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Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street opens with a scene that is downright dazzling, even by today's standards. It takes place on a crowded New York City subway. As people shift about, a man and woman eventually end up face to face. They begin to make goo-goo eyes at each other, but the flirtation is merely a distraction for the man to lift the woman's wallet as he expertly times the stopping of the subway with the closing of her purse. Two other subway riders witness the crime and give futile chase, while the woman departs, eventually noticing she's been had.
That brief scene, which doesn't take more than four or five minutes, is enough to suck viewers into this 1953 classic. The man is Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), a seemingly fearless petty thief who has just completed his third prison stint. He takes his plunder back to his home, a dilapidated bait-and-tackle shack on the river (complete with gangplank entrance), and is shocked to discover the wallet contains a strip of microfilm.
Skip's subway mark was Candy (Jean Peters), a perky little skirt who was supposed to deliver the film to a contact of her extremely nervous (and extremely abusive) boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley). What she doesn't know is that Joey is a dirty Commie bastard and that the film contained "a patent for a new chemical formula," which, best I can tell, is secret code for "something that will help the Ruskies win the Cold War." When Candy tells Joey the film has been swiped, he demands she recover it immediately.
Meanwhile, the local police (tipped off by the two feds who witnessed the pickpocketing) start hounding Skip, who suddenly realizes he might have stumbled upon something very valuable. His beliefs are confirmed when he returns to his shack one night to find it being ransacked by an intruder. The darkness prevents him from seeing the prowler is Candy, so Skip goes in swinging, knocks her out cold with a fierce blow to the jaw, and revives her by emptying a bottle of beer on her head. And that's before they start making out. Foreplay just ain't what it used to be, kids.
The rest of the fairly succinct film follows Skip, Candy, the fuzz, Joey and his Commie pals as they jockey for possession of the valuable strip of film. Most of the movie's characters turn to a lowlife stoolie (an unforgettable Thelma Ritter) for what amounts to the exact same information. Ritter's performance is the glue that holds Pickup together, and she was rightfully nominated for a Best Supporting Actress award that year (she lost to From Here to Eternity's Donna Reed - Ritter actually went 0-for-6 in that category between 1951 and 1963).
Equally impressive is Fuller's direction, which only slips when he portrays Joey as a perpetually sweaty nudnik (if they were always that soggy, the Reds would have stood out like David Dinkins). His camera placement is impeccable, most notably in the scene near the end that is shot through the bars of Candy's headboard, making Skip look like he's back in the clink. Listen for the barely noticeable alarm when Candy discovers her wallet is missing, and see if you can count the number of times Fuller's script (based on a Dwight Taylor story) makes reference to Candy's line of work. They never come right out and say it, but her profession is the world's oldest.
1:27 - Not Rated
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