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IMDbPro

Pickup on South Street

  • 19531953
  • PassedPassed
  • 1h 20m
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
15K
YOUR RATING
Richard Widmark and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.
Play trailer1:48
1 Video
99+ Photos
CrimeFilm-NoirMystery
A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.A pickpocket unwittingly lifts a message destined for enemy agents and becomes a target for a Communist spy ring.
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
15K
YOUR RATING
    • Samuel Fuller
    • Samuel Fuller(screenplay)
    • Dwight Taylor(story)
  • Stars
    • Richard Widmark
    • Jean Peters
    • Thelma Ritter
    • Samuel Fuller
    • Samuel Fuller(screenplay)
    • Dwight Taylor(story)
  • Stars
    • Richard Widmark
    • Jean Peters
    • Thelma Ritter
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 131User reviews
    • 104Critic reviews
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Nominated for 1 Oscar

    Videos1

    Trailer
    Trailer 1:48
    Watch Trailer

    Photos151

    Richard Widmark and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Widmark and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Widmark and Murvyn Vye in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Kiley in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Widmark and Richard Kiley in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Widmark and Richard Kiley in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Kiley in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Widmark and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Virginia Carroll and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Richard Kiley in Pickup on South Street (1953)
    Ray Montgomery and Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (1953)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Richard Widmark
    Richard Widmark
    • Skip McCoy
    Jean Peters
    Jean Peters
    • Candy
    Thelma Ritter
    Thelma Ritter
    • Moe Williams
    Murvyn Vye
    Murvyn Vye
    • Police Captain Dan Tiger
    Richard Kiley
    Richard Kiley
    • Joey
    Willis Bouchey
    Willis Bouchey
    • Zara
    • (as Willis B. Bouchey)
    Milburn Stone
    Milburn Stone
    • Detective Winoki
    Parley Baer
    Parley Baer
    • Headquarters Communist in Chair
    • (uncredited)
    George Berkeley
    • Undetermined Secondary Role
    • (uncredited)
    Chet Brandenburg
    Chet Brandenburg
    • Fight Spectator
    • (uncredited)
    Virginia Carroll
    Virginia Carroll
    • Nurse
    • (uncredited)
    Harry Carter
    Harry Carter
    • Detective Dietrich
    • (uncredited)
    Heinie Conklin
    Heinie Conklin
    • Subway Passenger
    • (uncredited)
    Clancy Cooper
    Clancy Cooper
    • Detective Eddie
    • (uncredited)
    George Eldredge
    George Eldredge
    • Fenton
    • (uncredited)
    John Gallaudet
    John Gallaudet
    • Detective Lt. Campion
    • (uncredited)
    Robert Haines
    • Library Worker
    • (uncredited)
    Frank Kumagai
    • Lum
    • (uncredited)
      • Samuel Fuller
      • Samuel Fuller(screenplay)
      • Dwight Taylor(story)
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The last of four films in four successive years that Thelma Ritter was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. This film follows nominations for All About Eve (1950), The Mating Season (1951) and With a Song in My Heart (1952).
    • Goofs
      When Joey leaves the basement after assaulting the police officer, he walks out of the shot, then a cat is obviously thrown into the frame.
    • Quotes

      Moe Williams: Listen, Mister. When I come in here tonight, you seen an old clock runnin' down. I'm tired. I'm through. Happens to everybody sometime. It'll happen to you too, someday. With me it's a little bit of everything. Backaches and headaches. I can't sleep nights. It's so hard to get up in the morning, and get dressed and walk the streets. Climb the stairs. I go right on doin' it! Well, what am I gonna do, knock it? I have to go on makin' a livin'... so I can die. But even a fancy funeral ain't worth waitin' fer if I gotta do bus'ness with crumbs like you.

    • Alternate versions
      When the movie was released in France, the French dubbing replaced the communists spying with drug dealing to avoid political controversy. No English print with subtitles went in circulation. The French title "Le port de la drogue" could be translated by "Pier of Drug". The original version was released several years after.
    • Connections
      Edited into American Cinema: Film Noir (1995)
    • Soundtracks
      Again
      (uncredited)

      Music by Lionel Newman

      [love theme for Candy and Skip]

    User reviews131

    Review
    Review
    Featured review
    9/10
    "Everyone Has A Price"
    In this excellent Twentieth-Century Fox film-noir, the metropolis is a labyrinth of despair in which scavengers and predators survive by living off one another. Brooding cityscapes lower over puny humanity in bleak expressionist symbolism.

    A prostitute has her purse snatched on the subway. It contains a microfilm, and a communist spy ring will go to any lengths to recover it. Two parallel investigations unfold as both spies and cops hunt down the precious information.

    Anti-hero pickpocket Skip McCoy is played with scornful assurance by Richard Widmark. He knows the cops to be his moral equals and intellectual inferiors, so he taunts them: "Go on," he says to captain Dan Tiger (Murvyn Vye), "drum up a charge. Throw me in. You've done it before." In this pitiless world, the cops are just one more gang on the streets. Just as Candy the hooker bribes Lightning Louie to get a lead, so the police are busy paying stool pigeons for information.

    It is hard to believe that when Widmark made this film he was already in early middle age. The 39-year-old star, coming to the end of his contract with Fox, plays the upstart Skip McCoy with the irreverent brashness of a teenager. Today it may not be acceptable for the romantic lead to punch his love interest into unconsciousness then revive her by sloshing beer in her face, but by the mores of the period it signified toughness - and Candy, after all, is a fallen woman.

    Jean Peters is radiant as Candy. Here, right in the middle of her five-year burst of B-movie fame, she is beautiful and engaging as the whore with the golden heart. She is the story's victim, a martyr to her beauty as much as anything else. She means well, but is constantly being manipulated by cynical men - Joey, Skip and the cops.

    The real star of this movie is New York. Haunting urban panoramas and snidering subway stations offer a claustrophobic evocation of the city as a living, malevolent force. Like maggots in a rotting cheese, human figures scurry through the city's byways. Elevators, subway turnstiles, sidewalks - even a dumb waiter act as conduits for the flow of corrupt humanity. People cling to any niche that affords safety: Moe has her grimy rented room, Skip his tenebrous shack on the Hudson River. As the characters move and interact, they are framed by bridge architecture, or lattices of girders, or are divided by hanging winch tackle. The personality of the city is constantly imposing itself. The angles and crossbeams of the wharf timbers are an echo of the gridiron street plan, and the card-index cabinets in the squadroom mimic the Manhattan skyline. When Joey's exit from the subway is barred, it is as if the steel sinews of the city are ensnaring him.

    A surprising proportion of this film is shot in extreme close-up. Character drives the plot, as it should, and the close-ups are used to augment character. When Skip interrogates Candy, the close-up captures the sexual energy between them, belying the hostility of Skip's words. Jean Peters' beauty is painted in light, in exquisite soft focus close-ups. The device is also employed to heighten the tension. The opening sequence, the purse snatch, contains no dialogue: the drama relies entirely on close-up for its powerful effect.

    Snoopers, and snoopers upon snoopers, populate the film. Moe (Thelma Ritter) makes a living as an informant, and her place in the hierarchy is accepted, even by her victims. When Skip observes, "she's gotta eat", he is chanting a recurring refrain. Just as 'straight' New Yorkers peddle lamb chops or lumber, the Underworld traffics in the commodity of information.

    And yet even the stool pigeons are superior to Joey and his communist friends. Joey's feet on Moe's bed symbolise a transgression of the most basic moral code. Joey is beyond the pale. Moe will not trade with Joey, even to preserve her life: " ... even in our crummy business, you gotta draw the line somewhere."

    "Pick-Up" was made in the depths of the Cold War. Richard Nixon had just been chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, having made his name with his phoney Alger Hiss expose - bogus communist microfilm and all. The McCarthy show trials were a daily reality. We see the cops in the movie inveigh against "the traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb".

    New York can be seen as a giant receptacle in which human offal cheats, squeals and murders. Containers form a leitmotif throughout the film. Moe carries her trade mark box of ties, and candy's purse, container of the microfilm, is the engine of the plot. Skip keeps his only possessions in a submerged crate, symbolising his secretive street-wisdom. The paupers' coffins, moving down the Hudson on a barge, are containers of just one more cargo being shifted around the pitiless metropolis.

    The film is a masterpiece of composition. Candy is shown above the skulking Skip on the rickety gangway of the shack, signifying her moral ascendancy. When the gun is placed on the table, the extreme perspective makes it look bigger than Candy - violence is beginning to dwarf compassion. The lovers are eclipsed by the shadow of a stevedore's hook, reminding us that their love is neither pure nor absolute, but contingent upon the whims of the sinister city. Enyard the communist is a shadow on a wall, or a disembodied puff of cigarette smoke. He is like the lone alley cat amongst the garbage - a predatory phantom of the night. Camera shots from under taxi hoods, inside newspaper kiosks and through the bars of hospital beds constantly reinforce in us the awareness that we are all trapped in the metropolis. We are civilisation's mulch.
    helpful•98
    23
    • stryker-5
    • Jan 4, 1999

    Details

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    • Release date
      • July 3, 1953 (Canada)
      • United States
      • English
    • Also known as
    • Filming locations
      • 20th Century Fox Studios - 10201 Pico Blvd., Century City, Los Angeles, California, USA
    • Production company
      • Twentieth Century Fox
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Technical specs

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    • 1 hour 20 minutes
      • Black and White

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