Pickup on South Street (1953)
Directed by Samuel Fuller
High and low crime go eye-to-eye in this dustup of swindles. Fresh out of jail and back to his grift, Richard Widmark’s magic-fingered, sneering hood, Skip McCoy, makes off with a lovely straphanger’s (Jean Peters) purse. Plus the purse’s cache of microfilm intended for the Soviets. From the beginning critics found the plot hard to believe, with the New York Times and Variety shaking their heads at its tale of Feds and Reds and something like love, one half of that love (Peters’s Candy) getting knocked out, beat up, shot at, and showered in beer. But pulp the way Fuller cooks it—snappy, violent, and mean—makes it own sense, right being Peters’s pleading, artless look, wrong a matter for us in the real world to fuss with. Pickup on South Street is fresh, pulpy, and savage, a still hot, hard-boiled classic. Jeremy Polacek (May 29-June 4 at Film Forum; showtimes daily)