Notes on Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953)

Tuesday 11/11/25

I saw Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street from 1953 at the Brattle Sunday. First time I've seen it on the big screen. It was 4K DCP rather than 35mm.

I'm more of a stickler than others are as to what constitutes film noir. Others familiar with the term apply it liberally to basically any black and white B-movie crime picture from the 1940s and 1950s. Most of those films aren't what I think of as noir. In my view, you need a femme fatale. Fatalism must be front and center. There has to be this moment, which we can pinpoint, when the doomed male character makes a decision that implicates himself in his own damning. The action should take place mostly at night. The streets should be wet. There's far more dark than light.

Out of the Past is the best example and also the best noir film and what I consider one of the greatest of all films. Double Indemnity is kind of daylight-y, but it also fits the bill. Pickup on South Street isn't a classic noir in this regard, but I'm not going to buck against the current too hard. The thing is, there is classic sense noir, and there's black and white 1940s and 1950s crime picture catch-all noir. And that's fine. We can use the term "noir" for both.

Pickup doesn't have a femme fatale. Nor is it fatalistic. There's no antihero who makes a portentous decision, "sealing his fate," as they say, which sounds like an oxymoron, but isn't in classic noir. But to the looser definition, this is a noir classic. A strong film.

Pickup features one of my favorite actors, Richard Widmark, more about whom will be following shortly in these pages, when we discuss something that virtually no one knows he was in from the middle 1940s. The movie also features Thelma Ritter, another favorite. She's billed as one of the main players in the film, but even when that's the case with Ritter, she's still a character actress, and I think that's a high compliment. She's too good, too believable, too relatable, too human in her characterizations for her not to be a character actor. That needn't be limiting; or certainly not with Ritter.

Widmark plays a pickpocket who picks the purse of a woman named Candy (Jean Peters) on the NYC subway. So we're doing a couple different plays on words with the title. Widmark's Skip McCoy character lives in a shack on South Street down the end of a short pier on the water. Has to be the coolest domicile of anyone in noir. Through his one window, he has a view of the skyline. He keeps his beer--and his loot--in a crate that sits on the bottom of the drink, which he hauls up via the rope it's tied to, and sleeps in a hammock, and that's his living set-up.

Widmark usually plays an oily heel. His characters are unctuous but dangerous, untrustworthy, but usually fairly likable, discounting the Tommy Udo character from 1947's Kiss of Death, which was Widmark's first film. This is one of those rare occasions when Widmark is a decent--well, kind of--guy in a noir.

Unbeknownst to Candy, she was carrying a vital strip of microfilm that is part of some plot or attempt at sabotage that her Communist ex-boyfriend and his cohorts are involved in, and now McCoy has it and the ex demands that Candy get it back. Candy is no Sunday school teacher herself and knows her way around a bit. She ends up at Moe Williams' place, Moe being played by Thelma Ritter.

She's sweet, kind, wise, funny, but also flinty, someone who knows what's what and how nasty, brutish, and short--as per Hobbes--human life often is. She sells ties and information, usually at the same time. In other words, she's an informer (with a side hustle), which is typically the underworld's version of being a pedophile, but not only are we on her side, the people she sells out to various degrees seem to be, too. It's just how it is when you're trying to survive and you have so little that can make you happy. The one thing that does for Moe is the idea of where she'll be buried. How's that for noir? Her nest egg, as such, is for interment. Not a down payment on a house. Well, not a house as most people think of a house.

I don't think we need to go into the plot any further, but some observations are in order. There's a sexual element to the pickpocketing itself, on account of McCoy's technique. All of the pickpockets, we're told, have different purloining styles. McCoy's involves a newspaper to cover up the action of his hand. His fingers are long, delicate, almost seductive as digits. His face is close to the face of the person he's stealing from. There is a discernible simultaneous orgasm--the shared approach to orgasm, rather--aspect of these interactions. Which is what they feel like to us, the viewer.

Likewise, when McCoy massages Candy's sore jaw with his fingers in his waterfront shack, we're witnessing what might as well be a sex scene. We feel like we shouldn't be watching, like we're in violation of two people's privacy.

I think viewers now would be surprised by the patriotism of the film. The automatic patriotism. It's by no means a jingoistic affair. But the various characters--and these characters are characters, if you follow me--know what to do on behalf of their country. There's no deliberation, no agenda.

You can see how far we've fallen as a nation in Pickup on South Street. The United States was once a place that people had pride in. They believed it went about its civic business in what was close to the best way possible. Not a perfect way. Far from it. But in a manner that did try to get things and keep things right. And that was something the members of a motley crew--like the non-Communists in Pickup on South Street--would all agree on.

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket came out in 1959, and its opening scene is apt to make you think about on that of Pickup on South Street, but I don't think Bresson was really influenced by the latter, because Bresson wasn't someone who operated under influence. But I do think he thought about Pickup on South Street, which is different. Bresson's films--and his ideas--are neither national nor international; they're universal. Pickup on South Street is American. Which isn't to suggest its dated. But American cops and their practices, the Red Scare, a certain kind of urban environment--this is the stuff of one country.

Ritter was in her early fifties when she made this film in which she's an old clock winding down, to paraphrase Moe. Her death scene speech in which she talks about how each day is a little harder, the body feels worse, there's less energy, less drive, less will, but she tries to keep going, even though she doesn't want to, is downright haunting in 2025. Could she not be speaking for you, as you? In this world? In this America? She talks herself into her own death, which wasn't going to happen and didn't seem to be where the scene was headed, until it was, and then that ending was inevitable.

Ritter had fantastic energy as an actor. She had up energy and down energy. She may be a clock winding down in this movie, but it's winding down with life. The next year, she'd play Jimmy Stewart's nurse in Hitchcock's Rear Window. She keeps that puppy moving more than anyone else in it. Stewart's character has the obsession, Grace Kelly's character gets on board with it, but Ritter is the voice of the piece, the counsel, the pep, the point of view--ironically--that does the most actuating. She was fantastic.

In her death scene in Pickup on South Street, the camera keeps advancing upon her--slowly now--as she delivers her aforesaid soliloquy that is worthy of Shakespeare. Street Shakespeare. Fuller knew what he was doing with the camera. There's no prevailing style of shot in the movie, and the mix produces the picture's rhythm.

The scene with the Commies doing some plotting and fretting in their comparatively cushier digs features a series of medium close-ups, but at these slightly off angles. That is, we're never really looking any of these people square in the face, and yet we're getting a sense for the contours of their visages, what may be happening behind their eyes.

A dumbwaiter contrasts with McCoy's beer locker. Things go up, things go down. Life as service industry, but with a combo of the fates and whatever imp represents the shortcomings of humans working the rope.

And here's something to blow minds now: In Pickup on South Street people sit and...think. Woah. Holy shit, right? Sit and think? Just be? In silence? Reflect? Ponder? Moe finds McCoy at a lonely coffee shop we sense that he's been in for hours. There's no music, no screens obviously. The two sit and have a conversation. An important conversation. A caring conversation.

The camera moves in flowing tracery in Pickup on South Street, just as we get these interspersions of cinematic beats, but here we have a static two-shot that feels utterly alive, because the people within it are. The people are the shot, rather than the shot being the shot. Which is actually a very Bresson-esque kind of thing, but it's also a very Fuller thing.

The scene in which Skip retrieves Moe's body out on the water feels like someone has taken a small craft to intercept Charon's larger one as the latter makes his way across the Acheron under an eternally blackened sky. You can't even see McCoy for the first part of the scene, though you see everyone who is in that scene. We recognize the voice, though. He must be there, and he is, and it dawns on us--ah, blessed hope--what he is doing. You see the parallelism?

This is skillful filmmaking. It's not something any palooka could do, and it's clear that Fuller knew exactly what he wanted to do. Pickup on South Street is a film with a taut vision and dispersive resonance, like ripples in the water beneath McCoy's shack.