Pickup on South Street

I watched this rich little noir the other night, and enjoyed and was surprised by it. I’d even say it deserved to be called “quirky.”

From the Criterion description:

Petty crook Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) has his eyes fixed on the big score. When the cocky three-time convict picks the pocketbook of unsuspecting Candy (Jean Peters), he finds a more spectacular haul than he could have imagined: a strip of microfilm bearing confidential U.S. information. Tailed by manipulative Feds and the unwitting courier’s Communist puppeteers, Skip and Candy find themselves in a precarious gambit that pits greed against redemption, right against Red, and passion against self-preservation. With its dazzling cast and writer-director Samuel Fuller’s signature hard-boiled repartee and raw energy, Pickup on South Street is a true film noir classic by one of America’s most passionate cinematic craftspeople.

I watched in the Criterion Channel, but you can actually watch the whole thing on YouTube.

I wish I could embed it, but I can’t. But here’s a short (3 minute) video about the film by Richard Brody of the New Yorker.

 It’s a little bit of a crazy mix, with the criminal underworld, law enforcement, those Commies, and, of course, Sparks Flying. But it’s captivating and – here’s the thing – short. Only about 80 minutes long, which means it moves along, and you don’t feel as if you’ve had to dedicated a big chunk of your life to taking it in.

I’m really interested in post-War noir partly because of what it hints about the psychological and mental states, especially of men in the aftermath of a decade and a half of economic depression and then a nation-absorbing war. The cynicism and alienation that courses through these films hints that everything, even victory and recovery, comes at a price.

So we have Richard Widmark, as the pickpocket – always in suit and tie and hat, as is every male character – even though the character lives in an abandoned bait shack and sleeps in a hammock! – having been picked up and questioned. Until he’s brought in, he has no idea that he’s lifted this microfilm, and the law tries to appeal to his patriotism to get him to hand over what he immediately understands could bring him great profit.

You boys are talking in the wrong corner. I’m just a guy keeping my hands in my pockets.

 If you refuse to cooperate, you’ll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb. –

Are you waving the flag at me? –

 I know something inside you should give.

And I know you pinched me three times, got me convicted three times… and made me a three-time loser. And I know you took an oath to put me away for life. Well, you’re trying awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash, but get this: I didn’t grift that film, and you can’t prove I did. And if I said I did, you’d slap that fourth rap across my teeth no matter what promises you made.

 Do you know what treason means?

Who cares?

And let’s just say that the point of the film is not to bring McCoy around to do the “right thing” for the “right reasons.” He doesn’t change. Much.

It’s most of all a film of character and moments. Indelible moments, really.

• The initial pickpocket scene (see it the New Yorker video), with another subway scene at the end bookending it, brilliantly.
• When Candy confronts McCoy in his shack, he greets her by socking her in the jaw (she’s in the shadows, and in his defense, he doesn’t know it’s a woman) and then revives her by pouring beer in her face. Smirk never wavering.
• Candy’s trying to figure out who lifted the film from her purse so she can get it back, which takes her first to some criminal kingpin slurping noodles in a Chinese restaurant. It’s absolutely mesmerizing as he never stops eating except to pick up the balled up bills she pushes across the table at him, picking up with his chopsticks and delicately stuffing them in his pockets. Slurp.

• Thelma Ritter, of course, who shines as an informer who peddles neckties as a cover, who draws the line at aiding and abetting Commies, and who’s just trying to save up for a funeral so when she dies, she won’t get tossed into Potter’s Field. Well…..
• A really great, raw fight in the subway that begins in the men’s bathroom and ends up quite near the rails. In an era of slick, ridiculous John Wick choreography, the simplicity and starkness of this battle was almost a pleasure to watch.
• A fabulous, tense, scene in which one of the bad guys is attempting to escape in an apartment building, gets in a dumb waiter, begins to lower himself, but then realizes that the Law is looking both down and up the shaft.  
• For some reason I got fixated on how the male characters, all in suit and tie and hat at all times, when racing away from a scene or running away, always took that one extra second to pick up their hats. I mean, it was a convention, and they’d be more noticeable in a crowd without the hat than with it, but it’s just one more minor moment expressing how times change….
• Apparently three-strikes laws weren’t an invention of the Clinton era. Such a law was operative in New York State, and it’s a big factor in the plot.
• The end is a little pat and even sentimental. I think the same resolution could have been reached and expressed without the cuteness.

Full of ironies and double-crossing and fueled by self-preservation and a distrust of institutions, Pickup on South Street  is an entertaining rush.