Pickup on South Street (1953) is a film noir well worth seeing. When a pickpocket steals a young woman’s wallet on the New York subway, neither at first knows that he has stolen top secret microfilm on its way to the enemy Communists. Samuel Fuller, screenwriter and director, tells a complicated story with easy and clarity, maintaining tension throughout. The acting is superb. Richard Widmark is wonderfully insolent as the cocky pickpocket. Thelma Ritter is world-weary and street smart as the middle-aged informer surviving day by day (her Academy nomination was deserved). Jean Peters as Candy is not quite perfect in every scene and she has to say a couple of stereotypical lines that almost no one could breath life into, but she exudes sexuality, and that is important to her role. The supporting actors, from Richard Kiley as Joey the Communist agent on down the list, give solid, credible performances. All of this is supported by an edgy score by Leigh Harline. I particularly appreciated the inventive music after I’d just watched Key Largo with its stereotypical and overblown orchestration. All the action is captured by one of my favourite cinematographers, Joseph MacDonald, who could shoot noir as well as anyone (although the three Academy nominations later in his career had nothing to do with noir). Shot in 20 days on location, the mean streets of New York City were captured convincingly.
The film is not without its flaws, but I will discuss briefly two scenes to suggest why the flaws are easy to forgive. Toward the end of the movie, Joey the Communist agent beats Candy, his ex-girl friend, when she refuses to help him further. In 1952 the Production Code had refused to approve the script for Pickup on South Street because of excessive violence, singling out the scene of Joey beating Candy. Although the scene must have been toned down, it is still very violent. But it works because it is so well done and it fits perfectly in the dramatic texture of the film. Unlike many modern films which use dozens of edits for a fight scene and show close-ups of blood spatters and so on, Pickup uses so few edits that it seems a continuous shot in my mind, and the camera is at mid distance. While this sounds boring to the modern movie mind, it works wonderfully because we see two real people, in real time, spinning and crashing around the apartment in a stomach-knotting, realist way. It works dramatically because it manifests Joey’s mounting desperation to get the microfilm his relentless bosses want; it demonstrates Candy’s growing love for Skip, the pickpocket, in that she refuses to help locate him; and it makes forcefully clear that what started as a petty crime could become a life and death affair.
The weak point in the movie is that after Skip steals Candy’s wallet, gets her in trouble, and then treats her miserably, she falls for him. We are given superficial motivation: He is a devilishly charming guy, and she is, well, a woman of relatively easy virtue. But this is not enough to make reasonable viewers overlook an improbable occurrence in a realistic film. We tend to accept the scene because it is done so well—steamy and complex. Steamy you’ll have to see for yourself, and as you do, your mind will start questioning whether he is just trying to get some easy sex or whether he’s toying with her before he makes some demands for money. Simultaneously, you will be wondering whether she has fallen for the guy or whether she is seducing him to get the microfilm or whether both motivations are going on at the same time. A lot of strengths make it easy to overlook a few weaknesses and create a movie which is greater than the sum of its parts.
posted on Friday, November 02, 2007 3:30 AM by JimBell