Writing in The Hudson Review (sixty years young this year, hey guys, happy birthday!), Jefferson Hunter examines the poet Joseph Moncure March and his 1928 book-length narrative poem The Set-Up, which in 1949 would become a classic minor noir of the same name, directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer with one last fight left in him. Not a lot of tense urban melodramas include the on-screen credit "based on the poem by..." But as Hunter makes clear, March was a peculiar kind of specialist, an ambitious writer who appreciated the qualities of movies and, trying to raise those qualities to literature, decided that the best way to go about it was through stories told in extended verse. He was wrong, and is now remembered only as a pop culture oddity, a relic of 1920s culture from the moment when it became self-referential, and one who tried to point writing and the movies down a path that they, not unreasonably, choose not to follow. (The writers who really had an impact on movies, and who brought the impact of the movies into writing in an influential way at that time, were Hemingway and the hard-boiled toughs who were boiling everything down to action and dialogue.)
March got so excited about his mission to wring art from the movies that, after The Set-Up landed on the best seller list and was bought by Hollywood, he actually lit out for the West Coast and took a screenwriting job. But as Robert E. Lee Pruitt used to say, just cause a man loves a thing don't mean it's got to love him back, and after jobs on James Whale's Journey's End and Howard Hawks's Hell's Angels, his career petered out in a string of justly forgotten movies. (Some of these show him trying to elevate the masses by watering down high culture, as with the 1932 Madame Butterfly, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Cary Grant in a non-musical version of the opera, so that you can really concentrate on the soppy plot.) March was not invited to work on the movie version of The Set-Up, which didn't happen until after his career at the big studios was effectively over. By the time the movie was made (with Art Cohn credited with the script), he might have had trouble recognizing his baby anyway. The poem is a modern tragedy about an aging black boxer named Pansy, who has some problems. For starters, he's an aging black boxer, and his name is "Pansy." March intended the poem as an indictment of racism, making it clear ("Pansy had the stuff/ But his skin was brown") that, because of it, his hero would never be given the break that his talent should have earned him. (Unfortunately, March seems to have been one of those white liberal artists who are scornful of racism in others but seek to mythologize African-Americans as something other than human: trying to convey Pansy's physical dangerousness, he likens him to a "missing link", "something to catch and cage...that belonged to a Jungle Age.") The poem ends with this "savage cat" of a man fighting a gangster in a subway tunnel. Pansy goes over the edge of the platform and, March writes, "The train screeched/And struck. THE END." As Michael O'Donoghue once wrote in National Lampoon, there are no situations that the writer in search of an ending can't resolve with a variant on the sentence, "And then suddenly he was run over by a truck."
In the movie, the hero, who is too old and broken-down to keep his career going but too proud to take a fall, is called Stoker, and is white. This change may have cut the guts out of March's conception, but as Hunter points out, it has a major compensatory effect: it means that he gets to be played by Robert Ryan. Ryan, with his gaunt, haunted look, and the presence of a man who might have been a Roman emperor before his bookkeeper stopped returning his calls and the repo van showed up, gave a performance that ranks with one of his finest; he's the single best explanation for why the movie is so much better-remembered to day than the book. Although Hunter calls March's work "a noir poem", the movie's classification as a boxing noir may have more to do with the emotions expressed by Ryan's suffering face and body than by the grinding mechanics of the plot, which pull up short from having Stoker killed: the gangsters who maul him may have finished his career, but he still has the loving wife who is embracing him in the final shot, and who clearly regards the fact that Stoker will never get into the ring again as a happy development. Hunter reports that the film's producer, Richard Goldstone, " reasoned that if Stoker were killed, he would be 'left without any problem. Whereas if he survived, he couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything, but had vindicated his manhood, it was a triumph rather than defeat, spiritually.' ”
The same year that The Set-Up was published, March published another book-length story poem, The Wild Party, and though Hunter is kind enough not to dwell on it, that poem too has had a complicated life that includes a movie version, which came out in 1975, two years before March died. The poem is a Jazz Age blow-out describing all the seamy, sordid affairs at the titular throwdown hosted by Queenie, a sort of Jean Harlow from Hell, and his thuggish lover, Burrs. In 1994, Art Spiegelman saw to the re-publication of a new edition which featured his own illustrations and a pull quote from William S. Burroughs, who insisted that March's poem was the work that had made him want to become a writer. If you ever meet anybody who claims that the 1975 movie, which was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, made him want to become a filmmaker, do the right thing and push him off a subway platform. The film, which was made before Ivory/Merchant productions became synonymous with respectfully upholstered adaptations of classic literature, is a misguided exercise in anti-nostalgia that turns Queenie (Raquel Welch) into the petulant bedmate of a Fatty Arbuckle-like silent film star, Jolly Grimm (James Coco), who's throwing the party to grease the wheels for his comeback. (In a clip we see of his new masterpiece, Coco, wearing missionary's robes and a Moe Howard haircut, is stuffed into a cookpot by African savages despite his protesting that "You can't boil me! I'm a friar!") The movie features snippets of March's poem being read on the soundtrack by a narrator who sounds as if he's due to be shot at dawn, and there are also bits of faux-twenties songs that analyze the characters, providing such helpful insights as, "Funny man! Trying so hard to be funny! Is it because if we knew the real you, we might frown?" (Is that what it sounds like inside Jay Leno's head?) More recently, the poem actually managed to inspire two different musicals that opened near-simultaneously, one on Broadway and the other off-Broadway, in 2000. Both are said to have been better than the movie, but then the only way that they could have been any worse would have been if the chorus lines had departed the stage to repeatedly kick every single member of the audience in the crotch.