Pickup on South Street (1953)

"I have to go on making a living so I can die."

sydney

Richard Widmark sneakily accessing the microfilm machine at the New York Public Library = me opening an Incognito browser window to view paywalled content.

Sean Fennessey

The dirty New York reflects a nation’s paranoia. A feverish portrait of post-war America, where anti-communism flowed from headlines into fiction. At the height of McCarthyism, when any minimal and distinct change outside the “normal” could be read as a threat to the…

noen

pickup on south street is the kind of film that finds beauty and complication in the prosaic, the every day folks that exist in the liminal spaces of life just trying to get by. these people are rough hewn, venal, cunning. what’s most interesting in rewatching pickup this…

Angelica Jade Bastién🪼🌷

The grace and delicacy with which Samuel Fuller portrays marginalized people is one of his greatest strengths as a director, and it's something which has never been more apparent than it is in Pickup on South Street, a film he also wrote. Never either condemning or…

sakana1

The expressive elements of noir become social realism in a crackerjack hell of a film. Thelma Ritter for MVP.

Peter Labuza

Marginalized people and their world. In the middle of it there’s a pretty effective thriller plot predicted on ways people get split against each other. But what really remain are the faces, places, the dead endness of it all, it is accepted desperation. Kiley villain is a…

Filipe Furtado

"Do you know what treason means?" "Who cares?" The US government concocts a paranoid fantasy of a foreign enemy to distract from the growing crime and poverty at home. "Look, what do you want from me, Tiger? Do I personally raise the price on hamburgers and pork and…

ScreeningNotes

"That girl was carrying TNT, and it's gonna blow up right in your face!" Small-time hustling meets big league treason in writer/director Samuel Fuller's masterful noir Pickup on South Street. Despite being a three-time loser whose next conviction spells life in prison,…

Richard Chandler