Rochi’s Retro Rental: Pickup on South Street (1953)

I spent some of the holiday week catching up with books I had missed, in part because the barrage of end-of-year-screenings had left me a little movie-d out — or, rather, end-of-year-screenings plus Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories, about which less said, the better. One of the books I’ve been idly leafing through is A Third Face, Samuel Fuller’s memoir — “My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking,” as the subtitle elaborates. You may have never seen a Sam Fuller movie, but plenty of people who you respect as moviemakers did — Martin Scorsese provides the introduction for A Third Face, and the just-released DVD of White Dog, shelved for decades due to controversy, is one of the hottest discs of the year. Fuller’s not exactly a name that springs to mind when we think of the great directors of the past, and at the same time, he’s got a real style — whether you’re watching one of his Westerns (I Shot Jesse James), or his war films (The Big Red One) or his dramas (Shock Corridor) or his two-fisted crime films — like this week’s Retro Rental, a movie I went back to after reading Fuller’s book, Pickup on South Street.

Pickup on South Street was released in 1953 and it nicely — and nearly perfectly — combines 40s-style black and white crime-movie crackle and pop with the more rich, subtly shaded melancholy of ’60s cinema. We open in a crowded, jostling subway car in New York as a man and a woman are shoved together but the push and crush of urban life; they make eyes at each other, veiled intent in his gaze and open invitation in her every sigh and glance … and all of this is as irrelevant as it is mesmerizing, because the real action’s happening out of sight; as her eyes move up and down his face, his hand is slowly, stealthily, moving into her purse. …

Richard Wildmark is squirmy and steely as Skip McCoy, a three-time loser of a pick-pocket; the next time he goes away, he goes away for good. He’s who we see pulling the dip in the opener; the woman is Candy, played by Jean Peters, and while she’s Skip’s latest mark, she’s not the usual mark. Skip doesn’t just lift Candy’s wallet; Skip takes a roll of microfilm she’s carrying, microfilm loaded with an industrial secret that the other side wants… then one of the tough-talking cops chasing Candy asks the question we’re asking: “So, the Commies are mixed up in this?” They are, and Skip doesn’t care about Red versus Red, White, and Blue; he just wants to make a little green, fully aware he’s got something a lot of people want — and he’s not afraid to play both sides against each other.

Pickup on South Street has the zing and snap of ’40s crime films, and it gets a lot of flavor from that; it also has the essential plot structure of late ’50s and ’60s Hitchock classics, where the protagonist is doing something bad and stumbles across someone doing something worse. Wildmark’s espionage-interrupting thief Skip isn’t that far from Jimmy Stewart’s murder-catching voyeur in Rear Window. (In fact, Thelma Ritter, so sassy and fun in Rear Window, has a great part in Pickup as a worn-down stool pigeon.) Pickup on South Street has that retro zing and snap to the dialogue — like when police captain Dan Tiger warns Skip: “You’ll always be a two-bit cannon. And when they pick you up in the gutter dead, your hand’ll be in a drunk’s pocket.” It also has a world-weary, ’60s sense of bleak nihilism to it: the ‘hero’ is a petty crook trying to graduate to treason in the name of a payday; the person in the film who’s closest to decent gets a lead-jacketed reward for their trouble.

Fuller was an artist and a craftsman; some of Pickup on South Street is superbly cut and edited, like a grim escape in a tight spot — and other shots have the clean, elegant simplicity that you get when a director knows enough to step out of the way of the story. Fuller’s book is great reading — from his Army service in war to the Army movies he made — it’s a great overview of his career. If you want to watch just one 87-minute movie that explains why you should care about Fuller’s career — a nice, lean, mean, old-fashioned and yet meanly modern crime film — you should pick up Pickup on South Street.