set up movie

Stoker Thompson (Ryan) is a 35-year-old has-been boxer. Tiny (George Tobias), Stoker's manager, is sure he will continue to lose fights, so he takes money for a "dive" from a mobster, but is so sure that Thompson will lose that he doesn't tell the boxer about the set-up.

At the beginning of the fourth and last round of the vicious boxing match with the much younger and heavily-favored Tiger Nelson (Hal Fieberling), Stoker learns about the fix. Even though he learns that Little Boy (Alan Baxter), a feared gangster, is behind the set-up, Thompson refuses to give up the fight and mushes on.

In the end, he defeats Nelson, but Little Boy has Stoker's right hand broken as punishment.

The Set-Up (1949) is an American film noir boxing drama directed by Robert Wise and featuring Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. The screenplay was adapted by Art Cohn from a 1928 poem written by Joseph Moncure March. The film is about the boxing underworld.