Samuel Fuller - Pickup on South Street (1953) DVDRip + Extras

Skip McCoy, a small-time pickpocket, steals Candy's wallet which contains a microfilm of top-secret government information. This sets off a frantic search for McCoy by the police and other parties interested in securing the microfilm.

Skip McCoy, un ratero de poca monta, en un robo rutinario a una mujer, Candy, se apodera de un valioso microfilm que contiene secretos de estado. Pero Candy estaba bajo vigilancia de agentes del gobierno, lo que convertirá a Skip en el blanco de diversos individuos.




Pickup on South Street has a nominal subject as timely as any in the morning paper in 1952 —PICKPOCKET HEISTS RED SPY MOLL– although today we might be more inclined to see it as PICKPOCKET FINDS LOVE, CHEATS DEATH. The Commie angle, besides being practically de rigueur for Hollywood that year, was a surefire means of injecting fear and trembling into the proceedings, by introducing a faceless, inhuman evil to contrast with the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook. That the picture is barely political can be demonstrated by the fact that, in France, where the Communist Party was a significant presence nobody wanted to offend, Pickup was released as Le Porte de la drogue —the villains became drug smugglers— with changes made only to the dubbed dialogue. What is at stake, after all, is nothing as high-flown as The American Way (“Are you waving the flag at me?” pickpocket Skip McCoy asks the FBI agent grilling him); rather, it is the possibility of a force so morally alien that, like the child molester in Fritz Lang’s M, the law and the underworld can be united, however briefly, against it.




McCoy is played by Richard Widmark, whose face could illustrate the dictionary definition of insolence. One look at him and you don’t even need the backstory to know why the cops want to send him up the river for good. Although he went on to play a wide variety of characters in his career, he was initially typed by his screen debut, which was also his first starring role, in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947), in which he kicks an old lady down the stairs. Here it is the old lady who nearly does him in, although their relationship is complex —she is, for all dramatic intents and purposes, his mother. Playing the part is the inimitable Thelma Ritter, who was unsurprisingly nominated for an Oscar for the role (it was the fourth of her six nominations in a twelve-year span; she never won). Ritter, only nine years older than Widmark, took the stereotypical Apple Annie character and over the course of her career made a Russian novel out of it. Here she is pathetic, cold-blooded, kittenish, stalwart, cunning, and tender, sometimes all at once. The love interest is supplied by Jean Peters, who is awe-inspiringly ripe —you imagine wardrobe having to gaffer-tape her dress every morning, to keep her from bursting out of it. Peters may not have been the greatest line-reader who ever lived, but she exudes sex so palpably, you can smell the pheromones. (She lost the fifties erotica sweepstakes to the forces of blondeness, alas, and gave up and married Howard Hughes.)

The locations are few but well chosen. A street, a subway station, a Chinese restaurant, a precinct-house office, an apartment (with that forgotten urban-thriller resource, the dumbwaiter) —put them together and presto! you have New York City and its teeming masses. Richard Widmark’s home is something else again, though: a bait-and-tackle shack on stilts, connected to South Street by a swinging bridge. It seems like a preposterous idea today, when New York’s function as a port has been all but erased, but (although I could almost swear I’ve seen a Berenice Abbott photograph of it from the 1930s) it was close to preposterous then, too. The shack is a bubble cantilevered off the tip of the material world, the bridge leading to it passing through the wall of sleep. In the midst of a zillion urban-grit signifiers, the shack cues viewers to the numerous fantasy elements of the story, not least the Red spy subtheme, but also the crooks themselves, who come from The Threepenny Opera by way of Damon Runyon. The shack is the beyond, but given that it is a real shack, roughly carpentered and battered by weather, it is also—what might be Fuller’s heraldic device—the embodiment of contradiction.



Fuller is crude and subtle, blatant and deep, unschooled and spilling over with ancient lore, harsh and plaintive, cynical and so attuned to complicated human emotions, you can’t accuse him of being merely sentimental. Pickup on South Street, it follows, is a penny dreadful with a hundred layers of felt meaning—the kind you register subcutaneously, without requiring professors to dissect and explicate it. If film noir is a genre in which tin-pot crimes are merely the outer manifestations of the churning unconscious, then Pickup on South Street is quintessential noir. Like so many of the worthwhile products of the American 1950s, it is a work of reverberating complexity, wrapped up to look like a candy bar.



Ripped with meGUI from the wonderful Criterion DVD9 rip uploaded by CerealRipper here at Avax


Ajeno a citaciones del HUAC y a listas negras, Samuel Fuller prosiguió sus labores en 20th Century-Fox con un film más propiciatorio de polémicas que sus ya controvertidos acerca de la guerra coreana, Pese a que se acreditó la historia original a Dwight Taylor, el director pudo escribir a su casi entera satisfacción Pickup on South Street (Manos peligrosas), cuya realización culminaría en octubre de 1952. Sin embargo, este relato cinematográfico sobre la búsqueda de un microfilm, con una fórmula referente a un secreto atómico, por comunistas y agentes federales no llegó a las pantallas hasta el 17 de junio de 1953, dado que J. Edgar Hoover, tras una proyección privada en Washington, expresó quejas a Darryl F. Zanuck y solicitó retoques. En todo caso, algunas frases del diálogo que molestaban concretamente al líder de la organización policial susbsistirían en el montaje definitivo.

Característica muy peculiar de la obra era que los tres protagonistas -un carterista, una joven de turbia vida sexual y una vieja confidente de la policía- pertenecían al lumpen neoyorkino y se veían involucrados, más bien a causa del azar, en un asunto de alto espionaje. Y si, por una parte, un colaborador de los agentes comunistas quedaba configurado como cruel asesino, por otra, las dos mujeres expresaban respectivos rechazos al comunismo que manifiestamente no procedían de racionalidad o convicciones sino de reflejos del pánico colectivo; en este sentido, y dada la escasa ética de ambas féminas, sus vacíos discursos en contra de quienes intentaban enviar el microfilm más allá del Atlántico resultarían invalidados precisamente por las idiosincrasias antisociales de una y otra.

Pickup on South Street se ha consolidado como valiosa muestra de cine negro, dotada de secuencias antológicas como la inicial del robo en el metro y la del asesinato de Moe, que comporta en su globalidad un elocuente testimonio sobre los tiempos de la guerra fría y el macartismo.

Screenplay/Guión: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography/Fotografía: Joseph MacDonald
Music/Música: Leigh Harline
Cast/Reparto: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis B. Bouchey, Milburn Stone, Henry Slate, Victor Perry



I have also ripped the main extras, namely:
An exclusive interview with the late Samuel Fuller, made by renowned film critic Richard Schickel.
Excerpts from the Cinéma Cinémas series with Fuller discussing the making of the film.