Pickup on South Street review – a masterly film noir

(Samuel Fuller, 1953; Eureka!, PG, DVD/Blu-ray)

A hard-nosed tabloid newsman in New York before scripting B-movies in Hollywood in the 1930s, Samuel Fuller served as a much decorated infantry sergeant in North Africa and Europe during the second world war. He returned to the cinema after the war, becoming a writer-director-producer, starting with I Shot Jesse James, a low-budget western questioning the nature of courage and hero worship. War movies, noir thrillers and westerns were his forte, action films of visual power that combined nuanced social commentary with brutal directness. They confused middle-class critics the world over into thinking Fuller was a rightwing thug rather than a sensitive artist who sympathised with outsiders, losers and men in the street.

Pickup on South Street was made at 20th Century Fox under the sympathetic eye of producer Darryl F Zanuck during Fuller’s only time as a well-paid contract director. It’s a masterly film noir, released at the height of the red-baiting McCarthy era. In the brilliant opening sequence, set on a packed, sweaty Manhattan subway, a flashy woman (Jean Peters) has her wallet lifted by a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) as two middle-class men look on.

Who are these people crushed together in sweaty close-ups? Why does the scene carry such a heavy erotic charge? The girl is innocently carrying microfilm for Russian agents. The thief is a cocky opportunist. The older men are FBI agents pursuing a spy ring.

Watch the trailer for Pickup on South Street

Fuller hooks us into a complex moral web that never lets up. It takes us back to the angst-ridden 1950s but retains an enduring realism, and in one of her most moving performances of a blue-collar working woman Thelma Ritter was Oscar-nominated as a sympathetic stool pigeon who sells underworld information to the cops but refuses to betray the whereabouts of a fellow minor criminal to the communists.

The movie’s realism, incidentally, is of a rather special kind. Fuller was much impressed by the neorealistic pictures then coming out of Italy, and his film has a comparable rawness and authenticity. But Pickup on South Street was made almost entirely in Hollywood on sets designed by the versatile Lyle Wheeler, who had won an Oscar as an assistant to William Cameron Menzies on Gone With the Wind.

The characteristic anti-communist hero in a Fox film at that time was Dana Andrews in The Iron Curtain (1948), Tyrone Power in Diplomatic Courier (1952) and Gregory Peck in Night People (1954). But Fuller didn’t care for protagonists who immediately proclaimed their clean-cut virtues or vices. He famously turned down Ava Gardner, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe as too glamorous for the role of the hooker, and wanted to bring out the more attractive side of Widmark, a specialist in playing smirking psychopaths. His leading characters come from the wrong side of the tracks, are up against unscrupulous opponents working on both sides of the political fence, and are treated callously by both. A form of patriotism is their default position, and they’re beaten or killed for it.

Fuller was a contrarian, a sort of anarchist opposed to simplistic isms and ideologies, against nationalism, racism, and in favour of individuals and self-selected alliances of the free. J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, objected to the unsympathetic treatment of his agents in Pickup on South Street and the derogatory remarks that Widmark’s character made about American flag-waving, but Zanuck refused to make any changes.

In France, where Fuller was soon to become a revered auteur, the fear that South Street might offend the then influential communist party led to the film being dubbed into French as Le port de la drogue and the villains becoming dealers in narcotics rather than agents of the Kremlin.

Fuller’s own form of patriotism is openly declared in the first shot of the movie, though years were to pass before this was immediately recognisable. His lifelong ambition was to make a film celebrating the wartime record of his old unit, the American First Infantry Regiment, recognisable from the shoulder flash known as the Big Red One. He eventually achieved this in 1980 with the appearance of Lee Marvin as the Fulleresque platoon sergeant in The Big Red One. Throughout the first shot of South Street, an American soldier is strap-hanging in the foreground, his arm bearing the Big Red One badge, invoking the war then being fought in Korea, about which two movies were written and directed by Fuller.

Watch Sam Fuller’s cameo role in Godard’s Pierrot le fou.

I’ve mentioned that Fuller became something of a celebrity in both Europe and America, making personal appearances in several films including Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence. The most famous of these cameo roles is undoubtedly Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), in which, at a Paris party, Jean-Paul Belmondo (an obvious stand-in for Jean-Luc Godard) asks the cigar-chomplng, black-spectacled Fuller: “I’ve always wanted to know what is cinema actually.” Fuller replied: “A film is like a battlefield. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, action.”

This new disc of Pickup on South Street features excellent contributions from French critics François Guérif and Murielle Joudet, and the American writer Kent Jones, all of whom have interesting new things to say.

Contributor

Philip French

The GuardianTramp

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