Pickup on South Street (

1953

) ½

After the House Committee on Un-American Activates (HUAC) exposed the surprisingly large number of communists (both past and present) operating in Hollywood, the industry found itself in a bind. The American public wasn’t going to shell out for movies they thought were made by the Communist Party. Beyond alienating individual film-goers, the industry risked state and local-level boycotts from the American Legion or other patriotic organizations. So rather than risk their profits, the industry created a blacklist that ensured anyone who had been identified by the HUAC as a communist would never work in Hollywood again (at least not under their actual names, plenty of screenwriters would continue to pen scripts under aliases). The only way out for identified communists was to play ball with the committee and “name names.” However, even the blacklist wasn’t enough to appease some of the era’s more hardline anti-communists, who weren’t prepared to forgive the fact that Hollywood had been absolutely riddled with Reds for much of its Golden Age. To appease this group, the studios would have to do more than just ban past and present communists from working on movies; they’d need to make outright anti-communist propaganda.

So began the era of anti-communist films, movies like I was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), and My Son John (1952). Most of these movies, being propaganda, were lousy and more likely to put their audiences to sleep than steer them onto the path of righteousness. As always, the low budget genre movies are more interesting and exciting than their big-budget A-list counterparts. The Thing from Another World (1951) represented the anti-communist agenda well in science fiction. Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) provided some first-rate pro-McCarthy Westerns to balance out the perceived insidious influence of the anti-McCarthy High Noon (1952). Adaptations of Mickey Spillane’s noir novels unsurprisingly turned out high-quality pro-American action/mysteries like Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Joining such luminaries is today’s film: Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street. Surprisingly, it drew the ire of the FBI for its sadistic violence, steamy sexuality, and general brazenness. Evidentially, J. Edgar Hoover and I would disagree as much about aesthetics as we do about politics because in my book Pickup on South Street is a damn fine example of 1950s noir in addition to being an effective and entertaining propaganda film.

We begin with a scene so sexy that to modern audiences it borders on obscene, but must have been overlooked by the more naïve censors of mid-century Hollywood. In a crowded subway train, a pickpocket deftly rifles through a woman’s purse, carefully removing and pocketing her wallet. The scene is odd because the woman being pick-pocketed seems not only to notice what’s going on but also seems to enjoy it. Hell, she seems to enjoy it a lot! I’m left wondering what sort of directions Fuller was giving to his leading lady on set that day, perhaps something along the line of “that’s good dear, but can you make your expression a little more orgasmic.” Obviously, between this and the vulvic folds of her pocketbook, we’re supposed to read this scene as an intensely sexual one. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any point for this characterization aside from cheap thrills and the innate joy of slipping something past the censor. Indeed, in the very next scene, the woman reveals that (despite what we have just seen) she didn’t realize she was being pick-pocketed at all. Whatever you say, dear.

The woman who was robbed in the opening was named Candy, and while the robber was just an everyday pickpocket, the wallet he stole was anything but ordinary. Candy had been in the process of making a delivery for her ex-boyfriend, Joey. She thinks Joey’s just engaged in a little corporate espionage, but in reality, Joey is a communist spy passing government secrets off to Moscow’s top man in New York City. The package he entrusted to Candy contains a chemical formula written on microfilm and maybe the most significant intelligence leak since Russian spies got their hands on atomic secrets during WWII. FBI agent Zara is onto the whole business, and he’s been tailing Joey and Candy for weeks. He’s got a good fix on everyone involved in the operation, except for the top man. The plan was to burst in and arrest him as soon as Candy made the delivery and catch him red-handed; obviously, this plan fell apart when he saw a pickpocket inadvertently make off with the goods.

Zara turns to NYPD Captain, Dan Tiger, to help him identify the pickpocket, why he didn’t just tail the pickpocket until he found an address is beyond me. Maybe his thrice-daily donut break was coming up and he didn’t want to miss it. Tiger calls in an informant, an elderly woman named Moe, who is well acquainted not just with all the pickpockets in New York but intimately familiar with their various styles and techniques. Right away, Moe figures that the job could only be done by Skip McCoy, a career petty criminal who has only been out of prison for a week. Once the cops pay for her information she points them to Skip’s domicile, a rundown shack on the East River that used to serve as a bait shop sometime in the very distant past (you try catching fish in the East River anytime after the 1850s and see if you catch anything aside from old boots and tin cans). Skip has cleverly hidden his loot inside a waterproof container that he tosses into the river and raised back up with a pulley. The cops, being incurable dolts (a case of truth in fiction if I ever saw one), can’t figure out this is the only viable hiding spot in the entire shack and fail to turn up the formula when they search his house. Back at the station, Tiger makes a real hash of his interrogation by trying to level honestly with Skip, a man who he has beaten a confession out of on at least one occasion. He lets Skip know what the formula is and that Communist spies are trying to smuggle it out of the country. Tiger even appeals to Skip’s patriotism, but Skip is a hard-boiled noir criminal and patriotism means about as much to him as honor. He tells Tiger to arrest him or let him walk, and without any physical evidence, Tiger has to let him walk.

Meanwhile, Joey pressures Candy into tracking down the guy who robbed her. Joey would go himself, but he is (like most spies) a physical coward, and quick to shy away from any dangerous confrontations. Candy follows the same path the police used, albeit in a more roundabout fashion and eventually winds up buying a tip from Moe. When she goes to Skip’s derelict shack because there’s something about his surly attitude, dingy environment, and petty cruelty that really turns Candy on. As my wife put it, “This movie shows you can find love anywhere.” Had the cops not tipped Skip off about what he’d stolen, he’d probably be amenable to Candy’s considerable charms. But, while Skip is the kind of guy who’d hand government secrets over to a foreign agent, he’s not the kind of guy who’d do it for free. He tells Candy to get lost and come back $25,000. The only problem is that this is the communists he’s dealing with if they had that kind of dough to spread around they wouldn’t have become commies. The spies opt for a different route, they send Joey with a 9mm to persuade Skip into giving up the goods.

This is a violent film, almost shocking so for the time period. Now, I cover a lot of violent movies on this blog it comes with the territory when reviewing the horror and exploitation genres. But most of the violence I see onscreen is fantastic (as is the case with say Brain Damage (1988)) or stylized to the point where it hardly even resembles reality (Operation Red Sea (2018)). That is to say violence that has been designed by the filmmakers to either thrill or amuse. The violence in Pickup on South Street is a grittier more realistic breed. People get slapped, punched, and bludgeoned into submission more or less constantly throughout the runtime. What’s more, the violence is doled out with discomforting even-handedness, meaning that women are beaten, bludgeoned and shot at nearly the same rate as men. I know it’s a societal quirk that makes me more sensitive to violence against women as opposed to seeing the same violence visited on men, but that doesn’t make the uneasy queasiness in my stomach it any less real.