The Set Up (1949) review
Robert Ryan as Stoker Thompson: is this THE night?
Believing is a condition of life. Even if it’s against all the odds. That’s what Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949) is about. How things turn out different? How does something new occur? Are events in the world a mere set of odds and probabilities subject to calculation to be added up on a "future book"? No matter the answer, one thing is certain: you just have to believe.
Determinism, probabilism, chaos: what's the difference if you're a small-time player, gambler, boxer or just a loiter in Paradise City? The town is a magma for losers and dreamers. Some hang around the streets, drink and smoke in bars, listen to the radio behind counters; others crowd in the locker room, waiting their turn at the ring, faithful they’ll get to fat city.
And inside this locker room, where all boxers wait for their hour at the wheel of fortune, one boxer says to another, while holding a scratch book with betting odds: "I play percentages. The odd is a million to one. A guy would be a sucker not to take them kind of odds, huh?"––– Would he? ––– The other boxer, properly called Mickey, replies: "How do you like that guy? Making a book on the hereafter?" –– There's hardly a better definition of a scientist than this one.
In playing the odds of the universe, winning seems easy, for the odds are always low. Well, human beings conduct their affairs in the universe, therefore the odds would have to be just as low, it is just a matter of knowing them. If the universe is determined, then human life is determined. And so the losers and dreamers and lowlifes in Paradise City behave like scientists: their subject-matter being, naturally, boxing.
We hear from one boxer, who's lost twenty-one fights in a row, that this night things are going to turn around for him. He'll start a winning spree that'll take him to the title. The hero of The Set-Up, Bill "Stoker" Thompson, is another one of these losers. He always loses and yet he always thinks he'll win and get his once-in-a-lifetime break. –– "I'll take that kid tonight I can feel it". ––Nobody else believes it, for they are all Humean creatures of habit. –– "You'll always be one punch away", his wife tells him in a cheap hotel room, exhausted: she’s just tired of seeing him lose fight after fight.
If you already know the ending, why go see a show? Why should one watch the same old movie with the same old sad ending over and over again? For the wife, it's a ritual of humiliation, nothing more. For our fighter Stoker, however, it cannot be just that: he has to believe, he's made to believe. That’s life for him: he just can’t help believing.
For other assorted types in town – gamblers, managers, the audience – that same old show might pay off. And for those who seek a thrill, and get a kick out of seeing someone getting his ass kicked— it's always fun, and you can have it with popcorn too. For those who seek profit— what better chances than betting on what always happens? The sun goes down and so does Stoker.
And his fate is settled, unbeknownst to him, even before he steps into the ring: his own manager has made a deal with a local mobster promising he'll take the fall. The only problem: he's so certain his fighter is a loser that he does not even bother to make sure he's in on the set-up. He takes the defeat to be a certainty: the odds are one-hundred to one. –– "But there's always that one...", they tell him. ––– He shrugs it off: that one is an illusion, the other one-hundred are reality.
After all, things always happen the way they're used to happening: it's called living. Until one day they don't. What happens when that one-hundred to one odd pays off? It only takes one... More importantly for the scientist: why does that one come about then and there? You do what you always do, it happens just the way it always happens–– but somehow the result is different. What's the explanation? In sports and gambling that's always the thrill: when will contingency favor us and break the spell of predictability?
The Set-Up takes its time. The story happens in one agitated hour, marked throughout the film in explicit clock shots: from 9:05 pm to 10:16 pm. A whole lot of expectation is created on the event: the fight. And we linger on the prelude to this event which is the one: when things turn out differently. Why did he win this fight? As in history, retrospectively many causal explanations will be given as to why this event, which nobody expected, happened then and there, like this and not like that. All necessary explanations, perhaps, none sufficient.
It's easy to play numbers with the universe for it’s so far away… One can just "shut up and calculate", indeed. When one's involved though, like a boxer – especially a bad boxer – one cannot afford such luxury. Stoker, the down-and-out loser who could not win a fight, when they bet on his loss— won.
It is the film’s tragedy that he gets his hands broken for this. And he'll never fight again because he won. But there's redemption in The Set-Up. In defying both the odds, his stars, and what the world had decided for him, he regained his dignity and learned a most valuable lesson: when it comes to living, belief pays off.
As in Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”: “I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains".
