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Pickup on South Street

Screening: Monday 2 July, 6:30pm

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, USA 1953)

"Perhaps Fuller’s most perfectly realized film and one of the undeniable masterworks of the entire crime movie and noir traditions" (Lee Server). (Its original title was Pickpocket, and one need look only at the virtuoso opening sequence to see the affinities with Bresson’s later film of that name.)

Richard Widmark plays a petty thief who, picking pockets in the New York subway, reaches into a prostitute’s purse and unwittingly steals some top secret microfilm. Both Federal and Communist agents are soon on his trail; Fuller’s central theme of betrayal and duplicity receives one of its bleakest treatments.

Widmark is coiled and iconic as the criminal who quite literally lives outside the realm of common people. Thelma Ritter was nominated for an Oscar as Moe Williams, the hard-bitten police informer intent on not ending up in Potter’s Field. (Her leave-taking soliloquy is one of the greatest moments in Fuller’s cinema.) Fassbinder so loved Pickup on South Street despite its McCarthyist politics, that he paid tribute to it in The American Soldier by basing the character of a porn dealer on Moe Williams and calling her Magdalena Fuller.

"A superb thriller… The film remains a desperate kind of masterpiece" (Time Out). Ironically, Pickup was awarded a top prize at the Venice film festival by a predominantly leftist jury, headed by Communist Luchino Visconti.

Written by Fuller, from a story by Dwight Taylor. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. With Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye.

(16mm, B&W, 80 mins, PG violence)

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