the film a real time narrative structure, three years before the device was used in High Noon. Viewers are shown the passage of time throughout the film: 9:05 pm: The opening sequence features a clock in the town's square. 9:11 pm: An alarm clock wakes Stoker. 9:17 pm: Stoker leaves for the fight. 9:35 pm: Julie paces with indecision, takes her ticket to the event, and leaves their room. Stoker sees the lights go off from across the street and believes she will be at the match. 10:10 pm: Having returned to the room, Julie warms soup on the stove while Stoker is beaten in an alley across the street. 10:16 pm: The long shot of the clock and the town square returns for the closing sequence. Before The Set-Up, Richard Goldstone's production credits had been limited to a half-dozen Our Gang comedy shorts. The fight scene, which features an exchange of blows between Stoker and his opponent that is very close to the original poem, was choreographed by former professional boxer Johnny Indrisano. Wise used three cameras to capture the action: one focused on the ring in its entirety; one on the fighters; and a third, hand-held device to catch details such as a glove connecting with a body. Reception Critical response When the film was released, The New York Times reviewed the drama and lauded the picture's screenplay and the realistic depiction of the boxing milieu: This RKO production...is a sizzling melodrama. The men who made it have nothing good to say about the sordid phase of the business under examination and their roving, revealing camera paints an even blacker picture of the type of fight fan who revels in sheer brutality. The sweaty, stale-smoke atmosphere of an ill-ventilated smalltime arena and the ringside types who work themselves into a savage frenzy have been put on the screen in harsh, realistic terms. And the great expectations and shattered hopes which are the drama of the dressing room also have been brought to vivid, throbbing life in the shrewd direction of Robert Wise and the understanding, colloquial dialogue written into the script by Art Cohn. Jefferson Hunter, in a Summer 2008 essay for The Hudson Review, wrote: All through The Set-Up, we see confirmed the oldest of truisms about film, that it tells its stories best in images, in what can be shown—a crowd’s blood lust, the boxers’ awareness