FFB: THE SET-UP by Joseph Moncure March (Covici-Friede 1928) as reviewed in the NYT by James T. Farrell

The other week I saw the neat little noir film The Set-Up (1949), about Robert Ryan as an over-the-hill but not finished boxer, though his wife (played by Audrey Totter) is worried he's sticking with it too long, risking too much. And things don't go well for him, nor for a number of the other folks on the match card with him and sharing a prep and fix-up room, in the small-city athletic club where most of the boxing action is set. Reportedly this was Robert Wise's favorite of the films he directed at RKO and one of his favorites among all his films. A bit heavy-handed (or gloved), not too much, about the brutality of the sport and the milieu in which it exists. 

First edition. Iconography not the most enlightened even for the time. The film makes the protagonist a non-brutish pale Caucasian.

Not quite unrelentingly grim, but the primary trainer and "cut man" (essentially the on-site medic) gets one of the more blatant bits meant to be humorous, when, after the last boxer leaves the prep room, he opens up the issue of the romance-fiction pulp magazine Thrilling Love he's been reading and settles in for more.

Art Cohn's script is loosely based on Joseph Moncure March's narrative poem. In the FictionMags Index, March's "Lyric to Baseball" is listed as a short story...perhaps because the The New Yorker's online archive lists it as a short story...but it's actually, and unsurprisingly with that title, a 12-line filler poem, at the tail end of the theater column, perhaps an intentional transition to the sports column on the facing page (how soon after Harold Ross ceased editing did TNY lose its sports column?):

"I hereby swear--expecting sneers--

That baseball bores me to tears.

While thousands shout at home run Kings,

My yawns escape on mighty wings:

When fielders muff an easy fly

And millions groan--I wonder why:

Always the one spectacular play

Comes when I look the other way:

Last, but not least--a fatal touch!--

The women I see there aren't so much.

I therefore swear--expecting sneers--

That baseball bores me to tears."

--Not so much for his lack of baseball fandom might he expect a sneer or a shrug for the doggerel. And his relative obscurity today...perhaps the film's source poem is a bit more impressive...

James T. Farrell says it is, in his 1977 New York Times consideration of March's two most famous books in verse form: 

[...] There is one interesting exception — he is known to sportswriters as the author of “The Set‐Up,” originally published in 1928, a classic about prize‐fighting. Earlier, in 1926, he had published “The Wild Party.”

These two books, especially “The Wild Party,” had been received with enthusiasm. Among those who saw value in March's work was Edmund Wilson. But even among those who agreed with Wilson there was disagreement. Were these books poetry? They were written in verse form. There was a pattern of rhymes. The language was simple, and some of the words were spelled phonetically.

“My god, Queenie; you're looking swell!”

Quoth Queenie:

“I'm feeling slick as hell”

This from the first section of “The Wild Party.” And in “The Set‐Up”:

“Yes suh!” he said.

“This shirt sure grand!

Ah held four Aces in my hand.

Got this shirt, Got this cap.

Poker suits me

Better'n crap.”

I have selected these two examples at random.

And if that's poetry, I'll eat my hat.

Both books could be described as novelettes following the general form of poetry. There are passages that rise to a poetic level. The stories are taut. In each of them tension mounts to a conclusion of tragedy. At least, they are tragic if the killing of a human because of greed or of drunken desire and jealousy, still can be called tragic. There is a strong sense of reality although some of this reality is sordid. The organization of the work can be termed cinematic. It's as if March anticipated scenario writing for sound films. But “The Wild Party” was written before the first talking picture was publicly released. And after “The Set‐Up,” March did work as a scenario writer in the film industry. In fact, he earned a number of credits as such. His ability to convey drama powerfully and quickly and his ear for dialogue helped him carry a storyline. March was an able writer. In some of his the reader all but feel the atmosphere in which his characters move, speak and act.

The Roaring Twenties was the decade for wild parties, parties where elitist youths could become “free” by drinking too much and daring too much. (In the 20's there was bathtub gin; in the present there is cocaine.) These young people have been immortalized, their anti‐conventional and frequently bizarre conduct romanticized. Few of them had read works of Nietzsche, but this didn't stop them from trying to act out his advice—to live dangerously. The fact is, of course, that wild parties and elitists who “dare” have always existed. But, in the 20's, there were many who felt that they had invented the wild party. In his book, “The Wild Party,” March did more than reflect this attitude, he brought it before the eyes of his readers. One of the popular jazz songs of the age was “I'm Runnin' Wild.” The first two lines, as I recall, of the chorus were: “I'm runnin' wild; I've lost control.” In “The Wild Party,” March developed this idea.

More of Farrell's essay at the link: 

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/17/archives/the-wild-party-and-the-setup-wild-party.html

And the lyrics of "Runnin' Wild" run a bit closer to this:

My gal and I, we had a fight 
And I'm all by myself
I guess she thinks now that she's gone
I'll lay right on the shelf
I'm gonna show her she's all wrong
No lonesome stuff for mine
I won't sit home, all alone
She'll soon find that I'm
Runnin' wild, lost control
Runnin' wild, mighty bold
Feelin' gay, reckless too
Care free mind all the time, never blue
Always goin' don't know where
Always showin', I don't care
Don't love nobody, it's not worth while
All alone, runnin' wild. Runnin' wild
When I first met that gal of mine
It seemed just like a dream
But when she tho't she had me right
She started actin' mean
Like mary led her little lamb 
She led me all the time
Until the worm had to turn
That's the reason I'm
Runnin' wild, lost control
Runnin' wild,…

FFB/MS: THE LONG GOODBYE, a 1972 draft of the screenplay by Leigh Brackett; BRASS KNUCKLES by Stuart Dybek (University of Pittsburgh, 1979)

This copy of a 1972 draft of Leigh Brackett's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is missing some key pages (not simply page 21 as annotated on the title page) but nonetheless is a very worthwhile reading experience, as Brackett proves she's as adept a scriptwriter as one might've guessed from her often brilliant, and diverse, fiction, and the films made from her scripts. It's offered as part of a multimedia web post on the Cinephilia & Beyond blog, along with several interviews with Brackett and others, and the draft was written before Robert Altman was associated with the project, but with knowledge that Elliott Gould was meant to play Philip Marlowe. One of the points of rage regarding the film for many Chandler/Marlowe fans is that Gould seems unlikely to be the Marlowe of Chandler's fiction (he doesn't seem quite right to Brackett, either, as it turns out, but not so much for the reasons that most of the Chandler fans resent so volubly...she sees Gould as insufficiently hardboiled, essentially). She also makes clear, both in the script and the discussion about it, that she takes full responsibility for the single fact that most enrages so many Chandler purists, the murder of Terry Lennox at the end of the film, a matter Brackett notes is left far more nebulous at the end of the novel. She also heightens the degree, in her script, to which Marlowe is not just sardonic but a smartass, which might well have been in part inspired by knowledge that Gould was meant to have the role, while retaining what Brackett sees as the most important aspect of the character, his basic uncompromising incorruptibility, his unwillingness to play along with those around him who want him to look the other way or go along with the gag even when it would be safer for him to do so. (I should admit at this point I remember the film, which I've seen about three times over the decades in its entirety, better than I do the novel, which I've read once thirty-plus years ago.) The film differs in notable ways from this draft of the script...Marty Augustine the gangster doesn't abuse his girlfriend-of-sorts as a way to get at Marlowe, and Altman's obsession with nudity, whether a thrown away joke as with Marlowe's neighbors or used to further heighten the insanity of Augustine in a setpiece in the film, is also missing from this script...though the abuse of his wife Eileen by the drunken bully Roger Wade is if anything more intense and vile in the script as written. (And how much Chandler's, or Brackett's, Roger Wade is meant to be after Hemingway is an interesting question.)

The utter concision of the dialog, and the grace with which the boiled-down version of the novel is conveyed in her script (Brackett notes that to truly film the novel as written, it would take at least five hours...perhaps a project someone should attempt), and the adeptness with which Brackett makes the adaptation believable as a contemporary story in 1972 is all very much worth experiencing firsthand, even, again, given that the PDF document is missing a few pages. Having read the novel or particularly seen the film will help with those elisions...and I have to wonder if the PDF document is missing the later pages through a slip-up on the part of the blogger. There are apparently a few other script drafts floating about from Brackett's career, but a formal, complete collection is more than overdue, given the importance of her work as a whole and of most of the films she scripted or wrote treatments for.

Stuart Dybek's Brass Knuckles is another odd choice, I suppose, even for the heavily crime-fiction-oriented FFB roundelay, as it's his first collection, from 1979, of poetry and prose-poetical vignettes. Divided into four sections, "Exile at 7", "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street", "Grand Entrance" and "My Neighborhood", it's largely a set of evocations of the tougher parts of Chicago, in and around the Polish-American neighborhood where Dybek was raised. A lot of the ground tread here falls somewhere between the abuse of children and its consequences in Joyce Carol Oates's similar work and the self abuse of Charles Bukowski's, though the writer I'm most reminded of is Ed Gorman...even if Dybek is more a Romantic than Ed was, in several ways, and has some manic asides and foregrounded metaphors, such as the suggestion of a not completely bad marriage that has the diminutive groom standing for a while on his wedding cake, holding hands with the wax bride figurine, while his actual bride cavorts with most of the wedding party, that fit in well with the mythical allusions, gritty details and explorations of lust and frustration throughout the lives of the characters. And much of the book is very funny, only some of it tragic. 

Perhaps almost as sad as some of the more sober bits is the fate of even some of the colleges, much less their little magazines, that this work first appeared in, in the 1970s, though looking again I suppose it's just the Goddard Journal that would be utterly vanished now. Though perhaps it's telling in a small way that the book has seen its more recent edition from not the state-owned University of Pittsburgh Press, but Carnegie-Mellon's...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: THE BIG TOWN (1987); MAIGRET HAS SCRUPLES (2004)

The first of my films this week has probably been more overlooked by me than most of you who might be reading this...it popped up on the digital broadcast network This TV on Thursday night while I was eating a late supper, and while I was vaguely aware of its existence, I had never made an effort to see it...but as the ridiculously impressive cast credits rolled by, and even more impressively to me, the fact that it was an adaptation of a Clark Howard novel, The Arm, made it necessary to give it some attention. (That cast includes Matt Dillon, Suzy Amis, Diane Lane, Lee Grant, Bruce Dern, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Skerritt, Cherry Jones, Del Close, and as Amis's character's young daughter, Sarah Polley. Ridiculous. The casting director, Nancy Klopper, deserves an award named after her...the other folks who haven't become as famous since, or weren't already, are as good.)


The second is part of a series of French/Belgian/Swiss (mostly French) telefilm adptations of Georges Simenon's novels, part of the rotation of International Crime Drama, Sundays and Tuesdays at 9pm ET/6pm PT on the small (about thirty affiliates nationwide) US public television network, MHz WorldView (and the oldest set in a "wheel" otherwise mostly devoted to such Scandinavian and Italian fare as the Swedish Wallander films, of late Irene Huss, and Montalbano...though some Tatort episodes, the German Law & Order equivalent, also make the cut). The late Bruno Cremer capped his career, moving from supporting roles to center stage with the role of Maigret. (Scruples will be repeated twice tonight on the network.)












I have never learned the rules of the gambling dice game craps, but that doesn't diminish the suspense built up around some of the games in the somewhat leisurely, but richly detailed and "lived-in" The Big Town, which involves a young Indiana man's coming to Chicago in 1957, after apprenticing as an "arm," a hotshot dice-thrower, with an old family friend who has connections with the Chicago craps underworld. Matt Dillon is good as the mildly sullen but guardedly openhearted young man, who soon finds himself involved with two "tainted" women: one an intelligent, thoughtful, and unwed mother (Amis), the other a stripper (Lane) who turns out to be married to the closest thing to a classic villain in the film, a dice-game proprietor (TL Jones) who takes an instant dislike to Dillon's JC. But even Jones's Cole isn't a complete bastard (if entirely too close for anyone's comfort), and that's one of the strengths of the film...even the most melodramatic aspects tend to be tempered by realism. The self-destructive tendencies of various characters are only infrequently going to put them in jail or in the ground, or they wouldn't've lasted as long as they have, even the young twenty-somethings at the heart of the drama. A decent soundtrack (even if the abridging of Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" is annoying...then again, I hadn't ever let myself realize the origin of the titular metaphor of the song is out of dice gaming, even as most of the song is about rather earthier matters) of period music, and if Diane Lane at college age, her face fuller with baby fat, isn't quite as stunning as she would be in the next decade or so, she was already a veteran and capable of enlivening the closest to stereotyped role among those in the film...it's probably a pity Amis doesn't act much any longer (in her role as Queen of the World). Yet another Howard novel for me to read. This film is available on DVD, and I had an opportunity to watch the entirety, uncensored and un-cropped/panned and scanned (unfortunate sins of the This TV presentation), on the website Crackle.

And I certainly have enough Simenon to read; I don't know the other adaptations of the novels well at all (I've seen perhaps one of the ITV Michael Gambon adaptations and no one else's yet), but again the leisureliness of the Francophone co-productions, not dawdling, is welcome and adds to their verisimilitude. Cremer seems to be enjoying himself, while elegantly immersing himself in the role; the supporting casts in the several productions I've seen have been uniformly good. Maigret Has Scruples (or, more correctly, Les Scrupules de Maigret) is hardly the most perplexing fair-play mystery one is going to try to puzzle out, but it is well-done on every reasonable level, and the subtitles seem good to me as someone with perhaps twenty words and two sentences of French (though MHz WorldView, to appease sensitive affiliate stations still waiting for Obama Administration to call off the Bush Admin's FCC hound dogs, will rather [intentionally] blatantly replace a subtitle such as "Bitch!" with one of "Hag!"). Uncensored dvds are available, though only in Region 2 editions (unlike most of the wheel series, available directly from MHz WV in Region 1 which should play in all rather than most US machines these days--most machines are pretty universal whether they're supposed to be or not).