Critics reviews

It has that familiar scent—stale tobacco and Greek dramatic irony— but Wise never reduces this to another tired yarn about an "underdog" with "one last fight." Instead, he leans heavily on his supporting cast to illustrate every dark corner of the sport.

Yes: it unfolds in "real time." But that's only one of the remarkable things about this film. Clockface cutaways aside, this is a doggedly human-level story about prisons. Borderline seedy hotels, nondescript hotel bars, drab and dirty streets, smelly locker rooms, and vast arenas that somehow still seem confining. As if Antonioni had made a boxing movie.

A tight, intensely moving, pocket-size masterwork about Stoker Thompson, a washed-up, 35-year-old heavyweight who believes he's just "one punch away" from changing his lousy luck... Ryan, all muscle, sinew and heart-rending longing, slugs through one punishing round after another — look for the photographer Weegee hitting the bell as the timekeeper — creating a portrait of a man who endures ghastly physical punishment on his way to redemption.

Wise had cast Ryan as the soul of naïveté in his domestic boxing drama The Set-Up (1949)—the film's a bit too midcentury mythpoetic about the modest dreams of little people, but effective for the "Paradise City" set, a backlot dream of Americana, and for Ryan, who plays a similarly idealized role, for once, with punch-drunk cadences turning slowly to self-discovery.

The boxing bell and the clock, the poles in the pugilist's purgatory... The bruiser racket and its zombies, scanned from top to bottom and locked into a clenched real-time composition in Robert Wise's virtuosically squalid microcosm.

There's a dynamism to Wise's rough, real-time in-ring action (an influence on Raging Bull). But the same can't be said about Ryan's wife's (Audrey Totter) nighttime stroll through the city—littered with eye-rollingly obvious symbols of an alternate, "normal" life—or the stereotype-upending ringside spectators, highlighted by a hilariously bloodthirsty blind man.

Screenwriter Art Cohn improbably adapted a book-length narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March (whose verse also inspired James Ivory's 1974 feature The Wild Party), and Robert Wise directed during his best period, as an efficient studio craftsman. I probably wouldn't tag this the greatest of all boxing pictures, but it's certainly a contender—and I'd pick it in a flash over Raging Bull.