The masterpiece of the late 1940s boxing cycle, this extraordinary film builds a descent narrative around washed-up heavyweight Bill 'Stoker' Thompson's movement from hotel room, to change room, to ring, as well as his lover's (Audrey Totter) parallel walk through the surrounding cityscape, culminating with her discovery of an entire world beneath the street. To this end, Wise abstracts these spaces (especially the change room, repeatedly referred to as limbo, or preparation for some imminent Afterlife), as well as the malignity cushioning and threatening them - from a set-up engineered by Stoker's manager and a local gangster (to which he remains dangerously oblivious), to the amorphous, anonymous crowd into which their relative facelessness allows them to recede, and which is more pathologised than any boxing spectatorship to date, and, finally, to an malign ambience that is itself condensed into the cold flood of light bathing the ring, sufficiently redolent of a projector to call into question the exploitative, voyeuristic imperatives of cinema itself, as well as imbue the participants with a statuesque grandeur that renders their visceral degradation (being hit in the eye, kidneys, throat) peculiarly shocking. This creates an overwhelming claustrophobia, only partly offset by Wise's liberation of Stoker's thoughts, via a series of spectacular tracking-shots that follow their various objects, and reinforced both by the use of real time, and a small set of sight-lines. Hence the final collapse of dystopian cityscape and boxing establishment, in which the darkened ring, rooms and corridors become literally continuous with the surrounding alleys, and this threatening ambience is elevated to a hallucinatory, jazzy pitch, seguing into brutal, crippling violence.
Billy Stevenson