Kritiken

There's an instinctive mastery in the film's formal impact, yet somehow the greater intimacy of this impeccable new Blu-ray transfer also reveals a surprising emotional quotient. Widmark's attraction to Peters is obvious when they lock eyes as he fingers her handbag, but he knows she feigns desire for a living... until the realisation that love exists in their marginalised, pitiless universe, it's lump-in-the-throat time. Top-five Fuller for sure.

Pulp the way Fuller cooks it—snappy, violent, and mean—makes it own sense, right being Peters's pleading, artless look, wrong a matter for us in the real world to fuss with. Pickup on South Street is fresh, pulpy, and savage, a still hot, hard-boiled classic.

The idea that J. Edgar Hoover hated Sam Fuller's insanely slangy, deliriously hard-boiled noir—the craziest anti-Communist movie of 1953 or any other year—only makes the movie more enjoyable.

Pickup on South Street is the most claustrophobic American film before Psycho. Hitchcock's lament for the aridity of the modern age focused on "private traps." Sam Fuller's 1953 noir, the finest distillation of his tabloid sensibility, is about public traps: the confinement of rigid political identity, the division of society into citizens and criminals, the solely economic line that separates pauperhood from respectability.

Fuller's pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread.

In Pickup on South Street, this idea of musical violence is most vividly embodied by the scene in which Candy stands up to her quasi-boyfriend, Joey (Richard Kiley), who beats her senseless and tries to kill her. But Candy lives, as she must, in a flourish that speaks to Fuller's remarkable blend of sensationalism with sentimentality. This film is an amazing example of what might be called noir jazz.

The phenomenally virile camerawork takes off from Kurosawa's Stray Dog and improves on it, pushing whole sequences (Widmark cuffs Peters, revives her with splashed beer, and seduces her by rubbing her bruised jaw) beyond noir tropes and into the realm of batty lyricism.

A diamond-cut crime drama at 80 minutes, Pickup doesn't waste a second in moving the story forward, but it's also flecked with incidental details, from the "trademark" techniques of a New York City pickpocket to the way a crook named "Lightning" Louie snaps up his bribe money.

In their own contradictory ways, Candy and Skip become a couple (‘fall in love' somehow doesn't quite fit the film's emotional aesthetics). Anna Dzenis found Fuller's later gangster film, House of Bamboo (1955), the most romantic film she'd seen all year, a judgment which surprised many. In a similar way, Pickup on South Street is Sam Fuller's cheerfully iconoclastic romantic comedy.

It isn't his best, but this 1953 feature may be the archetypal Sam Fuller film, a condensation of his themes and techniques with the steam still rising... Fuller's didacticism is fully vented, as is his flair for chunky, racking violence: the film contains an unforgettable image of a thug's chin being bounced rhythmically down a flight of stairs. There's an excellent, layered performance from Thelma Ritter, an actress generally given to cartoonishness.

The simplest way to describe [Fuller's] best film, Pickup on South Street, is to talk about his movie eye. A blunt melodrama about microfilm, stoolies and Soviet agents (fuller's scripts are grotesque jobs that might have been written by the bus driver in The Honeymooners: "OK, I'll give you five minutes to clear out. If you're not out, we're going to burn the place down"), its quite long segments in a subway have a devilish moodiness, spareness, quietness.