Pickup on South Street

Every film nerd has gaps in his knowledge. Oh, some may deny it, but there's just no way you can see all the movies there are in the world. Even if you devoted yourself to the task of watching 3 movies a day, every day, for several years, you couldn't possibly see the work of all the Italian Neo-Realists, French New-Wavers and Chinese Fifth Generationists. Plus, there's all those Coffin Joe horror films.

And what about Abbas Kiarostami? You gonna skip right over him? Actually, you probably should, because he's overrated. But that's a review for another day.

This is supposed to be about Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street. My point was that, despite the massive amount of love he now gets among cineastes, I haven't really seen many Fuller films. I saw Shock Corridor and enjoyed it back in college, but like a good deal of incidents from my UCLA years, I don't remember it terribly well. And that was it until two days ago, when I rented and very much enjoyed Pickup on South Street, Fuller's 1953 melodrama about a shifty pickpocket and the desperate girl who takes a chance on him.



That's Richard Widmark as the pickpocket, one of those actors that pops up in literally dozens of old, classic movies yet doesn't have a loyal, intense following among a lot of contemporary fans. In addition to this film, he's in Night and the City, Panic in the Streets (both recent DVD releases), Warlock, Judgement in Nuremberg, Madigan and countless others.

He's terrific as Skip McCoy, a grifter working the New York subway system following release from his third trip to prison. Skip filches the wallet of the attractive Candy (Jean Peters, who 4 years hence became Mrs. Howard Hughes) on the subway, not knowing it contains a microfilm detailing government secrets. Even Candy doesn't know what she's carrying - it's a package she's taking somewhere for her boyfriend, a Commie spy played by Richard Kiley.

So, Skip winds up with government secrets, which he hides along with all his other loot in a secret spot in his flophouse on the docks. The FBI wants it back, Candy wants it back (the commies beat her up), and all McCoy wants it to get paid. I mean, this is a fantastic set-up. Fuller just plays these three sides off one another, wringing all that he can out of their various double-crosses and conflicts.

Of course, Skip and Candy fall in love during the course of their various wranglings. And they all encounter a loopy professional snitch played by Thelma Ritter. Ritter was nominated for an Oscar for her work in the film, but I found her performance the least appealing part of the film. It's a hammy, old-fashioned kind of role. Her Mo is a ludicrous, chatty "type" rather than a character. Mo dreams of an expensive funeral in a classy cemetary, and saves up all her stool pigeon money working towards it. It's a silly subplot, but Fuller manages to pay it off in the most satisfying way possible. I suspect it's his masterful writing and direction that people remembered, more than the actual Ritter performance.

It's clear why so many contemporary directors cite Fuller as inspiring. He makes tight, bold, visually striking movies. What I like most about them is his directness. He's not Welles, filling a film with trick photography and elaborate, graceful cinematography. He's telling a story and goes about telling it efficiently and with maximum tension (he did begin his career as a copy boy at a newspaper). Take the opening sequence, in which Skip purloins Candy's wallet. There's not a single wasted moment in the scene. We see the subways doors open, we see people push up against each other (it's congested on the train, leaving no wiggle room), we see the car rock to life as begin down the track, we see Skip dart his eyes around looking for a target, we see Candy, we see Skip, we see Skip take a newspaper and hold it between himself and Candy, he reaches his hand in her purse, he puts the newspaper on top of the purse and he gets off at the next stop.

That's it. It's lean storytelling, simple and direct, which has become rare. Filmmaking has become something of an exercize for some directors, a challenge about who can come up with the best angle on a scene, who can devise the best trick or gimmick, who can devise the most realistic special effect. Even contemporary movies I like, such as Oldboy, depend largely on flourish, on purposefully testing the limits of cinema to see what can be done and how. But films like Pickup on South Street don't want to show off, don't want to give you some nifty effect to talk about after the movie's over. They want to tell a story in a matter-of-fact way. Fuller had something to say, about the lives of common criminals, about people on the fringes of society, and he said it simply.

It's a striking and very entertaining film that's not a noir, despite half of the Internet reviews I've read labeling it as such. It does contain something of an anti-hero I suppose (although I'd cite Candy as the protagonist, and she's a hero-hero), but he's not tortured by the past. It's much less able style than the great noirs, as I said before focusing much more on character, plot and dialogue than mood. And, most importantly, it has a freaking happy ending. Come on, people!

It's clearly a melodrama, an emotional story concerning several different people and their heated conflits and interrelations. And it's a very good one, at that.