The Set-Up has been unfairly overlooked for being a boxing film rather than the superb film noir that it is. The French film critic Georges Sadoul wrote, "Set entirely at night in a seedy provincial town, this harsh portrait of the boxing world, with its petty crooks and its sadistic, hysterical crowds, has rarely been matched." Robert Ryan (who was an amateur boxer himself) gives a canny performance as an aging middleweight who spoils a racketeer's arrangement for a fix by insisting on a win-despite fierce punishment in the ring from his younger opponent. Audrey Totter is his wife, as desperate for an end to the boxing life as her husband is for redemption in the ring. Inspired by a jazz-age poem by Joseph Moncure March ("Cheap seats, the crowd was rough/ None of your high-hat Gershwin stuff"), the film itself is a bruising bit of American poetry, from the bleak town with its Cozy Hotel and I Dream Cafe, to the vicious gangster named Little Boy and the spectator who constantly shouts "Kill him! Kill him!"