Popular reviews

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  Review by sydney ★★★★ 1

  "I have to go on making a living so I can die."

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★ 1

  Richard Widmark sneakily accessing the microfilm machine at the New York Public Library = me opening an Incognito browser window to view paywalled content.

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  Review by ✨Angelica Jade Bastién🔮 ★★★★

  pickup on south street is the kind of film that finds beauty and complication in the prosaic, the every day folks that exist in the liminal spaces of life just trying to get by. these people are rough hewn, venal, cunning. what’s most interesting in rewatching pickup this time — which i haven’t seen since college over ten years ago (dear goddess) — is that even though it’s positioned as anti-communist propaganda it displays the american identity for all its grit and failures and in doing so functions as an intriguing, anti-capitalist argument. the performances sizzle! the cinematography envelopes! thelma ritter’s death scene is the standout moment in the film given her layered, richly realized performance. i was struck by her…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★★ 14

  The grace and delicacy with which Samuel Fuller portrays marginalized people is one of his greatest strengths as a director, and it's something which has never been more apparent than it is in Pickup on South Street, a film he also wrote. Never either condemning or simplistically celebrating his people on the margins — usually criminals, but also sometimes those pushed aside by society; often both — Fuller invariably shows us their souls, including both the darkness and light therein.

  As for example, with Skip (an extraordinary Richard Widmark). He's our protagonist, but he's also fundamentally unlikable, for reasons that already comfortably fill several pages before his stated willingness to deal with communists is revealed. Every time we start to…

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  Review by K. Austin Collins

  Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) is a professional pickpocket, a man whose survival, whose worth, is contingent on the sly gestures of an eloquent hand. When he touches a woman in this film, first to rob her, then, thinking she's a thief or worse, to hit her, and again (and again) to caress the wound, he isn't just working her over. He's going to work. "I play everything smart," he says, and by the time he says it we're hip enough to know it's a line uttered in the spirit of his maker.

  The purest pleasure and thrill of Pickup on South Street is surely the ease with which we, like the woman, a sex worker named Candy (Jean Peters), get…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 18

  "That girl was carrying TNT, and it's gonna blow up right in your face!"

  Small-time hustling meets big league treason in writer/director Samuel Fuller's masterful noir Pickup on South Street. Despite being a three-time loser whose next conviction spells life in prison, recidivist pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) nimbly lifts a strip of film containing U.S. trade secrets from the purse of unwitting communist courier Candy (Jean Peters) while she is under government surveillance on a crowded subway train. With a bitter confidence verging on hubris, Skip commences a casual affair with Candy and uses her as an intermediary in an attempt to extort her craven ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley) and his seditious confederates—all the while acerbically stonewalling the NYPD…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★★

  The expressive elements of noir become social realism in a crackerjack hell of a film. Thelma Ritter for MVP.

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  Review by Anna Imhof 🌸 ★★★★½ 31

  My brain is a washing machine—so many jumbling words and tumbling images, so this won’t be very eloquent. Just a few thoughts then. Richard Widmark. That seems like a good place to start. This is only the fourth film I’ve seen with him, but I’m looking forward very much to seeing more. He’s an interesting actor, like a less mysterious McQueen, or a less annoying Kinski. And I like those challenging, inquiring eyes. I’m not surprised chicks don’t notice they’re getting robbed while he’s staring at them.

  Jean Peters has got amazing eyes, too (not to mention a beautiful face). Her performance sparkles as much as those big innocent eyes that speak of an honest heart. Some dames are bullshitters,…

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  Review by laird ★★★★½

  I can't imagine any other writer/director from the era having the guts to make a character as slimy as Widmark's Skip McCoy the center of their movie, nor being able to infuse the story with so many little authentic-feeling details about crime and criminal communities, nor writing these low-life characters with an unforced sympathy and humanity.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 3

  "Do you know what treason means?"
  "Who cares?"

  The US government concocts a paranoid fantasy of a foreign enemy to distract from the growing crime and poverty at home.

  "Look, what do you want from me, Tiger? Do I personally raise the price on hamburgers and pork and beans and frankfurters? Is it my fault that the cost of living is going up?"

  1950s | Samuel Fuller | Film Noir
  Best of Its Director | Best of Its Year

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Marginalized people and their world. In the middle of it there’s a pretty effective thriller plot predicted on ways people get split against each other. But what really remain are the faces, places, the dead endness of it all, it is accepted desperation. Kiley villain is a little low on personality outside of his constant anxiety, but otherwise this is near flawless. Ritter does get one of the best exits on American film and the evocation of Skip’s world couldn’t be better. A movie that loves every character who usually would only pass through more respectable work.

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  Review by Amy Hensarling ★★★★★ 5

  Oh my goodness, I LOVED Pickup on South Street. Time for some handy-dandy bullet points.

  Prepare for a gush fest. 

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  -First off, the names! Skip McCoy, Candy, Joey, Lightning Louie, Moe Williams, Capt Dan Tiger. How can you *not* be an instant fan? Brought me back to Velma & Moose Malloy from Farewell, My Lovely. So fun, so full of personality, so crackerjack snappy.

  -This is better than all of the noirs I watched in July during the Criterion series. Might be my favorite noir, period. ?! Flawless.

  -I kept thinking over & over how many great one-liners Pickup had, and then I suddenly realized the entire script’s quotable. Particularly admired the use of the word “cannon” to describe pickpockets with…