The Set-Up (1949)

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: What really makes a noir possess the qualities of a noir? I’m tending to be of the opinion that it will usually involve some down on his luck fella (maybe, sometimes it’s a dame, but it’s almost always a fella) comes into an opportunity to make some real dough. Like, the kinda dough that’ll change him from a two-bit to a real somebody.

Only, our guy here doesn’t have all the angles figured out, see. Bad people start comin’. Bad people with guns. Things go upside down, and our buddy is going to be lucky* to get out of this with his girl and his guts intact.

On that front, I can only vaguely commit to the notion that The Set-Up** is a noir at all. Stoker Thompson (Ryan) is as down-on-his luck as one can get and still have food in his stomach and a leading lady on his arm, but he’s absolutely unaware that there’s money to be made and schemes to be hatched outside of the ring until the last possible moment. He’s not even a part of the scheme. He’s just a boxer who everyone thought had long since landed his last punch, even if he knows different.

It’s a different kind of movie, ultimately, one influenced less by noir trappings of the era, and more prepared to influence films to come like Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

*Read: the movie has sort of a soft, artificial ending.

**The cynic in me may want to say that Robert Wise is the journey-man director to end all journey-men directors, but is there anyone who has made more classics in as many different genres? The Haunting (1963)? The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)? West Side Story (1961)? That’s not even going to cover him editing Citizen Kane (1941).

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan

Have I Seen it Before: There’s something about this movie that makes it feel like I’ve never quite seen it all the way through. Like they are still making the movie as I’m watching it.

Did I Like it: Now, that above thought could be taken as a dig about its interminable runtime. It’s only just over two hours, but it feels like 40 years passes from the prelude to the final warp effect.

But it’s worse than that. The film’s plodding pace is a matter of accepted film and Trek canon. Given the rampant, directionless egos (mostly in the form of Gene Roddenberry) that tried to come together to make the film, it’s a minor miracle that any moment in the film works, even if the whole isn’t quite the sum of its parts. The movie spends a befuddling amount of time featuring characters looking out windows or at viewscreens, but the expression on the face of Kirk (Shatner) as he sees the newly re-fit Enterprise for the first time is one of the best performances the actor has ever given.

Other movies—and even movies in the science fiction genre—have a similarly deliberate pace. Blade Runner (1982). 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). When I finally got a chance to see 2001 on the largest screen possible, the film transformed before my eyes. While most of Star Trek was meant for the smaller screen, maybe when I finally saw this first film in the way it was meant to be seen, it would improve.

Sadly, it does not. I’m struck by and expanding realization that Kubrick truly knew what he was doing, as even on the big screen, this film can't embrace the majesty of its more traditional special effects, or the weirdness of its more oblique imagery. The star gate via the monolith is a panic inducing experience, whereas the V’Ger is cheap and predictable. The Discovery seems like a real spaceship, whereas there are shots (and there are many, loving shots) of the Enterprise where the distant edges of the ship blink in and out existence.

How a film could be edited this poorly under the auspices of Wise, one of the greatest editors in the history of the moving picture is beyond me.

Maybe the voyages of the various crews of the Enterprise are better left to the small screen.

Maybe the odd-numbered films aren’t very good.