Pickup on South Street (1953)

[drinkanddestroy]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046187/

Pickup on South Street (1953)


PLOT SYNOPSIS: A subway pickpocket steals a woman's wallet, which contains a microfilm for Communist agents; now, both the Commies and the police are in a race to track him down.


Cast, Courtesy of imdb

Richard Widmark    ...   Skip McCoy
    Jean Peters    ...   Candy
    Thelma Ritter    ...   Moe Williams
    Murvyn Vye    ...   Captain Dan Tiger
    Richard Kiley    ...   Joey
    Willis Bouchey    ...   Zara (as Willis B. Bouchey)
    Milburn Stone    ...   Detective Winoki


Here are the 2 previous posts on this movie:

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 http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=cr3r581tkpqgdqkv97hrhvpp64&topic=1822.msg148836#msg148836

titoli: Pickup on South Street (1953)  I saw this a couple of times some decades ago (dubbed on tv) but this time (on a big screen and undubbed) I liked it even more. The pace is just about perfect (82' running time: why films nowadays must be 2h long?), the love story is not an encumbrance because it reflects on the plot development, the actors give great performances (W., Peters and Ritter) with some great dialogues. Minor complaints about Richard Kiley: he's good but something is missing in his performance. The score is remarkable. 8\10

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http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=1822.msg148839#msg148839

cigar joe: I like it a lot also, its a bit of a puzzle to me why Fuller never quite reaches this caliber of Film Noir again, I'm leaning towards the demise of the whole studio apparatus and the reliance on package deals that put various creative elements together that obviously don't match up to what was done before. The caliber of acting talent in Fuller's later noirs doesn't quite match this and the Bamboo Curtain.

The TV market and the use of Color probably also influenced the decline of the stylistic dark noir's.

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[drinkanddestroy]

I give this movie an 8/10


I've liked Jean Peters since seeing her in Niagara (made the same year), Widmark is always awesome, and Thelma Ritter has one of the most touching roles you'll ever see, for an immoral character.
 She plays an aging stoolie, used by cops and crooks alike, whose greatest fear is to be dumped in the public cemetery after she dies; she is trying to save enough money for a nice funeral and cemetery plot. It sounds corny, but she and director Sam Fuller really make it work.

I did not like the Peters for falling for Widmark shit. It was probably inevitable that that happened, but my real problem is that it happens immediately. He's stolen her wallet, and then she sneaks into his place to snoop around, he knocks her out, and then she falls for him like mad? Come on. If that was going to happen, it can't happen so fast.

I got the Criterion dvd from Netflix, which means I was guaranteed of two things: a beautiful-looking movie, but a scratched disc. Really bad scratches  toward the end, I was able to forward over them with difficulty; this must be the tenth scratched disc those bastards at Netflix have sent me  

I'm in middle of watching the bonus features on the dvd. The first bonus feature is called "Sam Fuller on Pickup on South Street) it is a SPECTACULAR 19-minute piece, put together by Richard Schickel, of Fuller talking about this movie. If you have this disc, you MUST watch this piece    Fuller recounts, among other things, his discussions about the movie with Darryl Zanuck and J. Edgar Hoover, and how the characters were influenced by his experiences dealing with similar people.

[cigar joe]

Another title that improves more and more with repeated viewings.

The cinematography of Joseph MacDonald (Niagara, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets, My Darling Clementine,  Viva Zapata!, Yellow Sky,  The Street with No Name, The Dark Corner) combines the great 20th Century Fox studio set design seamlessly with stock NYC location footage to depict a very believe-able 3 layered Manhattan. From vaulting suspension bridges overhead, against a backdrop of Brooklyn waterfront warehouses across to a lower East Side, East River, pier-scape, with a catwalk to a crumbling bait shack, butted up to the border of Chinatown with its grifters, flophouses, cigarette machines, B-girls, and tattoo parlors perched above the labyrinthine passages of the subways with their human drain ways from the surface

Peters approaching Moe's "above the tattoo parlor and across from the top of the stairs"


Widmark spotting a tail


Interior of swaying rush hour subway car in a neat sequence that introduces Peters, Boushey, Widmark and the plot:

After a station stop where various riders both exit and enter the car as the train starts and sways we watch as patches of Widmark, a hat brim, a corer of his eye, come into view as he jostles his way through the car of commuters...




until he stands opposite floozie "I've "kissed" a lot of guys" Peters

 
All of the major actors are great in their roles. Ritter in probably her best performance as Moe, she is sly, shrewd, and funny in her scenes with G Man Bouchey and cop Vye, woman to woman matter of fact with Peters, motherly with Widmark, fearless with Kiley. Fuller did an outstanding job on the screenplay and was spot on in the dialogs.

Ritter with Bouchey, rt. and Vye, lt. at precinct headquarters, selling information and ties.


Other highlightes, watch for Peters dickering with Vic Perry (Lightning Louie) in a Chinese restaurant ( Perry was a real pick-pocket and was a technical advisor on that aspect of the movie.), and the brutal  fight Peters has with Kiley.

Widmark is most excellet in the culmination of all his three time looser wise ass roles, and there is real chemistry in the on screen relationship between Widmark and Peters that sparks once they quit playing each other while jockeying for the microfilm . Some question the transition to romance, but it's meant to be a little off the wall. Moe points out how Skip is some kind of chick magnate. Moe she cant figure how women seem to fall for him, I'd say it is probably the most successful depiction of a relationship in a noir, and Fuller gives it plenty of time to stew and marinate. If it survives past the end credits is anybody's guess, but the deck is stacked against them. Peters is a real cutie in this, its a shame she cut her career way too short.

Peters taking a soak while sucking a tar bar.


Great score by Leigh Harline, Another 10/10 for me. The demise of the studio system really is apparent in Fullers later noirs
From IMDb:

Samuel Fuller's richest, most accomplished film noir, 7 January 2002

Author: bmacv from Western New York

Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street is anomalous: A "Red Scare" movie devoid of hysteria, in which the Communist threat is nothing more than the McGuffin that ignites the plot. Pickpocket Richard Widmark relieves loose woman Jean Peters of her wallet containing a strip of microfilm; unbeknownst to either of them, it harbors secrets vital to the Cold War. Peters, as it happens, was under surveillance by FBI agents who are as nonplussed by the theft as the man who's running her, cowardly comsymp Richard Kiley. In trying to retrieve the precious film, both sides enlist the help of Thelma Ritter, a streetwise old jane who's always on the earie and willing to sell what she hears.

Fuller draws from an opulent palette of tempos and tonalities in telling the story, which becomes a race against the clock of escalating brutality. From the subways to the waterfront, his midsummer Manhattan takes on a sweaty sheen that's almost pungent. The love scenes between Peters and Widmark become an unstable mixture of the tumultuous and the tender, and they're scored to "Again," a song introduced by Ida Lupino in Road House, also starring Widmark. The pace slackens for Ritter's beautifully written and played death scene -- among the most poignant vignettes in all noir, and a kind of mirage-oasis in a film parched of sentimentality. This is writer/director Fuller's only work in the strictest confines of the noir cycle; his later explorations of American pathology (The Crimson Kimono, The Naked Kiss, Underworld U.S.A.) never resulted in a synthesis as satisfying as Pickup on South Street.

by freudified_n_funkified (Sun May 6 2007 23:22:11)   

Here's the deal with the Skip/Candy romance. From the moment she's in his shack, it's not the romance people seem to perceive it as. It's not like they're immediately in love because they're making out. They're both playing each other -- Candy to get her purse back, Skip to figure out what it's worth. Fuller himself describes it as a "mercenary kiss" and goes on to say:

"Skip quickly figures out he can get a bundle for this precious microfilm, setting himself up for the rest of his life. And he isn't going to let Candy botch up that deal. No woman is worth that. He wants nothing to do with women. Home? Family? Love? Useless middle class pipe dreams to Skip. Candy irritates the hell out of him, interfering with his work. Everything changes when Candy gets beaten up trying to save Skip's life. Why would anyone risk her neck for him? It makes no sense in Skip's primitive world, where sacrifice is laughable. Nevertheless, the seeds of love have been planted."

That's what does it for Skip. Candy, on the other hand, clearly isn't the sharpest tack and has already proved her bad taste in men. So why is it a major flaw of the movie to have them legitimately hook up at the end? They ride off into the sunset, but there's no promise as to how far they get. The upbeat little coda does ring kind of falsely optimistic, and the chances of either one of them turning their lives around and living happily ever after are completely zilch. It works on a more subversive level because if we really know these characters, we know their sunny optimism is just another impossible pipe dream waiting to crumble out from under them. Either of them or both of them will wind up as gutted and destitute as Moe, or dead or locked up before they get a chance. Fuller allows them their victory, but of all filmmakers Fuller knows that most victories, personal or grander, are short lived.

That's what I take from PICKUP anyway - one of the sharpest, most exuberant and entertaining of film noirs and one of Fuller's crowning accomplishments. In most regards I think that Fuller, who is definitely an acquired taste, towers over contemporaries like John Huston, whose best work was mere adolescent male adventure fantasy. And while Fuller's creative sensibilities seem to be just that, his heart and his insight gave genuine weight to even his most didactic or ham fisted yarns. That and they're just so much more fun to watch.

[cigar joe]

Just in time for some back drop info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jNXIPwUjB-0

And Lightnig Louie (Vic Perry) http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1893&dat=19551220&id=yrAfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=C9cEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2914,5994802