[Movie Clip]
David Hast: Scott, have you seen Pick Up on South Street?
Scott VanderWerf: I have seen Pick Up on South Street, directed by Sam Fuller with Richard Widmark, Gene Peters, and Thelma Ritter starring in the film. It's a great film noir and kind of a surprising one as well.
DH: It is. mean, it's Samuel Fuller whose movies are pretty different than a lot of other people's. And this one might be in some ways one of his most conventional ones but it's still pretty different than other film noirs.
SVW: It is, I mean, because there's a political aspect that you don’t see coming, I mean, unless you had read about it or whatever, but you don't see coming until it's there, which isn't that long into the plot, but it's still kind of, it sets itself apart from other types of film noir.
DH: And it sets itself apart because it's a Samuel Fuller film, and Fuller's films are, no matter what type of film it is, he worked in a lot of genres, they're very energetic, emotional, in many ways more brutal than other films for the time. He draws you in with this combination of fast camera moves, high and low angle shots, tight closeups, lots of tight closeups that reveal characters. This is an 80-minute film. Sam Fuller was this guy who his first training was as a storyteller, as the youngest crime reporter in history, a 17-year-old crime reporter in New York. So he knew how to jump right to the key plot points, the emotional points, and edit briskly, shoot briskly, and just tell a great story.
SVW: And this is probably one of the only Samuel Fuller films that I've seen. I know that I've seen at least one or two others decades ago, but I can't even tell you what movies those were.
DH: Samuel Fuller was, made, worked in different genres. He made several war movies. We'll talk about Fuller later, because he is a fascinating character, but he fought in World War II. He made several war movies, very different than most war movies because of his experiences. And he made a few film noirs and yeah, he's just a really interesting director. But let's talk about what this movie's about. Pick Up on South Street, 1953. The movie starts with a young woman riding a subway train in New York. The train is completely crowded so she's standing holding on to one of those hand grips and turns out...that she has her wallet stolen. Her wallet is pickpocketed. So this is Jean Peters and Richard Widmark, the lead in the film, slides up next to her and pickpockets her purse and steals her wallet. And it turns out that in this wallet is a strip of film that she's delivering to someone as a favor to her ex-boyfriend. And unknown to her, this film contains top secret information stolen by communist spies. That's who her boyfriend's working for. You know, side note, this movie is 1953. It's the height of the Cold War. So this kind of thing was a really common theme.
SVW: It's a common theme, but this is where I say it's kind of surprising because I don't expect to have political espionage intrigue inserted into my film noir. And here it is.
DH: Yeah. And it's really interesting the way Fuller handles it. And it was controversial. And we'll talk about that, the whole aspect of that. So there end up being three characters who are at the center of the story. And this is a very fuller thing. All three of them are marginal characters who have to live by their wits, scams, and deals that they make. There's the young woman, Candy, who it turns out, we don't really know what it is, but we know she's kind of living off the streets and she may be an ex-prostitute based on some of the stuff her communist boyfriend says. Then there's the pickpocket, Skip, and he now has this top secret stolen information even though he doesn't know what it is. And then there's this older woman named Moe who's a friend of Skip's, but she's a police informer. And at one point she actually rats out Skip and he doesn't even mind because he's like, she's just doing her job. So, the FBI and the police, they desperately want to recover this film because it's got a top-secret chemical formula on it. But Skip, Candy and Moe are just trying to survive and make a living. So the authorities try to appeal to their patriotism, but that doesn't carry a lot of weight. What appeals to them is you give me 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and maybe I'll give you some information. Candy tracks skip down and they get involved financially and sexually. You can't really say romantically because it happens really fast. Like the first second they meet and it's clear they're just using each other.
SVW: It's clear that they're using each other, but later, uh, most says that she's in love with him.
DH: Well, later they do fall in love by what happens in the movie. Right? I mean, at first, Candy just wants to clear up the trouble, right? She gets out of the subway, the thing's gone, she goes back to her commie boyfriend, and he's like, oh, we're in huge trouble, you gotta find that film. And he doesn't do much, he sends her out to go find it. So she has to track down Skip. Using Moe and various leads on the street, she finds Skip. So, she wants to clear up the trouble. Skip, once he finds out - Oh, I've got something. didn't just score a few bucks out of this wallet. I've got this film that people are really care about. He wants a big payoff. mean, at one point she's offering him like 500 bucks because that's what her boyfriend gives her. And Skip's like, you go back to him. I want $25,000. So, and we're talking 1953 here, right? And today's dollars, that's a lot of money. Candy's ex-boyfriend… so Joey, he shakes her down for Skip's address when she can't get the film back. He's like, I'm going to go do it himself. And she lies about where he lives. And then Joey discovers that she lied, that she's covering up for Skip. And why is she covering up for Skip? They like each other, but mainly it's because they're both trying to get something out of this. But when the boyfriend finds this out in this brutal scene, really brutal for the 50s, done in one shot, he beats her. And as she tries to escape, he shoots her. And she survives. And then when Skip finds out she almost died trying to protect him, right? That's when...
SVW: That's when Skip realizes that she's in love with him.
DH: Right, and that he's in love with her, that there's more to it and they're not just using each other. And now, Skip will help the authorities, not out of any respect for them or out of the political patriotism they've been trying to get out of him, but he owes it to Candy and he wants to see Joey get punished.
SVW: Well, in the way that this all happens, the movie is only about an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and a half long.
DH: So it's hour and twenty minutes, it just moves really quickly. Yeah, and you and I, we love short movies, right?
SVW: Especially when you're talking about film noir or crime or suspense movies, the shorter the better in some ways.
DH: Yeah, I mean, he's just so efficient and it's such great storytelling. It's so fast and just..I love Sam Fuller for this and this many people think this is his greatest movie. It's not as difficult as some of his other movies. The politics of it is great. And because here's what happened in real life. I mean, this is interesting. It's an interesting artifact of the Red Scare era, the communist witch hunt era. When this movie came out, and even before it, I mean, before it, there's an interesting thing, which is literally J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, the founder of the FBI found out about this meeting, got a hold of the script. know, Hollywood often was getting their stuff screened in these days and demanded changes to the script because the skip character is so disrespectful to the FBI who are trying to appeal his patriotism. But Daryl F. Zanuck, the great producer Daryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, who was the producer of this, backed Fuller and refused to make the changes. So that's kind of cool. What happened was when it came out, conservatives, anti-communist people, accused Fuller of being a communist sympathizer because, you know, Skip's not cooperating with them. But on the other side, liberals accused him of being a red-baiter because there is this anti-communist sentiment to the movie. Fuller, here's what Fuller said. This is a quote: “I had no intention of making a political statement, none whatsoever. My yarn is a noir thriller about marginal people, nothing more, nothing less.”
SVW: And you see it in the movie. I mean, like I said, I was a little taken back by the political insertion into the storyline. I mean, it was not something that I was used to seeing. there is sort of the FBI and the law enforcement, there's a certain level of goodness that they're portrayed by. But they're also portrayed like the Skip character points out to the one police detective that he had backed out on his word before when he put him in jail. So he's like, I can't trust you. And so you get that angle as well. But it's interesting that he would be accused of being a communist sympathizer because you do see some other characters that are maybe higher up in the local communist cell. And they don't come across as being good guys.
DH: No, and that's why liberals who saw this or just people who were suffering because of all this communist witch hunt going on in the 50s said, you've just portrayed the real communists in the movie as just like, they're just evil, know, they're just nasty, sweaty, bad people. So that's where he got the flak from that side. But a lot of it came down to that scene in the police headquarters where the FBI agent's there too. I'll read the dialogue. So the FBI agent says to Skip, “if you refuse to cooperate, you'll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.” And Skip says, “are you waving the flag at me?” And the FBI agent, says, “do you know what treason means?” And Skip says, “who cares? Is there a law now I gotta listen to lectures?”
SVW: Yeah, those are great scenes. And there's more than one scene like that where they're leaning on him in terms of like trying to get him to do the patriotic thing. And he's like, hey man, I'm just trying to live here.
DH: Right. But then later on, Moe, the stool pigeon, when she has this confrontational scene with Joey, the communist boyfriend, she could...help herself and give him some information, but she's like I just don't like commies. Yeah, so you get that too.
SVW: Yeah Well, let's talk about Moe because she's a great character and she's portrayed by Thelma Ritter Who's one of the great character actors throughout Hollywood? Throughout the history of Hollywood and as and worked until she died basically.
DH: Yeah, and she was always another movie She's really well known for as a supporting actress his rear window and this movie she was nominated for best supporting actress I don't think she won but she was one of these character actors. She was nominated like six times.
SVW: That's interesting that there would have been some award nominations for this movie. That's the only one, I think. Because of the brevity and also because of the nature of the film in terms of film noir, I would have thought that this would have been a B picture.
DH: Yeah, well, this is one of his rare A pictures. mean, after this, most of Fuller's, you know, in terms of the financing and the people in the movies and stuff, most of Samuel Fuller's movies are B, but this was an A picture. But yeah, in those days…nowadays, Oscars go to all kinds of edgy movies, right? But back then, no. Alfred Hitchcock never won a Best Director Oscar. Alfred Hitchcock, right? I mean, they didn't give them to horror and noir and crime movies and stuff. They wanted serious drama.
SVW: Well, talk about Fuller’s other movies.
DH: Well, I it's funny. I've said this before. I've been keeping a log of all the movies I've watched for like the last five years, right? And we’re talking hundreds of movies, right? And I always, I just for my own sake, just I give them a star rating from, you know, zero to four stars. And there's two in there that are, I just put big question marks. I had no idea whether to give these movies like two stars or five stars. And they were both Samuel Fuller movies. Shock Corridor and the Naked Kiss. You've never seen any of these films from the sixties?
SVW: I think I may have seen the Naked Kiss.
DH: They are just so bizarre. I mean, so. Fuller was really out there. But he also made some really terse, you know, more conventional films. He made great war movies and Fuller himself is an amazing guy. He wrote a great autobiography. Fuller had like three lives. Samuel Fuller started in newspapers like when he was 12 years old, working in newspapers and became the youngest crime reporter in New York. So, he was writing crime stories, you know, as a reporter when he was 17 and 18 years old. Then he had a second chapter of his life. He was in the Big Red One, the big army unit in World War II that fought, he fought in North Africa, he fought in the battles in Italy, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he was in a unit that liberated a concentration camp. He was at the center of this and won like a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, I mean, incredible. So when he made war movies, he refused. I mean, he could have cast John Wayne. He wouldn't make a World War II movie. He made all these Korean movies, war, but he was afraid to touch World War II because that was his experience and he wanted it done right. And he was offered big money and A picture kind of thing to do it with John Wayne and he wouldn't do it because he said John Wayne movies are fake.
SVW: But he ultimately made an autobiographical one called The Big Red One
DH: He did make the Big Red One with Lee Marvin who we thought could play it much better. And then there's the third chapter in his life, the longest one. He became a filmmaker. He wrote a lot of scripts. He was writing scripts. He wrote novels and scripts even when he was younger. There's a great scene in The Big Red One. There's a character that's kind of modeled on him. And they're resting. I think it’s, here’s his unit over in Europe fighting World War II, and they're resting. And one of the other soldiers is reading a book. And Fuller goes, “hey, that's my book.” The guy goes, “no, it's not, it's my book. bought it at the PX.” And goes, “no, no, it's my book. I wrote it.” And that's true. While Fuller had submitted a novel before he volunteered and went off to fight in World War II. And the novel got published while he was over in Europe fighting. So he was a published novelist. And when he first came back, he was writing screenplays. So he got into Hollywood as a writer and then as a director. So what a life. mean, this guy, incredible.
SVW: And if you ever see any sort of filmed or taped interviews with him. He is a character He himself is presents himself as a larger-than-life type of character. I can't even describe him to be honest with you.
DH: Yeah, he's always chomping on a big cigar and you know, but I mean in a way you could see someone doing this kind of stuff and you think what a poser, you know This guy's just like he's trying to look macho and that but he's actually when you see it when you listen to what he's saying He's a very kind and sympathetic person. When he was asked about politics, said, I don't know that much about politics, I just know I hate totalitarianism. I hate dictators.
SVW: All right, let's talk about Richard Widmark as well, who plays Skip in here, and he does it with that Richard Widmark energy.
DH: Right, so again, this is not a cast of the names that trip off your tongue, it's the top actors, right? Richard Widmark and Jean Peters.
SVW: And Jean Peters I did not recognize, so this is my first time I've seen her in a film.
DH: She wasn't in very many films. And a great story about this movie. When they brought her in to do rehearsals, Sam Fuller noticed there was always this guy that drove her and he would wait in car the whole time. And Fuller said, you know, you can bring, is it your boyfriend? She said, yeah. He said, you can bring him in, you know, he can get comfortable. He didn't have to sit in the car and she said, no, it's what he wants to do. It turned out that her boyfriend was Howard Hughes, one of the richest men in the world and a Hollywood producer. He wanted to sit in the car because he was a reclusive kind of guy. They ended up getting married and she never acted in that many movies. Yeah, she lived a kind of reclusive life with Hughes for about eight years. So she's a really interesting actress. Richard Widmark was pretty big by this time because he he he burst onto the scene in this movie called Kiss of Death. Have you seen that?
SVW: I have not seen Kiss of Death. I have seen scenes of it.
DH: You know, the notorious scene, the notorious scene. Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death plays this gangster, this hood, this cheap hood in New York City. And he pushes, there's a woman in a wheelchair and he pushes her down the stairs. And this is like, welcome to Richard Widmark. And so they always cast him, they always wanted to cast him, they often cast him as a bad guy. And even when he's good, I mean, even when he's sympathetic, like in this movie, in this movie they have you sympathizing with these petty criminals, because they're basically, they're not harming anyone pretty nice, but so Widmark's okay, but even when he's okay, he's still a loose cannon.
SVW: Still a loose cannon. And there's one thing that I would want to point out that kind of stood out in the movie to me that would not work today at all. And younger audiences might be put off by it is that he, you know, we talked about the communist boyfriend beating her up and putting her into the hospital, but also there are a couple of scenes where Richard Widmark punches her or slaps her around.
DH: Well, he doesn't accidentally.
SVW: Well, he punches her because she’s invading his house or his little lakeside shack that he lives in. So he doesn't know if it's a man or a woman.
DH: Well, he doesn't see her at all because she's it's dark and she's got a flashlight and she stands up and shines the light right in his face. And that's when he just rears back and hits whoever it is.
SVW: Bu, there's there's another scene that follows where he's slapping her around, too. And that's just something that would not go over well with the audience.
DH: No, it wouldn't. I mean, he's not beating her. It’s just, but yes, it's definitely dated by today's standards.
SVW: But that said, the dynamic between the two characters otherwise is really, works really well. It's fluid, you believe in it. And it's interesting to see him go, the Skip character go, I mean, he never becomes truly a good guy. He has his reasons for helping the authorities that are personal. You know, he finds a way to do the right thing, but he's still, you know, there's, there, we don't need to give any spoilers, but by the end of the movie, there's, you know, you see like, he'll probably continue his life.
DH: Oh yeah. Yeah. So in that sense, it violates the spirit of the production code because you got these, these, you know, kind of low-level criminals who are going to, who get to walk away and they're going to keep doing it. But you know, he, he could get out of it, right? One thing we learn about him is he's a three time, he's been in prison three times. He's a three time loser and they repeat a few times that if he gets convicted again, he's going to prison for life. They say that's what the law is. And here he is with the police captain who would love to put him in prison for life, but the FBI agents sitting right there saying, you are free to go. You can tell us you did the pickpocketing and stole the film. You're okay. You're going to get off because we need to catch…be a patriot and help us catch these communists, but he's just like, he won't cooperate with the police.
SVW: So now I definitely want to see some more Samuel Fuller movies. He was apparently influenced by the Italian Neo-Realists who we've talked about, Rome, Open City, Bicycle Thieves, great movies. You can see it in this noir, even though it still gives you the thrills of a classic film noir from Hollywood.
DH: Isn't that an interesting, that's another spin on Fuller that he, maybe that's why his films are different and edgier besides his background. He also was looking at European art films.
SVW: Well, thanks for joining us.
DH: Thanks, Scott.
