Ratings list

Film	Likely to see again?  0 No  1 Maybe  2 Likely  3 Quite likely 4 Definitely	Comments re watch again	Rating as at 28.06.14 (out of ten)
A Prize of Gold	3	Must be worth a second look if only for that insouciant smirk (Widmark) and a very young George Cole	5.5
Alvarez Kelly	3	It’s OK.	6
Backlash	4	Absolutely definitely yes.	10
Bedford Incident	2	Maybe, if only to get that quote about Widmark's character being such a mean bastard (and doing it so effortlessly)	6
Broken Lance	2	Probably.	6
Cheyenne Autumn	2	A film even RW described as a ‘bit boring’. Possibly, but not any time soon.	3
Death of a Gunfighter	4	Yes	9.5
Destination Gobi.	3	Quite likely.	5
Don’t Bother to Knock	1	Possibly, if only to see it was really as bad as I thought it was the first time.	2
Down to the Sea in Ships	2	Possibly, given a wet enough afternoon.	4
Escape to the Sun	3	Yes.  Widmark hated this film.  I like it!	8
Garden of Evil.	4	Absolutely definitely.  Wonderful film.	8
Halls of Montezuma	4	Brilliant film; yes.	7.5
Hell and High Water.	3	Quite likely.	6
Judgment at Nuremburg	2	Possibly; a tough film to watch though.	6
Kiss of Death.	1	Not that fussed; Udo not my favourite character.	4
Madigan	3	Would very much like to.	6
MOTOE	0	No, not enough Widmark in it :-)	2
Night and the City	3	Yes, one of the best noirs made.	7
No Way Out	3	Yes, but best rationed to keep the shock value!	9.5
O. Henry’s Full House	3	Re-run of Udo’s character in a short story – good though.	7.5
Panic in the Streets	3	Possibly, Widmark’s character is so whingy though!	5
Pickup on South Street	3	The more I see this film the more I love it.  A great noir.	9
Red Skies of Montana	1	Not too bothered.  Very 2-D.	3
Roadhouse	3	Definitely, if only for Ida Lupino’s singing.	9
Slattery's Hurricane	3	Quite likely, though don't consider it a particularly great film.  Worth another go though.	4
Street With No Name	3	Quite likely.  Widmark’s a very good baddie though not keen on the overall documentary style.	7
Take the High Ground!	3	Yes, curiously.	7
The Alamo	4	Oh yes.  Though not for John Wayne.	7
The Frogmen	4	Probably the best war film I’ve seen	9
The Last Wagon	2	Possibly.  This may well be the first film that I have actually seen to death.  Would like to redo the screen shots at some point.	9.5
The Law and Jake Wade	3	Yes – though Clint Hollister has to be the baddest cowboy ever!	8.5
The Sell Out	3	Hopefully now have a DVD with decent sound quality	6
The Trap	3	Yes, it’s strangely compelling.	9.5
The Way West	1	An averagely good film let down by poor soundtrack.	5.5
Time Limit	2	Would like to get the DVD, so likely.	7
True Colors (sic)	0	Not bothered.  Don’t like Cusak.	3
Two Rode Together	1	Irritating film (see my review comments) but maybe.	6
Warlock	4	Very much yes, especially to compare it with the book (which is excellent).	10
When the Legends Die	0	Dull and far too long; seen it and ticked it off list.	2
Yellow Sky	3	Yes, though now it seems odd to see a Western in b/w.  Works though.	6

Songs from the movies

'Mam'selle' - Pickup on South Street.  Sung here by Frank Sinatra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHOqtvvNLqs

Ida Lupino singing 'One for my Baby' - Roadhouse - clip taken from the actual film, smoking & all ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Q71t5D8ko

Doris Day singing 'Again' (Roadhouse) - shame there's no clip available of Ida Lupino singing it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdrE5DKq-EU

'Sweet Apple Wine' sung by Lena Horne from Death of a Gunfighter in which she also starred.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9XZ70yXq6Q

Alvarez Kelly (Title sequence from the film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVZ4Qc8xjQ

Jazz Noir

http://jhupressblog.com/2014/01/15/jazz-noir/#comments

Guest Post by Mark Osteen

A sharply creased fedora rests atop the oiled hair of a smart-talking detective, whose steely eyes gaze at a seductive blonde smoking a cigarette. When they kiss, a slinky jazz saxophone plays. Hat, blonde, smoke, jazz: these are the signature tropes of classic film noir. But there’s a problem: the jazz wasn’t really there. In fact, not a single 1940s noir and only a few from the ‘50s featured a jazz soundtrack. Nevertheless, as I argue in Nightmare Alley, noir filmmakers used jazz to explore America’s shifting attitudes and anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, and violence, and to register the dissonances of a changing postwar world.

Film noir’s many nightclub scenes introduced viewers to an underground world of racial mixing, louche behavior, and unorthodox gender roles and sexual orientations. These associations color noir’s portrayals of white jazz musicians, who are typically depicted as sexually suspect and prone to madness and violence. Yet the films also betray a fascination with these figures who enact viewers’ repressed attraction to blackness and its (often stereotyped) tropes. In other words, white jazz musicians are “noired”—transformed into surrogate African Americans—in films like Phantom Lady (1944) and Black Angel (1946). However, later noirs, such as The Strip (1951) and Sweet Smell of Success(1957) present jazz not merely as a respectable way to make a living, but as an island of integrity in a continent of corruption.

Some films even find that jazz trumpets progressive ideals such as hybridity, emotional liberation, equality, and self-creation. The best examples of this strain are two movies in which the multi-talented Ida Lupino plays world-weary, resilient torch singers. Petey Brown, in The Man I Love (1947), belies the title song’s lyrics: instead of submitting to her man, she leaves him, in order to emerge with her integrity and artistry intact. In Road House (1948), Lily Stevens overcomes professional and personal obstacles by employing wit and husbanding her emotional resources.

These singers exemplify how jazz can be not merely a way of playing, but a way of living, in which improvisation serves as a survival technique suited for the modern world.   Although few noir films featured jazz scores, many used tunes from the Great American Songbook to evoke moods and reveal characters. Songs like “I’ll Remember April” (Phantom Lady), “I Hear a Rhapsody” (Clash by Night), “Your Red Wagon” (They Live by Night), “Never Let Me Go” (The Scarlet Hour) and “One for My Baby” (Road House), as well as the classic title themes from Laura and Body and Soul, comment powerfully on the action. In the 1950s and afterward, jazz soundtracks evoked urbanity and menace in films such as The Big Combo, in TV crime series such as Peter Gunn and Mike Hammer, and in neo-noir films like Chinatown.

If you’d like to hear these tunes and learn more about film noir, you’ll want to attend “Night Songs: The Music of Film Noir” on January 24th, at Germano’s Piattini. At this concert, I will show brief film clips and introduce the tunes; then my group, Cold Spring Jazz Quartet (CSJQ), will perform them. The show begins at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $10. To purchase a ticket and make a reservation, please call 410-752-4515. Afterward, you’ll be ready to walk those mean streets again.

To learn more about jazz and other themes in film noir, pick up a copy ofNightmare Alley. Click here to find out more about CSJQ. For the lowdown on what’s happening in Baltimore jazz, check out the Baltimore Jazz Alliance.

Mark Osteen is a professor of English, chair of the English Department, and founder of the Film Studies Program at Loyola University Maryland. His latest book Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream is now available from JHU Press.

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Halls of Montezuma - lyrics

From the Halls of Montezuma

To the shores of Tripoli;

We fight our country's battles

In the air, on land, and sea;

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean;

We are proud to claim the title

Of United States Marine.

Our flag's unfurled to every breeze

From dawn to setting sun;

We have fought in every clime and place

Where we could take a gun;

In the snow of far-off Northern lands

And in sunny tropic scenes,

You will find us always on the job

The United States Marines.

Here's health to you and to our Corps

Which we are proud to serve;

In many a strife we've fought for life

And never lost our nerve.

If the Army and the Navy

Ever look on Heaven's scenes,

They will find the streets are guarded

By United States Marines.

Luc Sante essay on Pickup on South Street

Pickup on South Street:
Extra! Pickpocket Foils Doom Plot!

By Luc Sante

Samuel Fuller had ink in his veins, just like the hero of his 1952 newspaper epic, Park Row. After all, he started working as a copy boy when he was fourteen or so, and at seventeen he was the youngest crime reporter in the country, employed by the most daring and scurrilous tabloid America has ever seen, the New York Evening Graphic. When that paper folded (under the combined impact of a number of libel suits), he moved to California and soon began supplementing his salary by writing film scripts, selling his first in 1936, when he was just twenty-four. Five years later he was in the movie business full-time, and he directed his first picture, I Shot Jesse James, in 1949, not long after he got out of the service. In Hollywood he was clearly drawing on another part of his brain—he was a wildly visual and visceral filmmaker, and one of the great masters of the moving camera—but he never shed his reportorial instincts. He knew how to sell a story as well as tell one, how to hit hard and not let go. Every one of his movies has a built-in banner headline.

Pickup on South Street has a nominal subject as timely as any in the morning paper in 1952—PICKPOCKET HEISTS RED SPY MOLL––although today we might be more inclined to see it as PICKPOCKET FINDS LOVE, CHEATS DEATH. The Commie angle, besides being practically de rigueur for Hollywood that year, was a surefire means of injecting fear and trembling into the proceedings, by introducing a faceless, inhuman evil to contrast with the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook. That the picture is barely political can be demonstrated by the fact that, in France, where the Communist Party was a significant presence nobody wanted to offend, Pickup was released as Le Porte de la drogue—the villains became drug smugglers—with changes made only to the dubbed dialogue. What is at stake, after all, is nothing as high-flown as The American Way (“Are you waving the flag at me?” pickpocket Skip McCoy asks the FBI agent grilling him); rather, it is the possibility of a force so morally alien that, like the child molester in Fritz Lang’s M, the law and the underworld can be united, however briefly, against it.

McCoy is played by Richard Widmark, whose face could illustrate the dictionary definition of insolence. One look at him and you don’t even need the backstory to know why the cops want to send him up the river for good. Although he went on to play a wide variety of characters in his career, he was initially typed by his screen debut, which was also his first starring role, in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947), in which he kicks an old lady down the stairs. Here it is the old lady who nearly does him in, although their relationship is complex—she is, for all dramatic intents and purposes, his mother. Playing the part is the inimitable Thelma Ritter, who was unsurprisingly nominated for an Oscar for the role (it was the fourth of her six nominations in a twelve-year span; she never won). Ritter, only nine years older than Widmark, took the stereotypical Apple Annie character and over the course of her career made a Russian novel out of it. Here she is pathetic, cold-blooded, kittenish, stalwart, cunning, and tender, sometimes all at once. The love interest is supplied by Jean Peters, who is awe-inspiringly ripe—you imagine wardrobe having to gaffer-tape her dress every morning, to keep her from bursting out of it. Peters may not have been the greatest line-reader who ever lived, but she exudes sex so palpably, you can smell the pheromones. (She lost the fifties erotica sweepstakes to the forces of blondeness, alas, and gave up and married Howard Hughes.)

The locations are few but well chosen. A street, a subway station, a Chinese restaurant, a precinct-house office, an apartment (with that forgotten urban-thriller resource, the dumbwaiter)—put them together and presto! you have New York City and its teeming masses. Richard Widmark’s home is something else again, though: a bait-and-tackle shack on stilts, connected to South Street by a swinging bridge. It seems like a preposterous idea today, when New York’s function as a port has been all but erased, but (although I could almost swear I’ve seen a Berenice Abbott photograph of it from the 1930s) it was close to preposterous then, too. The shack is a bubble cantilevered off the tip of the material world, the bridge leading to it passing through the wall of sleep. In the midst of a zillion urban-grit signifiers, the shack cues viewers to the numerous fantasy elements of the story, not least the Red spy subtheme, but also the crooks themselves, who come from The Threepenny Opera by way of Damon Runyon. The shack is the beyond, but given that it is a real shack, roughly carpentered and battered by weather, it is also—what might be Fuller’s heraldic device—the embodiment of contradiction.

Fuller is crude and subtle, blatant and deep, unschooled and spilling over with ancient lore, harsh and plaintive, cynical and so attuned to complicated human emotions, you can’t accuse him of being merely sentimental. Pickup on South Street, it follows, is a penny dreadful with a hundred layers of felt meaning—the kind you register subcutaneously, without requiring professors to dissect and explicate it. If film noir is a genre in which tin-pot crimes are merely the outer manifestations of the churning unconscious, then Pickup on South Street is quintessential noir. Like so many of the worthwhile products of the American 1950s, it is a work of reverberating complexity, wrapped up to look like a candy bar.

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and co-editor of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. He teaches at Bard College.

Shadows of Film Noir: Pickup on South Street

(Extracts)

http://news.moviefone.com/2010/07/18/shadows-of-film-noir-pickup-on-south-street/

Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) is tough and punchy; Fuller used his newspaper reporting skills to really get to the heart of life on the street, including some terrific-sounding slang. But above all, it the most physical of 1950s films noir. The opening scene shows a skilled pickpocket (Richard Widmark) lifting a package from the purse of a sensual woman (Jean Peters) in a sultry, sweaty subway, and it's almost like slow, silent sex. 20th Century Fox released it, and the Criterion Collection deemed it worthy of a DVD release in 2004. (See Luc Sante's great liner notes essay here.)

Behind the Scenes

Director Sam Fuller (1912-1997) was one of the greatest of all writer/directors. By the time he was a teenager, he was working as a hard crime reporter for a New York newspaper. He enlisted in the U.S. army and served in the 1st Infantry Division during WWII. Fuller had already written some stories (he called them "yarns") for the movies, and during the war, his novel The Dark Page was published. Upon returning home, he went to work writing screenplays again, but quickly grew tired of other directors mangling his work. In 1949, he made his directorial debut with the ultra-low-budget I Shot Jesse James (1949). Through the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a series of "B" films, thrillers, war films, Westerns, etc. Some critics described their slam-bang action and dialogue as being "like headlines."       

In the mid-1960s Fuller began to have trouble raising money for movies and getting them distributed; he found his biggest supporters in Europe, and found himself appearing in films by Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders. In 1980, he made a big studio movie, The Big Red One, based on his wartime experiences; unfortunately, it was released in an edited version and went mostly unappreciated in its own time. In 2004, a restored version was released and the film took its place in the canon.

Actor Richard Widmark (1914-2008) was a brick-jawed, snake-eyed tough guy who, at this time, was best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in Kiss of Death (1947), in which he knocks an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. The very potent Jean Peters (1926-2000) had a fairly short career, but appeared in some notable movies like Viva Zapata! (1952), Niagara (1953), and Apache (1954). The most impressive cast member is character actress Thelma Ritter (1905-1969), who received six Oscar nominations -- all for Best Supporting Actress -- without ever winning. She is perhaps best known for her role as "Stella" in Rear Window (1954), though she did not receive a nomination for that one.

What It's About
Skip McCoy is an expert pickpocket -- or "cannon" -- who boards a crowded subway and sneaks a package out of the purse belonging to Candy (Jean Peters). Candy is actually smuggling the package for her boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley), although she is unaware that Joey is a Commie and that the package contains sensitive microfilm. Candy finds Skip via Moe, a weary tie-salesman who makes a living on the side as a professional stool pigeon (oddly, Skip does not resent Moe for this; it's just business). Candy must use every trick in the book to try to placate Joey while she tries to get the microfilm back from Skip. Unfortunately, the FBI is following her, and she finds herself falling in love with the wiley pickpocket.

The Lure of the Underworld

Usually, a noir hero makes a bad choice that sends him running irrevocably down the wrong road, and it usually has something to do with either money or women. In this case, all of these characters are already in the underworld. Skip is a "three-time loser" and Candy is an ex-prostitute who is stuck working with Joey. And poor Moe has mostly given up; she wants nothing more than to have her own burial plot (and not to be buried in "Potter's Field"). The action does begin when Skip interrupts the course of events with his illegal pickpocketing. However, oddly, the microfilm gives them all a chance to climb out of the underworld, making this kind of a film noir in reverse. The other unique thing about this film is that it uses Communism as the actual evil, corrupting force in the film. (There's no metaphor suggesting Communism.) No matter how low our characters have sunk, they are still above the Commies.

The Femme Fatale

Many films noir have a "femme fatale" character -- also named by the French -- who is responsible for the hero's downfall. Candy is a richer, more dimensional character than we usually get in film noir; she's street smart and wary, but she's also a bit on the helpless side, and depends on too many men to make her way in the world. She's not a typical femme fatale, in that she falls for Skip first, and he's too cynical to let her get her claws in him. She doesn't drag him down. Rather, it turns out that they are stronger together than they ever would have been apart.

The Look

Pickup on South Street does not rely much on shadows and moods. It's more about the vivid, physical details of the crime world. The film is filled with memorable little images like Moe's creaky old turntable and its sweet, soulful song; Skip's waterfront shack, and his crate of beer that he keeps cool in the river below and hauls up with some rope; the guy who eats chow fun and picks up dirty money in his chopsticks; as well as the overall heat and stench of the city air.
 

Bright Lights Review of Pickup on South Street

On Commies, Stoolies, and Other Assorted Lowlifes

Pickup on South Street on DVD

Widmark and Peters sizzle, but Thelma Ritter steals the show

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Matthew Kennedy

Craggy, no-nonsense director Sam Fuller knew how to start movies. In Shock Corridor (1963), a reporter meets with his girlfriend and psychiatrist to plot his admission into an insane asylum for the purpose of solving a murder and winning a Pulitzer Prize. In The Naked Kiss (1964), a hooker with a heart of coal wallops a john while the camera records the assault subjectively from his perspective. Her wig flies off to reveal a perfectly bald head, and a great grotesque moment of film is made. In both cases, Fuller demonstrates such gritty visuals and muscular storytelling that we're invested in these movies nearly before they've begun.

He shows similar fortitude in 1953's pulpy, coarse Pickup On South Street, now on glistening display in a new DVD release from Criterion. After opening credits using Fox's standard mid-century font, we get one quick establishing shot of a subway, then wham! we're set in the middle of a packed train car. We see small-time hood (Richard Widmark) expertly fingering the purse of a costume bejeweled dame (Jean Peters). We also see another man eye Widmark, but he says nothing. The movie, in fact, has yet to offer one word of dialogue. Widmark scores, and he gets off at the next stop before the witness can follow him. It's a bravura first scene, often evoked in film classes as a textbook example of a seamless blend of editing, reactions, and mood.

More importantly, that heist offers the beginnings of a complex plot whereby the audience knows not where it's going. Neither victim nor perpetrator realizes that they're handling sensitive government documents wanted by Communists, and there are folks willing to kill to get them back. Pickup on South Street joins the ranks of a select number of movies that exploit a narrative structure particularly well defined in American crime dramas, in which deceptive simplicity spirals into deep complexity and suspense. The Big Heat, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, The Hitch-Hiker, and Detour all reveal themselves in ways deliberate, teasing, and sinister, and Pickup on South Street belongs very much to this tradition.

Given its vintage, Pickup on South Street might be expected to offer testimony on the evils of Communism and the goodness of Democracy, but everyone is too busy looking out for themselves. Its canvas is decidedly small, but there is a clearly understood street hierarchy. Pickpockets, traitors, and stoolies are all low — but none are lower than the Commies. For one moment, men and women on both sides of the law unite against the Red Menace. Still, the politics of Pickup on South Street remain murky. Fuller kept the patriotism at arm's length, stating, "I had no intention of making a political statement in Pickup, none whatsoever. My yarn is a noir thriller about marginal people, nothing more, nothing less."

The cast is perfectly chosen. Widmark's mouth acquired a permanent sneer ever since he pushed that old lady down the stairs in Henry Hathaway's 1947 Kiss of Death. Peters looks like she was born sleazy, but it is Thelma Ritter as embittered, bemused, world-weary Moe who gives a performance to rank alongside the best in American film history. Every line, every gesture, every expression offers us a look at Moe's sorry, pitiable life. Ritter lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Donna Reed, who stretched her instrument none too persuasively that year as a woman of easy virtue in From Here to Eternity. The choice today looks felonious, but such are the crimes of Oscar.

As is its custom, Criterion loaded on the extras. Here we have Fuller, a man's man and a director's director, holding court in two brief documentary interviews. He's a straight talker void of the obnoxious self-regard that adheres to so many filmmakers. The 20-page booklet confirms him as a regular guy, strong enough to fight Darryl F. Zanuck on casting Betty Grable in the female lead, but personable enough to endear himself to studio people of every rank. He has modern acolytes as well, from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino, Curtis Hanson, and Stephen Frears.

Pickup on South Street's veneer is made of neon, greasy spoons, flophouses, police headquarters, and one highly picturesque waterfront shack all finely lit in long shadows. But the fetid urban landscape is not a literal translation of Fuller's soul. Quite the contrary. In the DVD's booklet, he is quoted saying, "I hate violence. That has never prevented me from using it in my films. It's part of human nature.... violence is deplorable, but alas, it's part of our brutal heritage." Fuller wasn't afraid to look into the eyes of the beast — and the beast is us.

May 2004 | Issue 44

Copyright © 2014 by

Matthew Kennedy

http://brightlightsfilm.com/44/pickup.php

The Definitives Review - Pickup on South Street

THE DEFINITIVES
AN ONGOING SERIES OF IN-DEPTH ESSAYS AND APPRECIATIONS ON THE VERY BEST OF CINEMA

Pickup on South Street (1953)

DIRECTOR: Samuel Fuller
CAST: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, and Richard Kiley
RATED: Not Rated
RUNTIME: 80 min.

by Brian Eggert

The Definitives:
07/22/2009

Original Release Date:
06/17/1953

Samuel Fuller made films about survivors. Whether they tromped through the perils of war and came out alive or faced up against one of society’s more menacing social problems, his brand of hard-boiled characters and roughneck scenarios operate on instinct and pure emotion. Having seen it all, from blood-soaked battlefields to the likewise drenched urban sprawl, Fuller writes experience into his screenplays and directs them with authenticity and visual dynamism. His yarns are designed to disquiet his viewers, to “grab audiences by the balls” and not let go. Such is the case with Pickup on South Street, a film that spits in the face of patriotism in favor of human survival.   

Backed by his longtime supporter Daryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox, Fuller was hired to rewrite Harry Brown’s script based on Dwight Taylor’s original story Blaze of Glory. Zanuck wanted a picture defined by “guts and realism,” a platform against formula noir pictures that were all too common by the early 1950s. Brown’s treatment was entirely too orthodox for Zanuck, who, according to early conference notes about the film, craved a “hard-hitting Richard Widmark kind of thing.” Who better to communicate that than Samuel Fuller? Having greatly admired Fuller’s intense and genuine war movies like Steel Helmet andFixed Bayonets, Zanuck entrusted Fuller to create a visceral, truth-telling portrayal of the criminal underworld.

What Fuller might call a “pisscutter-of-a-movie,” Pickup on South Street contains a lurid realism in respect to the cold-blooded, amoral, yet oddly noble central characters, all of whom are criminals. In Fuller’s crackerjack script, a pickpocket named Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark, much to Zanuck’s pleasure) lifts the wallet of an unwitting Communist courier on a subway, a dame called Candy (Jean Peters) being trailed by two FBI agents. Unbeknownst to Skip, her wallet contains microfilm holding a top-secret formula meant for an undisclosed nefarious plot. When Candy tells her handler Joey (Richard Kiley) what happened, he tells her to find the pickpocket, and so she follows a trail of names until she reaches Moe (Thelma Ritter), a lowly necktie saleswoman who also gives up information to cops or anyone paying. However, Moe has already given Skip’s name to the police.

Skip finds himself downtown, police Captain Dan Tiger (Murvyn Vye) and FBI men appealing to his patriotism to hand over the microfilm. Skip laughs off their pleas, “Are you waving the flag atme?” A three-time loser, Skip plays it cool under pressure, knowing life imprisonment awaits him if they convict him of theft once more. Unable to prove anything, they let Skip go but keep an eye on his movements. Candy later arrives to hunt for the microfilm at Skip’s home, an abandoned bait shack on the Hudson River. She does her best to seduce it out of Skip in a series of visits, and even begins to fall for him in the process, but he sees right through her game and sends her back to Joey for a bigger payoff. It makes no difference to him what secrets the microfilm holds, even after he learns it belongs to Communist spies.

Knowing the cops are watching him and wanting to keep Skip out of jail, Candy eventually bludgeons him over the head and takes the microfilm to Joey, completely unaware that Skip had kept a frame for insurance. Joey beats Candy to a pulp when he discovers this, but she refuses to relinquish the location of Skip’s hideout. Joey then proceeds to Moe and murders her when she too refuses to divulge information to a Red. And so Skip, forced to recognize Candy’s loving sacrifice and enraged by Moe’s murder, gives up on his pursuit of a high-buck payoff and goes after Joey for revenge, slugs him up and down a busy subway station, recovers the microfilm, and catches the Communist agent under the nose of the authorities. In the final scene, Skip and Candy leave the police station free, though Captain Tiger predicts Skip will find himself in trouble again. Candy replies, “You wanna bet?”  

Fuller wrote in his autobiography, “All over the world, you’ll find small-time crooks like Skip, Candy, and Moe living on the underbelly of society, struggling to survive with their scams, abiding by their own unwritten code of ethics.” Throughout the picture, it is impossible not to observe that the only characters with ties of any kind are the authorities. Fuller’s protagonists do what they must to get by. Skip lifts wallets on subway trains, Moe sells names along with her men’s accent-wear, and Candy does whatever she can to earn cash for dresses. Fuller resolves that Candy is “too dumb to be a hooker, too dumb to be a mistress.” Though her criminal station remains somewhat undefined, Candy presents the frank obscurity by which these people survive. Unskilled though she may be, her good looks and knowledge of the street are enough to keep her going.

Fuller’s underworld inhabitants all subsist according to an unwritten code that frees them of any personal responsibility for their actions, with the understanding that each does their part for themselves and no one else. Moe, for example, sells Skip’s whereabouts to the police, however Skip does not hold it against her. “She’s gotta eat,” he explains. In a tender moment when Candy asks Skip how he came to be a pickpocket, another director might have exploited Skip’s backstory, softening the tone with a melodramatic response. But Fuller knows that a character like Skip would never unnaturally ruminate about his painful past; he instead writes it that Skip shoves Candy away and shouts furiously, “Don’t ask stupid questions!” And Fuller’s rabble accepts that others like them earn their dollar in their own way, politics notwithstanding. When Candy returns to Skip’s shack for the second time to recover the microfilm, he figures she works for the Reds, even if she remains unaware of it herself. “So you’re a Red, who cares? Your money’s as good as anybody else’s.”

Much was made of Skip McCoy and his politically indefinite dialogue in the screenwriting process thanks to the suspicious eyes of both J. Edgar Hoover and the Production Code Administration (PCA), who called for numerous script revisions. In an anecdote told by Fuller himself, during a lunch between Hoover, Zanuck, and Fuller the FBI director wanted the original line “Don’t wave that goddamn flag at me” removed. Though Zanuck and Fuller conceded to remove the profanity, Zanuck defended the purpose of the line, arguing that it had nothing to do with any projected undercurrents of patriotism in the film or lack thereof, rather it had everything to do with the nature of the character, which Hoover could not control even with his authority—he had no jurisdiction over story. 

Fuller made most of his PCA concessions on the violence depicted in Pickup on South Street, which despite the director’s artistic compromises still represents some of the most shockingly brutal displays from this era of cinema. Take the scene where Joey throws Candy around—she emerges from a bath wrapped up in a zipped robe, but Joey shakes her about the room, smacking her face and slamming her into furniture, and when she tries to escape, he shoots her. Most impressive is that this takes place all in one shot; it is actually Peters and Kiley, not stunt actors. Originally Fuller wanted to suggest that her robe comes off during the struggle, except even if nothing was shown the implication was too much for the PCA. Later, when Skip confronts Joey in the subway station, the sequence, shot from a high angle to capture the fight in all its rowdy glory, blazes with natural-looking but meticulously choreographed violence. Or when Skip first finds Candy rummaging through his shack in the  dark, he socks her in the jaw, and when the light come on, that he punched a woman makes no difference to him; he pours beer on her face to wake her up and cackles about it.

Skip’s coarseness comes easily for Richard Widmark, whose onscreen persona resides beneath the beady eyes and cocky grin of a hard case. Widmark embodies Skip completely, imbuing that same roguish impetuousness he maintains in films noir like Kiss of Death and Night and the City. A manner of violence booms all around Skip, communicated through Widmark’s body language, the arrogance in the actor’s walk, the way his lips curl when he flashes that seedy smile. Though these expressions resist being warm and welcoming, Fuller’s audience knows the character from their first glimpse—a scoundrel who demands our empathy by admiration of his singular roguish mannerisms. That Widmark’s very presence exudes unnerving tumult helps further the description of Fuller’s setting as a criminal world wrought by violence and urban survivalists.   

No character better demonstrates Fuller’s understanding for the need to survive than Moe, as told through Thelma Ritter’s heartfelt, Oscar nominated performance. Taking cash for neckties and names, she saves to feed her “kitty”—code for a cemetery plot on Long Island. “I have to go on making a livin’ so I can die,” says Moe, afraid of being another nameless corpse dumped onto Potter’s Field, as she does not yet have enough money to reserve her burial plot. When Joey pays her a visit to extract information, resignedly, she becomes aware that her lifetime’s worth of scraping by was in vain. “You’d be doin’ me a big favor if you’d blow my head off,” Moe tells Joey. And he does. After Skip learns of her murder, Fuller shows him stopping the ferry carrying numbered coffins to Potter’s Field and taking Moe’s body to be buried with dignity, and in that reveals the character’s compassion.

Fuller’s means to point out the travesty of a world that demands people spend their lives saving for death. But this world is where Fuller grew up. In a physical sense, his descriptions of New York City, although filmed on a Hollywood studio, bear staggering verisimilitude. Cinematographer Joe MacDonald (My Darling Clementine) uses noirish lighting and finds impressive detail imbedded into the film’s few sets, creating a sense of haphazard “realism” like that employed by early Italian Neorealists such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti. Embedded into this cityscape are ripe characters taken from real life, each given an unmatched power developed from the director’s personal experience on the streets of New York.

In his early teens, Fuller became a copy boy and found his kinship with ink and words. By seventeen he was reporting crimes from the underworld to readers of a prickly tabloid, the New York Evening Graphic. At this young age he played witness to bloody murder scenes, all manner of crimes, scandal, and corruption amid officialdom, all of which would serve as inspiration later on. Once his paper shut down, he reformatted what he had seen into pulpy yarns, selling short novels and the occasional (sometimes ghostwritten) script to Hollywood. His first script sold in 1936 when he was just 24. When he returned from his duties as an infantryman in WWII, where he helped liberate the German concentration camp at Falkenau, Fuller began working for Hollywood full-time. And in 1949 he directed his debut feature, a vital Western called I Shot Jesse James.

Over the next several decades, Fuller’s filmmaking style earned him a reputation for confronting the viewer with energetic camerawork and emotionally wrenching storylines. Strangely and often miraculously, Fuller’s films found balance between their barefaced audacity and their dramatic resonance. Consider The Naked Kiss, his colorful humanization of prostitution, which begins with a shaved-headed Constance Towers attacking a first-person perspective camera angle doubling as her pimp. Forty Guns features Barbara Stanwyck as a rancher protected by a small army of hired guns; she rides on horseback around her expanse of land, an army of male soldiers, thin metaphors for phalluses, following behind her. Or take White Dog, his 1982 film that was blacklisted by Paramount Pictures and labeled racist. In it, a dog trained to attack black people serves as an allegory for the inhumanity of racism—the film’s critics clearly missed the point, as they often do with Fuller’s work.

Though many of his films were unfortunately labeled B-movies—as if budgets and big-name stars could ever determine the quality of a motion picture—Fuller’s output has its admirers among scholars and directors. Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders have done their part to help stimulate awareness about Fuller’s career through written appreciations or references to Fuller in their films visually, thematically, or just placing him in the cast. Jean-Luc Godard asked Fuller to appear in his 1965 film Pierrot le fou—Fuller appears in sunglasses, standing against a wall, playing a beatnik version of himself. As the tale goes, Godard asked Fuller to improvise a definition for film with the camera. Fuller responded, “Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.” This adlib is often used to describe Fuller’s aesthetic approach.

Fuller sought to wake his audience up with blows to the gut and harsh slaps to the face. To call his work blunt would be an understatement, but he never resorts to superficial shocks. His films are at once honest and daring, ballsy and genuine, and always filled with characters contradictory by design. With scripts pulled tight as a hanging rope, his objective is truth. If that means he has to communicate through amplification or sacrifice good taste, so be it—humanity rarely behaves in good taste, which Fuller had witnessed more than most, so his films illustrate that trend with unflinching candor.

Perhaps this is why Fuller remains best known for his authentic war pictures. Having seen how soldiers behave first hand, he knew those John Wayne actioners about the glories of battle were hogwash romanticized for the American viewer. Battle was brutal and unromantic. Fuller’s war pictures, most significantly The Big Red One and Steel Helmet, show how wartime has very little to do with heroes, rather just unfortunate people who endure a turbulent landscape and somehow survive. Pickup on South Street is the same. Take a Fuller war picture, diminish the scope to a cold war setting, point the camera into back alleys and sordid parts of the urban backdrop, and the films carry identical themes about desperation and survival at any cost.

When Pickup on South Street was released in 1953 during an era where the cold war climate put an eerie chill over the United States, Fuller’s film jabbed at this absurd paranoia by representing characters whose motivations were more basic, more insignificant than politics or borders or top-secret formulas. Critics, however, interpreted the picture according to their own views. That the film refused to make an oblique, outspoken political commentary and yet concerned itself with an otherwise hot cold war topic earned it diverse readings. Some believed it a pro-communist, anti-American assessment. Others called it a welcomed anti-communist critique. Fuller insisted his film was just a story and only that: “My yarn is a noir thriller about marginal people, nothing more, nothing less.”

By avoiding political statements in Pickup on South Street and releasing a film about people without labels, Fuller sends a powerful message to those driving cold war obsessions or overtly political moviemaking. The director’s intentional lack of perceptible biased offers an individualist alternative to the grand stakes of a traditional studio film, thus he rebels against an era desperate to propagate its jealous Americanism. Standing on unpatriotic and certainly criminal grounds, the film sustains grit, intelligence, sincerity, yet still entertains in a way that challenges the viewer with ideas of humanism. Through this narrative about hoods just trying to survive, the picture permeates raw, volatile emotion onto the screen, fully characterizing the elemental energy of Samuel Fuller’s cinema.

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