PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Samuel Fuller
Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter
Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Milburn Stone
A pickpocket working the New York subway lifts the wallet out of a woman's purse, not knowing that it contains a strip of film the commies and the FBI both want real bad. This is set in a backstreet world Fuller knew well from his early career as a crime reporter, and the movie got some McCarthy-era flack for being un-American, with a protagonist whose beliefs and motives were thought to be dangerously apolitical. That the movie has no use for communists, either, is the flip side of the equation. Fuller was an equal-opportunity provocateur. Widmark's perfectly cast as the shifty, smart-talking pickpocket. Jean Peters plays the hard-luck dame who's trapped between the feds, the reds, the thief and the cops, and desperately wants to get the film back. Murvyn Vye's a cop named Tiger and Richard Kiley's a communist agent, but the scene stealer is Thelma Ritter as a tired old woman named Moe, who knows every grifter in town, and just wants to make enough money peddling ties and information to buy herself a decent burial.
