Pity poor Moe Williams, the lonely drifter who sells men’s ties on the street and sooths herself in her shabby New York walkup with albums by chanteuses francaises. She didn’t ask for any of this. Didn’t ask to be caught up in a clandestine conflict between the U.S. and the Soviets. It was 1953. They were still dying in Korea then. But Moe was a stateside casualty.
But Moe, as played by the great Thelma Ritter, saw it all coming. A life on the outside helped her see all the angles and made her invaluable to the cops as a paid stoolie. The minute she saw the feet propped near the edge of the bed, she knew. Knew it was a gunsel. Knew her fate. She never wanted to know too much, but couldn’t help it. All she wanted was a decent burial and never got it.
Moe isn’t the central character in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), Skip McCoy is. Where Moe knows the angles, Skip only thinks he does. A four-star pickpocket and all-around louse, he’s played by Richard Widmark with a lazy insolence. “He’s as shifty as smoke,” Moe says of him. He’s on top of the world because he’s freed himself from caring about anything but himself.
Then Skip lifts the wrong item from a packed New York subway car and invites Hell to his door. In this case, his door sits on the East River, in a shanty with a view of Brooklyn on a plot likely now owned by an oligarch. Skip lives there like a modern-day Huck Finn, climbing ladders and swinging on cables. Or maybe he’s just another rat in the sewer.
Love It or List It?
The item is microfilm filled with nuclear secrets, the most valuable information there was in the early 50s. Skip swiped the film from the overly trusting Candy (Jean Peters), who didn’t know what she was carrying. Candy’s “knocked around a lot,” we’re told and need no further explanation. She wears figure-hugging, sleeveless dresses but it seems she’s misunderstood. She’s no noir siren of doom; she’s just got big-time boyfriend problems. To Moe, she’s just another unfortunate “muffin.”
Sam Fuller was a former newspaper man and the script crackles with the kind of knowing shorthand of a city room. After Skip’s picks Candy’s pocket, the police start “looking for a cannon who hinged a girl on the subway” a detective tells Moe. “Well, ain’t she pigeonholed with the moll-buzzers?” Moe replies.
Again, this was 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee still reigned powerfully. Already, some of Hollywood’s finest directors and writers had been black-listed, and Fuller had been harassed. He had been accused of being sympathetic to the Soviets after the release of his Korean War film The Steel Helmet despite having served as an Army infantryman in World War II.
That may have made Fuller a bit cynical when the phony patriots came for him.
Pickup is an examination of patriotism wrapped in the guise of a film noir. Skip, it seems, will sell out anyone. Even his country. When the FBI presses him on the microfilm, he tells them to save the “patriotic eyewash” and the stop “waving the flag at me.”
Even Moe gives Skip a hard time for that. “You playin’ footsie with the Commies?” she asks him, drawing a line between criminality and siding with the Soviets.
Drawing a line…
Other male actors such as Robert Mitchum or Robert Ryan might be closely associated with film noir, but Richard Widmark was its beating heart. I particularly like his performance in NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), a London-set noir in which he plays, of course, a hustler. He was at his best when the walls were closing in.
As he shows in Pickup, maybe in the end, he’ll do the right thing. But he’ll do it his way.
WHERE CAN I FIND IT? Pickup on South Street is part of the Criterion Collection.
HEY, ISN’T THAT?: Thelma Ritter is one of the greatest second bananas and scene stealers in Hollywood history. You might know her best as James Stewart’s housekeeper in REAR WINDOW.
DUST CLOUDS: Before Pickup was released, Fuller and Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck had lunch with J. Edgar Hoover, who expressed his dislike of the picture and in particular the flag-waving line, according to Fuller’s autobiography. Zanuck cut out any mention of the FBI in the movie’s marketing.
Pickup, like other Fuller films, was an influence on Martin Scorsese. Some of the zooms and push-ins in the movie feel familiar.
DOOMSDAY INDEX: It’s a 3. The Soviet agents never get a hold of the microfilm and as viewers, we’re not quite sure what’s in it anyway.
LAST ENTRY: By Dawn’s Early Light (1990)
NEXT ENTRY: WarGames (1983) A foundational document for Nuclear Theater and a snapshot of the author’s childhood.