Pickup On South Street

This Sam Fuller vehicle from 1953 cleverly blends Film Noir with Cold War espionage, which is perhaps what you might expect from a man who only two years prior was accused of being pro-Communist.

Seasoned pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) is up to his usual tricks on a busy New York subway train. One of the passengers is Candy (Jean Peters) who just happens to stand next to Skip. Almost to her face he brazenly steals her wallet out of her handbag, not realising that Candy is under surveillance of Police Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) and government agent Zara (Willis Bouchey) who are just a bit to slow to apprehend him before he gets off the train, having witnessed the theft. Of course, their motives are altogether somewhat deeper than just the apprehension of a pickpocket. What both Skip and Candy don’t know is that the wallet in question contains a microfilm secretly placed with top-secret information… Candy is blissfully unaware that her ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley) is in fact a communist spy who has been under suspicion for some time and he has fooled her into believing she is delivering important business documents. This is now a major alert, and Zara and Captain Tiger have got to find the thief! This vital piece of information simply cannot be allowed to get out of the country.

No problems, professional informant Moe Williams (the incorrigible Thelma Ritter) is at hand. This is a woman who knows every crook and pickpocket in the city, as well as their techniques. When Moe is brought into the police station, Zara and Tiger buy one of her neckties (one of Moe’s little earners) in exchange for pointing out Skip amongst several mug shots, and the chase is on.
Meanwhile, Candy has returned and confesses to Joey that the wallet has been ‘liberated’ by a pickpocket. Naturally, Joey is not very happy to hear this and orders her to use one of her underground contacts to find out the identity of the thief. The trail leads to Moe, and after Candy purchased an exuberantly priced necktie from the crafty informer she makes her way to Skip’s waterfront shack, only to find herself knocked out by him upon his unexpected return. Gaining consciousness again she demands the film from Skip who refuses to hand it over. Not one for giving up, Candy returns a second time to the shack, only this time Skip seems fully in the know-how regarding the microfilm’s contents and accuses her of communist activities. Still unaware as to what the film contains, Candy is intrigued by the high sum that Skip demands for exchange of the film but begins to fall for his roguish and rough charms. Once again returning to her ex without the film and confessing she has been defeated by Skip, it is now that Joey begins to show his truly ugly side…

Despite the fact that Widmark’s character ‘Skip’ was seen as unpatriotic, the communist spy Joey was portrayed as an out and out black-hearted bastard without an inkling of a social conscience. This was apparently still not good enough for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who made no secret out of the fact that he objected to Fuller’s movie for precisely those reasons.

Widmark and Peters are well paired in the leads, and Thelma Ritter provides some truly entertaining moments as ‘Moe the stoolpigeon’.

This Dual Format Edition of Pickup On South Street boasts the following EXTRAS:

• New 1080p presentation of the film from the new 4k restoration, on the Blu-ray
• New and exclusive interview with Kent Jones
• Video interview with François Guérif
• Cinema Cinemas: Samuel Fuller interview
• Trailer
• 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring a new essay on the film by critic Murielle Joudet; remarks by Fuller; and rare imagery