"I have to go on making a living so I can die."
In New York City, an insolent pickpocket, Skip McCoy, inadvertently sets off a chain of events when he targets ex-prostitute Candy and steals her wallet. Unaware that she has been making deliveries of highly classified information to the communists, Candy, who has been trailed by FBI agents for months in hopes of nabbing the spy ringleader, is sent by her ex-boyfriend, Joey, to find Skip and retrieve the valuable microfilm he now holds.
Pickup on South Street is showing in 1 cinema in New York City - next screening Tuesday 3 November at 20:00 at Film Forum.
Next screenings: Tuesday 3 November.
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"I have to go on making a living so I can die."
Richard Widmark sneakily accessing the microfilm machine at the New York Public Library = me opening an Incognito browser window to view paywalled content.
The dirty New York reflects a nation’s paranoia. A feverish portrait of post-war America, where anti-communism flowed from headlines into fiction. At the height of McCarthyism, when any minimal and distinct change outside the “normal” could be read as a threat to the homeland, the director plunges us into an underworld of pickpockets and informants, where the foundations of patriotism are negotiable and ideology is a currency. The film in a way does not align with the rigid moralism of the time; it punches hypocrisy, revealing that the struggle between capitalism and communism, these two ideologies that in a way in small details, know how to read what happens in reality, but ultimately dissolves into the law of the smartest.Richard Widmark was a very smart choice, I loved it, with his cynical laugh and predators eyes, he embodies Skip McCoy, a pickpocket who, with a flick of his fingers, pulls from a bag what will be his passport to destruction and redemption: a microfilm. Jean Peters, whom I wasn’t familiar with, is incendiary as Candy, she’s an intelligent femme fatale, a survivor of the underworld. But it’s Thelma Ritter who steals the show, her Mo, an informant who sells secrets as if selling ties (lol), she's simply surreal, the only character who understands the real cost of betrayal. Fuller films all the actors with an almost documentary rawness, capturing every drop of sweat, every wrinkle carved by survival.The script is simple, but each scene is driven by a voracious need for survival, a choreography of betrayals, threats and low blows. The shadows mix with Fuller’s brutal realism, creating a rhythm that borders on hysteria: claustrophobic close-ups, sharp cuts, spit dialogues as if words were knives. Violence, when it comes, is fast and dirty, without glamour, there is no heroism, only necessity. A noir worthy of its time.— List: The Femme Fatale Legacy
A cynical pickpocket in New York City inadvertently steals classified microfilm meant for communist spies, drawing unwanted attention from both federal agents and criminal syndicates.
Pickup on South Street was directed by Samuel Fuller in 1953, renowned for his gritty, hard-hitting American crime dramas.
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