of cuts to a clock-watching Julie to clue us in. The clock’s hands move with their own inexorability to that moment when, Julie knows, Stoker will have to fight. Meanwhile managers are always coming into the dressing room to hurry their boys out to the ring; the timekeeper repeatedly looks at his stopwatch and drops the hammer on the bell; the referee counts ten over a fallen boxer … time is everywhere, pressing on. The viewer is as anxiously trapped in the time scheme of this film as the reader of March’s poem is trapped in his tight little verse paragraphs: it is a triumph of page-to-screen adaptation, something to set against RKO’s whitening of Pansy’s skin. March himself—“I learn something of value every time I see a picture”—might have approved Wise’s ingenious last shot of the clock in the hotel room. At an oblique angle across a dresser top, where Julie is warming some soup for her long overdue husband, she herself appears reflected in the clock face, a tiny worried figure pacing back and forth across the blurry hands and numerals. It is an image which might easily be interpreted in words (“She is a prisoner of …”) but which scarcely needs to be.

In actual fact, when March and his wife saw The Set-Up at its first release, he apparently approved of nothing in it. His account in A Certain Wildness mentions scraping together enough money for balcony seats in a big cinema on Times Square, only to be disgusted by what he complained of to Ebony, the change from black boxer to white boxer, the tossing of the “whole point of the narrative … out the window.” The account ends with a bitter ironic sigh or shrug of the shoulders, in one of those short lines that March was so fond of:

Ah, Hollywood … !

What March says about scraping money together can be believed, in that his post-screenwriting career was only intermittently successful. Publishers and agents rejected his proposals, he and his wife were beset by illness, money was scarce, he had to write an apologetic note to a doctor about not paying a bill, while meanwhile he was working off his debt to Knopf for The Undertaker’s Caprice in sad little fifty-dollar installments. The payment he got from Merchant-Ivory for The Wild Party rights in 1975 made a big difference to him in the two years he had left before his death, in Los Angeles, in 1977. All this history of just scraping by and lapsing into obscurity appears the more painful in comparison with the career of, say, Robert Wise, who saw The Set-Up gain critical approval (it won two awards at Cannes), then went on to direct thirty-two more films, some of them big hits (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music, Star Trek, West Side Story). One of Wise’s best later pictures, Odds Against Tomorrow, featured an important black actor, Harry Belafonte, playing against Robert Ryan as a bigot, as if in delayed reparation for the racial switch in The Set-Up. Wise eventually became President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and winner of its 1967 Irving Thalberg Award. Meanwhile old friends of March also prospered and gained fame: his Lawrenceville classmates Reginald Marsh and Randall Thompson, for example. As for James Chapin, as impecunious as the young March in the era when Negro Boxer provided the stimulus for The Set-Up, he found a teaching post at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and established himself successfully as a painter of genre scenes and commissioned portraits. Chapin painted Alexander Meiklejohn, March’s old antagonist, and also Frost; Chapin’s somber green-gray study of the poet hangs prominently in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst.

In 1968 March attempted a writerly comeback with a reprint edition of both The Wild Party and The Set-Up, accompanied by the long autobiographical introduction A Certain Wildness. For this edition, he decided, a revision of The Set-Up would be advisable. Like the elder Wordsworth reshaping The Prelude into a respectable epic, March reshaped his slangy youthful poem into something staider, so that

Some of the sporting pink
Papers raised a stink

became

Some of the sporting writers tried
To throw their weight on Pansy’s side;

and

They damn well chose to be let alone

became

They chose to be let alone.

Many tabloid-tongued passages, for example

Ready to hit like a pile-driver
With either mitt,

were simply deleted.

But March went further. He had received complaints about anti-Semitism in his portrayal of Cohn, Pansy’s scheming fight manager. Accordingly, he changed Cohn to Stone and moderated the character’s racial characteristics (“Nose like a beak,” “Grey bulging eyes”: both phrases excised). “Swarthy” became “swaggering,” “How they hangink?” turned into “How they hang-in’?” At the same time March cut out the tightfisted Scottishness of Ed MacPhail, the objectionable Germanness of Herman Brecht. Tony Morelli metamorphosed into Tony Diamond, Battlin’ Kovinsky into Battlin’ Fargo. Most (not quite all) of the “nigger“‘s hurled as insults at Pansy were cut, as were those objectionable lines comparing Pansy to the missing link, something to catch and cage, a specimen of a Jungle Age; Pansy’s own speech grew more correct. Even the mildest of ethnic references—“It sounded like the Mexican army coming”—was sanitized into “It sounded like a whole platoon coming.”

This de-ethnicization of The Set-Up is the last and saddest lesson of the poem’s history. More thorough even than RKO’s in the film version, it was carried out for good liberal reasons, fully explained in A Certain Wildness. March believed that attitudes had changed, that readers in 1968 would be troubled by the obnoxiously Jewish fight manager of forty years earlier, and no doubt he was right. Yet what was the original poem’s purpose, if not to trouble? The Set-Up is a profoundly troubling work, a showcase of just how nasty the American demotic could sound, an assault like one of Pansy’s punches on smugness and good liberal attitudes and gentility. It preserves as if for the record an era’s ethnic animosities, and those animosities we had better not obliterate, however much we wish to distance ourselves from them now. March himself acknowledged the poem’s documentary function (“like the photograph of a lynching”), the viciousness of its milieu, and its mood of grim squalor—all qualities compromised by the rewrite. The Cohn of the original may be shaped into his villainy by the anti-Semitism of the 1920s, but he is at least real enough to pay attention to, sharply observed, alive and kicking on the page,

Vy, Jesus Christ you don’t deserve
I should make you an answer!
Vere is your nerve?,

whereas the Stone of the rewrite is a cipher, a nothing:

What did I ever do to deserve
A partner like you!
Where’s your nerve?

Stone is the creation of a man long out of touch with the actual fight arenas of his youth, with their stench and their catcalling accented voices.

Both the poetic and the cinematic The Set-Up acknowledge what time has in store for aging prizefighters—

The spot light shifts:
The clock ticks fast:
All youth becomes old age at last—

but the revision of the poem reveals more cruelly, under bright lights and in the public arena, what time has in store for aging writers, the draining away of confidence, the loss of technique, the rewriting of feistiness into bland acceptability. Doing what March did to his long-ago work, as the rejection slips kept arriving and the bank balance fell, is human and understandable. Nevertheless, it sabotaged what was most distinctive in him, and what in some sense he knew was most distinctive in him. This was his wildness, a quality even RKO, in its fashion, had stayed faithful to, punch by photographed punch. Wildness had once made the young man thumb his nose at Amherst, go to war, drink at parties, become a writer, offend Harold Ross, invent a new verse form, fall in love with the cinema, move to California, work for Howard Hughes. Wildness had witnessed racial hatred, dreamed up Pansy Jones, and put Pansy in the middle of an original, disturbing, angry, hard-to-forget poem. All this, in the end, the old man’s cautiousness irredeemably betrayed.

Ah, Hollywood?

Ah, Joseph Moncure March.

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