“The Set Up” is playing this weekend (08/12-13/2011) at Film Forum… The highlight of a Robert Ryan retrospective.

(A page from Weegee by Weegee.)

Two paragraphs from the NY Times website:

“Robert Ryan’s Quiet Furies”

By Manohla Dargis (Published: August 5, 2011)

Born to play beautifully tortured, angry souls, the actor Robert Ryan was a familiar movie face for more than two decades in Hollywood’s classical years, his studio ups and downs, independent detours and outlier adventures paralleling the arc of American cinema as it went from a national pastime to near collapse. A little prettier and he might have been one of the golden boys of the golden age. But there could be something a touch menacing about his face (something open and sweet too), which bunched as tight as a fist, and his towering height (he stood 6 foot 4) at times loomed like a threat. The rage boiled up in him so quickly. It made him seem dangerous…

He nurtured his social activism for most of his life, fighting for civil liberties and against nuclear armament…

Ryan made “The Set-Up,” one of his favorites and most indelible films, two years later. Directed by Robert Wise (who had edited “Citizen Kane”), “The Set-Up” is a tight, intensely moving, pocket-size masterwork about Stoker Thompson, a washed-up, 35-year-old heavyweight who believes he’s just “one punch away” from changing his lousy luck. Part redemption story, part romance (his wife is played by Audrey Totter), the film unfolds in close to real time and takes place in the cruelly named Paradise City. Ryan, all muscle, sinew and heart-rending longing, slugs through one punishing round after another — look for the photographer Weegee hitting the bell as the timekeeper — creating a portrait of a man who endures ghastly physical punishment on his way to redemption.

“The Set-Up” almost didn’t happen, having been canceled by Howard Hughes, who had bought a controlling interest in RKO in 1948…

From the Film Forum website:

THE SET-UP

(1949, Robert Wise) Unheralded “real time” experiment, as aging boxer Ryan turns down an invitation to take a dive, then pays the price. Approx. 72 minutes.

“A tight, intensely moving, pocket-sized masterwork. Ryan, all muscle, sinew and heart-rending longing, slugs through one punishing round after another — look for the photographer Weegee

hitting the bell as the timekeeper — creating a portrait of a man who endures

ghastly physical punishment on his way to redemption.”

– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“ONE FOR THE TEN BEST LISTS! This is the boxing movie to lick all others, with Ryan impeccable as the ageing fighter gearing up for a bout he’s expected to lose… Great blue moments in black-and-white from a director whose early work is still outstanding: the film burns with the humanity that Raging Bull never quite achieves, an expression of masochism mixed with futile pride that is the essence of boxing as a movie myth.”

– Time Out (London)

“The first half of Robert Wise’s boldly drawn film, set mostly in the ring’s warm-up room, captures in miniature Stoker’s (Robert Ryan) life as a whole until that moment: one long wait for the fight that will change everything. And then it’s happening—success, or failure—in front of everyone choreographed by lank former university champ Ryan and enacted before a vividly realized avid crowd, the bout is edited into an exhausting sequence. By the end, we feel his experience in our own muscles.”

– NicolasRapold, Artforum

“Hard to forget. Ryan–his face never more craggily heroic than in defeat–raises the picture above its poetry-of-realism aspirations.”

– Pauline Kael

“The fight, seen round by round, is the most savage ever filmed… An excellent example of studio-built realism.”

– Richard Winnington

“Bob caught all the nuances of guts and shattered hopes, and small-time aspirations of a never-was beating the hell out of the desperation of being a club fighter.”

– Samuel Fuller