Category: Films

The Set-Up from noir director, Robert Wise, is a sharp expose of the fight game packed into a lean 72 minutes. From RKO and filmed at night on a studio lot, this movie is brooding and intense, with Robert Ryan, as the aging boxer, “Stoker” Thompson, in perhaps his best role, with a great supporting cast. The boxing scenes are as real as they get: Ryan himself was a college boxing champ. The arena is brilliantly filmed with focused and repeated shots on selected spectators, which portray not only the excitement, but also the unadorned mob brutality, that reaches fever pitch as the fighters struggle to a climactic finish.

The film opens and ends with zoom shots of a street clock: starting at 9.05pm and ending at 10.17pm – yes – the actual length of the picture…

There are other interesting visual commentaries on the action which mock the existential angst of the protagonists:

The boxers’ dressing room, where Stoker’s essentially decent persona is established from his interactions with the other boxers, is beautifully evoked. Each person in that room is deeply and sympathetically drawn, and these scenes are enthralling. To the movie makers’ credit, remember this is 1949, there is a black boxer, who responds to Stoker’s friendliness, with a heart-felt wish of good luck, after winning his own fight.

A simple story of gut-wrenching humanity. One of the great noirs.

The Set-Up has been packaged with four other films noir in the DVD set Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 1. The other movies in the DVD set are the noir classics: The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Murder My Sweet, and Out of the Past.

A very enjoyable B thriller from a crew with strong film noir credentials. Director, Richard Fleischer, is ably supported by cameraman, George E. Diskant, and the movie features a strong cast of b-liners, with the tough Charles McGraw and the exciting Marie Windsor in the leads. A nice plot twist propels the tension to the end. From the dramatic opening credits of a train screeching through the night, The Narrow Margin, has you hooked.

One of the best on-a-train thrillers, this movie starts off in noir mood but develops into a smart thriller with few noir pretensions. The direction is sharp, the dialog snappy, and the cast top-notch. The early night scenes before the action switches to a train trip from Chicago to LA, are brilliantly filmed and edited, with stark lighting and shadows, and low angles.

On the train, tension is heightened by judicious cuts to the steaming train running aggressively from right to left across the screen. There is a nice piece of montage worthy of Eisenstein half-way through the trip which gives a cut to the train even added tension: the action cuts from Marie Windsor frantically filing her nails to the churning wheels of the steam engine.

For me this film is all about Marie Windsor as the dame in trouble scrapping with her cop protector. She dominates every scene with her aura of sex, excitement, and nervous fear. Her great lines are delivered flawlessly with great rolling of her incendiary eyes and almost always with a cigarette in her mouth or hand. You don’t want this vixen to leave the screen.

She is brutally bumped off towards the end, and to my exasperation is never alluded to again. This cheapens the rest of the story for me, because she is the one character who is exposed to the most danger, and merits the greatest kudos. To be simply forgotten is almost misogynistic.

This weakness aside, the closing scenes are classic compositions which accentuate the escape from the claustrophobia of the train while remaining on the “straight and narrow”:

Boomerang, an early movie from director, Elia Kazan, is famous for its then innovative quasi-documentary style. Based on a true story, it is a sharp and well-acted film where a small-town DA in a novel reversal of role determines the innocence of a troubled WW2 vet wrongly charged with murder. The movie feels dated but the story of integrity in the face of political corruption and police expediency remains strong.

How others have classified this picture as a noir has me stumped. Yes, the accused is a war veteran struggling to catch up in the “parade of life” after 5 years in the army, but this is peripheral and does not a film noir make.