10.4 SCREENING: Pickup on South Street

 10.4 SCREENING: Pickup on South Street


This week's screening is a biting one, and a nice follow up to last week's Force of Evil. Permitting viewers entry into the world and experiences of a career criminal, we gain access to the other side of the game. In doing so, director Sam Fuller shows us that these folks, too, are "just doing their job." That, they too, have a strict code of ethics that may not be obvious to the law abiding public, and certainly not the police. 

The film cleverly takes on the Red Scare, the nauseous wave of calls to blind/overt patriotism in the 1950s, rough and tumble gender/power dynamics, the importance of respect even at the height of disagreement and last but not least - Pickup on South Street (overtly) subverts many elements of the Hays/Production Code.

Filled with jaw-dropping cinematography, violence, displays of power and fear: be on the lookout for particularly effective use of character actors in smaller parts and stand-out performances by Richard Widmark and Jean Peters. Additionally, the ahead-of-its-time resistance of main character Skip to authority. Big middle fingers in this film to the establishment and many of its stale rules. 

Pickup on South Street is a movie about marginal people, in which—on the face of it—America is saved from communist espionage by a petty thief, a tramp, and a mercenary police informant. The star is Richard Widmark, irresistibly raffish as the pickpocket Skip McCoy, but Ritter shows him a thing or two about larceny, filching the movie out from under his nose. In her first scene, as she haggles and banters with the cops who want her help fingering a “cannon” who “buzzed” a woman’s wallet on the subway, Ritter is her familiar, adorable self. The frumpy floral-print dress and squashed hat, the squawky voice with its Brooklyn accent thick and pungent as a pastrami sandwich, are the same as they were in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), the same as they will be in Rear Window (1954) and Pillow Talk (1959). But here she transcends her usual character turn; in just a few scenes, Ritter takes a slangy comic sketch and shades it into a fully human portrait, baring the weariness and vulnerability of an aging woman alone in the world, bone-tired from hustling to survive. This is all the more affecting because Ritter’s type was tough as leather, always armed with a punchline and a gimlet eye; rarely did she reveal any weakness.

- "Least Wanted - Film Noir's Character Actors: Thelma Ritter, " - Imogen Sara Smith - Link

YouTube NOIR ALLEY INTRO 
Link Here

Pickup On South Street (1953) - Full Film on YouTube
Link Here

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