Pickup on South Street (1953)

A gritty dark movie directed by by Sam Fuller leads the viewer through a winding plot after a pickpocket steals and intercepts microfilm containing sensitive information from Candy, played by Jean Peters, destined to be shared by communist spies. The lowlife pickpocket Skip played by Richard Widmark, is an ace at eluding capture by police. Suspense ratchets up as Skip puts himself and Candy in harms way with the communist spies and the cops. With superb acting by Peters, Widmark and Thelma Ritter, this film is an awesome view and should be added to one of your top movies to see.

Everything about this film is first rate. Everything!The story is solid, the acting excellent, the direction spot-on, and the cinematography excellent.What a perfect paring; noir and spy-craft. Richard Widmark gives a convincing if not schizophrenic performance as a petty criminal in love with this mark. But the movie is stolen by Thelma Ritter in her final scene.Everything about this film says "dark film" without screaming it. Add to that, they "communist connection," and you have and update version of the original American film art-form.WARNING: There is a REMARKABLE amount of male on female violence for a Hayes Code film. Yes, even today, it's hard to watch.

Due to its excessive brutality and sadistic beatings (especially the rough slapping around of pretty Candy), this rough'n'tough Crime/Thriller from 1953 ran into a lot of serious flak from the censors prior to its initial release.In order to appease the picky censor board's pointless grumblings, several violent scenes were quickly re-shot and even a "cutesy-pie", little happy ending was tacked onto the story for good measure.And because this film's theme dealt directly with Communist espionage on American turf, FBI agent, J. Edgar Hoover, even got into the act and complained to Darryl F. Zanuck (then head of 20th Century Fox) about the unpatriotic attitude of Richard Widmark's lippy character and his "Are you waving the flag at me?" line.Of course (as you can well-imagine), the whole controversy that all of this silly attention stirred up prior to "Pickup's" initial release did absolute wonders as a means of advertising and, thus, selling it to the curious movie-going public, and generating big box-office bucks.Pickup's story deals with the serious events that are set into motion after the brazen pickpocket, Skip McCoy, steals a wallet being carried by pretty, little Candy.Unknown to both Skip and Candy, this innocent-looking wallet actually contains a strip of microfilm of top-secret information that was being delivered to a group of ruthless Communist spies operating within the seedy underworld of NYC.Filmed in stark b&w, this hard-edged Crime/Drama had a running time of only 80 minutes. It was directed by Samuel Fuller whose other films from the 1950s included Forty Guns, Hell and High Water, and Underworld USA.

This is not groundbreaking and it will not change you in any fundamental way. But it is deeply noir, and that is something always worth seeing.We have a story centered on a character who is, among every character, the one who knows less about what's going on. He is the only one totally outside the juicy plot he gets sucked into, and yet the only one that everybody (police and communists) believe to be in control of everything. Everything happens to him, he fights to control the events, but ends up being swept by them. Notice this: he literally gets into the story by randomly picking a girls' pocket, and steeling some very important film. He doesn't have a clue about the importance and value of what he has, and acts accordingly. In the meanwhile he tries to outplay both the police and the communists, using the girl as his arrow girl, as a shield. He ends up loosing control both of the story (but not quite), as he falls in love with the girl. So here we have a cute sense of chaos in the story, agitated narrative where we find ourselves lost, as much as our surrogate detective, in this case the pickpocket. Fuller has a great sense of pace and mood, and this film has a very special extra thing: the floating shack where many of the fundamental twists in the narrative happen. That is one great set that I will have with me for a long time. As an explored space it is good enough, in studio context. As a metaphor for the unstable mood of the whole narrative it works fine. In the end, this space becomes the odd center of the bizarre noir world of the film, and to root a film so strongly in a place is something I always appreciate.My opinion: 4/5http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com