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66 reviews in total

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62 out of 68 people found the following review useful:
Visually stunning, provocative drama., 5 October 2004
Author: mdm-11 from United States

Powerful drama centering around elderly NYC slum-area pawnbroker (Rod Steiger in Oscar nominated performance), tormented by his painful memories of Nazi concentration camp nightmare. Embittered, he brushes off all friendly people in his life, insisting that nothing matters and emotions are wasted.

Apparently "playing the system" for years, allowing king-pin thugs to use his store as a money laundering "front", while collecting his "cut", the no-nonsense pawnbroker is suddenly plagued by flashbacks, showing how his young wife and son are killed, and at once wanting to stop the evil workings of his hoodloom infested slum neighborhood. When the young "apprentice" he hired lays his own life on the line to protect him from being shot during a robbery, the pawnbroker shows his first human emotions since the horrific day he lost his family.

The flawless direction, masterful black & white cinematography, haunting Jazz score, along with innovative handling of the themes (racism, prostitution, social reforms, etc.), make this nothing less than a masterpiece. There is a sequence with prolonged nudity, considered daring during the "Hayes Code" years, even if it appears tame by today's standards. The scenes are not gratuitous, but essential to the plot. Still these scenes may make this film unsuitable for pre-teens.

Like Shindler's List, this is a film many may find painful to watch. By 1965 standards, the mere attempt of giving insight into the evils of the Holocaust was a strong move. The resulting product withstood the test of time and will endure. Named as his personal favorite work, "The Pawnbroker" gives us Rod Steiger's finest performance! Highly recommended.

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40 out of 43 people found the following review useful:
Heavy Duty Lumet New York Drama., 21 January 2005

Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Rod Steiger considered this his best performance and he might be right. He is, for him, subdued for most of the film, although towards the end he punctuates his performance with silent screams. He's pretty good as the survivor of Auschwitz, consumed by survivor guilt, and denying himself any pleasures except the money taken in his pawn shop.

Various figures come and go in his life, although he shows no particular interest in any of them, and aversion towards many. The characters are rather sketchily done, as they might be in a play. There is the ambitious assistant, the whore, the gangster, the lonely man who wants to talk about Herbert Spencer, Reni Santoni as a quivering junkie, the pregnant young girl who wants to sell her engagement ring. (Not a wedding ring, mind you, this is an illegitimate pregnancy and in 1964 you were still in trouble if you had no husband and no opportunity for an abortion.) "That diamond is glass," he tells the stricken girl brusquely. Steiger's Sol Nazerman is a pretty cold fish.

His relationship with his Latino assistant is key to Steiger's evolution. Steiger "teaches" him that nothing matters but money, so Ortiz very sensibly decides to help the local gangsters hold up Nazerman's shop. But the assistant, instead, teaches Nazerman something. Killed in the robbery, he teaches Nazerman to feel pain, which Nazerman then reaffirms by impaling his palm on one of those spikey receipt holders, a kind of stigma to go along with his concentration camp tattoos.

The movie was pretty much a shocker on its release. Partly because the audience got to see some naked breasts. Amusing now, isn't it? It was also knocked because of the way Latinos and blacks were treated. I don't know why. It would be surprising if the owner of a pawn shop on 116th street didn't have a lot of customers who were people of color -- good and bad.

The jazz score is loud and at times almost overwhelming. The photography makes 1964 New York grimy, smoggy, and dangerous.

If you haven't seen it, catch it if you have the chance. You're not likely to forget it in a hurry.

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40 out of 44 people found the following review useful:
Never has internal pain been so vividly portrayed., 1 January 2004

Author: Brigid O Sullivan (wisewebwoman) from Toronto, Canada

This is in my 50 best movies of all time list.

Rod Steiger,a gifted actor, is at his very best here portraying Sol Nazerman, a pawnbroker who is completely shut down emotionally.

Through flashbacks, some fast, mostly slow, we see both the joy and subsequent horror of Sol's life in Nazi Germany, when his wife and children are swept into the camps and killed. Sol's deepest pain is that he survived and he carries it visibly. Nothing touches him. He is removed from humanity, living a life outside anyone else's.

This is never more exemplified than at his shop, where he is behind bars, often in shadow, while humanity moves outside, sometimes pleading with him, sometimes just wishing to make an emotional contact to no avail.

Brilliant black and white photography. Quincy Jones' music underscores this, it is jazzy 60s type of music, loud and vibrant, totally contrasting with the dark, dead world of Sol.

The supporting cast are terrific and the outdoor location shooting in New York is riveting. The movement of street life against the heaviness of Sol's plodding.

I still find it hard to believe that Rod lost the Oscar to Lee Marvin in the forgettable "Cat Ballou" (!!) that year.

This has to be seen by any serious lovers of movies. The last scene, done in one continuous take is heartbreaking, Sol finally getting in touch with the pain he has buried so deeply. Gut wrenching stuff. 9 out of 10.

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26 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
Steiger gives greatest performance of all time, 9 February 2006

Author: edwardi-koch from United States

Rod Steiger gives the greatest lead-actor performance I have ever seen in the title role of the Pawnbroker. Lumet's direction strikes no false note and neither does the incredibly well-researched and painfully honest script. It's hard to believe how virtually forgotten this true masterpiece of a survivor's private hell. It shows very vividly that even those of us lucky enough to survive the camps need to be ever more rare of spirit to survive without significant trauma scars. Steiger extracts every piece of emotion from his character with a performance that exceeds all that came before it and has never been surpassed. Every aspiring actor needs to view Steiger's performance to realize how magnificent it truly is.

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26 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
A very impressive and dramatic movie, 24 December 2004

Author: SandroSt

A very impressive and dramatic movie. I remember when I saw the first time this movie as a young teenager, I was deeply impressed by it, and after many years it still one of the movie that are important to me. The thing that hit me in the movie is the wire between the violence in the streets of the city and the violence in the Nazist concentration camp. It's the story without any hope of a survivor, a dead man walking, living an impossible life in the violent modern society. It has been the first movie that I saw about other movies about the Holocaust and still Ithink it's one of the more impressive about this argument. I saw many movies about the Holocaust, ma no one treats as this, the difficult life of survivors who lost their family.

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27 out of 30 people found the following review useful:
Is Diane Arbus somewhere around here?, 26 December 2005
Author: (futures@exis.net) from Ronn Ives/FUTURES Antiques, Norfolk, VA.

"The Pawnbroker" (1964): Directed by Sidney Lumet, scored by Quincy Jones, and starring Rod Steiger. This is one of the most powerful character studies in all of film history. It's up there with "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Taxi Driver". Shot in some of the most beautiful, gritty, black and white photography, set in Harlem, often using the real environment and passersby, this work has the feel of anti-Hollywood, which is completely appropriate for the story of a Jew tortured by the memories of the Holocaust, and the environment of pawn brokering. There's not a single moment of comedy, and many moments that feel like Diane Arbus could be seen lingering nearby. Steiger's ability to express withheld expression – anger and pain trying to burst from his impenetrable shell - is awe inspiring. When I first saw this film in the 60's, I knew I wanted to see everything this man did.

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30 out of 37 people found the following review useful:
Dead Man Walking, 23 January 2005

Author: sol from Brooklyn NY USA

**SPOILERS** Owning a pawnshop in Manhattan's Spanish Harlem Sol Nazerman, Rod Stiger,tries to cut himself off from any human feelings that he still has left by buying and selling the hopes and dreams, for a few dollars on the buy side and five to ten times as much on the sell side, of the people of the neighborhood that he does business with.

Sol's hopes and dreams were destroyed some twenty five years ago in German occupied Poland. It's there where he lost his entire family in the Nazi concentration camps. As the 25th anniversary of that nightmare approaches Sol starts to get flooded with shocking flashbacks of what happened to him his wife and two children back then and goes as far as trying to stop the clock,or calender, to keep that dreadful anniversary from coming.

Sol's past WWII nightmare in Poland becomes a real and new nightmare now in the New York City of 1964 that meshes together and in the end shocks him back to the reality of being a person with feelings for others as well as himself.

Sol's helper at the pawnshop Jesus Ortiz, Jamie Sanchez, sees a man give Sol an envelop with some $5,000.00 in cash that Sol puts away in his safe. Ortiz thinking that thats the kind of money to be made running a pawnshop wants Sol to tell him all he knows about the business so that he could go into the pawn business himself. What Ortiz didn't realize was that the man who gave Sol the money was Saverese, Warren Finnerty, a bag man for the top crime boss in Harlem Rodriguez ,Brock Peters, who's using Sol's pawnshop to launder his dirty and ill gotten gains.

This set the stage for Ortiz to get involved in a robbery of Sol's store with three of his friends in the neighborhood Tangee Buck & Robinson, Raymond St.Jacques John McCurry & Charles Dierkop. In the end the robbery would result in Ortiz's death and Sol's regaining his humanity by getting his feelings for his fellow man, and woman, as well as himself back but at a shocking and heart crunching cost.

Undoubtedly Rod Stigers best movie performance as concentration camp survivor Sol Nazerman who after trying to suppress his feelings for years has them burst open like a long inactive volcano at the end of the movie.

The movie "The Pawnbroker" covers the days that lead up to Sol's finding out that keeping deep inside all the hurt and suffering from the past will only make him and those around him only more depressed and not allow those wounds of past years to heal. Sol's sees later in the movie how his actions hurt people that tried to be friendly and help him like his new neighbor Marilyn Brichfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald, who tried to strike up a friendship with him. Marilyn was a lonely middle-aged women who lost her husband at an early age.

Sol's most hurtful act was that what he did to his second wife Tessie ,Marketa Kimberell, who's also a concentration camp survivor. After Tessie called him at the pawnshop with the news that her father Mendel, Baruch Lumet, just passed away Sol coldly told her to bury him and hung up.

Sol's relations with Rodiguez was also a bit odd. How could he have not known that Rodriguez owned the whorehouse down the block from his pawnshop when he confronted him at his penthouse about the dirty dealings that he was doing in the neighborhood? Since we know that Sol himself was involved with them by laundering Rodiguez's dirty money and taking a cut for himself all these years?

"The Pawnbroker" is a dark haunting and surrealistic film that hits all the right buttons in it's story about the human condition thats so skillfully played by it's leading actor Rod Stiger. A story of the loneliness and emptiness of the human heart which can only go on for so long until, like in the movie, it either breaks down or bursts open and explodes from the pressure thats been built up in it over the years.

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20 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Disturbing but a great Steiger performance..., 10 October 2004
Author: tksaysso from United States

The Pawnbroker is a very disturbing film. The title character, Sol Nazerman,

played by Rod Steiger, is an aging Holocaust concentration camp survivor

running a pawnshop in New York. A young hispanic man who works in the

pawnshop looks up to Steiger's character, hoping to learn from the older man's years of experience and expertise in both financial and other business matters.

Steiger's character is emotionally closed throughout the entire length of the film. Jarrring flashbacks to the time when Nazerman was happy with his wife and two small children become increasingly menacing and tragic as the Nazi

domination and cruelty become more dominant. Steiger's character survives his family. The guilt attached to that survival haunts Nazerman as he numbly

proceeds throughout the present-day portions of the film.

This movie takes a huge risk even in it's premise because the title character is never really likable. You certainly have empathy for what Nazerman has

experienced in his life, but the harsh and dismissive way in which he treats both people close to him and the tragic figures who frequent his pawnshop leave you little choice but to have mixed feelings about this man.

Rod Steiger is excellent. It's incredible to think that less than three years later after playing this character, an elderly Jewish concentration camp survivor,

Steiger won an Oscar for his portraying southern bigoted police chief Bill

Gillespie in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night.

Sidney Lumet's direction is excellent. The photography is a starkly shot black and white with a grainy almost documentary-type feel to it. The score by Quincy Jones is somewhat uneven, with inappropriate upbeat instrumentation intruding in to somber scenes.

All in all, a very good film, but definitely excruciatingly somber in tone.

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21 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
An absolutely stunning film..., 31 July 2001

Author: turtlewax from California

Although the supporting cast is uniformly excellent (Brock Peters especially so), they are really only believable props to what is, essentially, a one-man performance by Rod Steiger.

And what a performance it is! Steiger grabs your emotions, and maintains a hold long after the final credits roll. He sucks all the oxygen out of the room, and you're not able to draw a deep breath until it's over.

For some reason, this movie seems to have faded from public awareness, and isn't all that easy to find. I first saw it in 1965, and then again about 30 years later; it packed the same emotional wallop the second time around.

Both Steiger and director Sidney Lumet have done plenty of excellent work since The Pawnbroker, but this remains the highwater mark for both.

It is, unquestionably, one of the most powerful films ever made, and that's a might tough act to follow.

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19 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Classic, one of my all-time favorites, 9 July 2002

Author: pbasofin from Dixon, CA

It's strange to say that this very grim movie is one of my all-time favorites. "The Pawnbroker" might make you suicidal in it's deep cynicism of the human condition, but I think there is a positive side to the film. The main character, a deeply-wounded Holocaust survivor, initial has no feelings for anyone or anything--he's just going through the motions of life. But by the end of the film he learns that people are not all bad--and maybe that's the most shocking revelation of them all!

Certainly Rod Steiger's greatest role. Do see it.

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