Synopsis
How the law took a chance on a B-girl … and won!
A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.
1953 Directed by Samuel Fuller
A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.
Richard Widmark Jean Peters Thelma Ritter Murvyn Vye Richard Kiley Willis Bouchey Parley Baer Chet Brandenburg Frank Kumagai Virginia Carroll Milburn Stone Harry Carter Clancy Cooper Henry Slate Heinie Conklin George Eldredge John Gallaudet Alan Reed Robert Haines Jay Loft-Lyn Ray Montgomery Jerry O'Sullivan Ray Stevens Ralph Moody Roger Moore Vic Perry George E. Stone King Mojave Harry Tenbrook Show All…
Lange Finger - Harte Fäuste, Alarm auf der South Street, 사우스 스트리트의 소매치기, 남부 거리의 소매치기
Richard Widmark sneakily accessing the microfilm machine at the New York Public Library = me opening an Incognito browser window to view paywalled content.
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…
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…
"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…
The expressive elements of noir become social realism in a crackerjack hell of a film. Thelma Ritter for MVP.
"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
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.
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.
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,…
"How many times you've been caught with your hand where it doesn't belong?"
Mini-Collab w/ Rob
Noirvember #14
At his best, nobody could make a noir more exciting than Sam Fuller!
Everything about Pickup on South Street (available here on YouTube) works exactly as needed for me, but there are three extra-special ingredients that really put this tough drama over the top, first of which is Joseph MacDonald's B&W cinematography. His images perfectly capture this cutthroat world of pickpocketing, government-secret-trading and detective-snooping, right on the money from the moment the story opens with smarmy crook Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) lifting the all-important film strip of Commie intel out of gorgeous courier Candy's (Jean Peters) purse on the New York subway.…