Popular reviews

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  Review by sydney ★★★★ 2

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

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★ 1

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

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  Review by Angelica Jade Bastién🪼🩵 ★★★★ 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  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 time — which i haven’t seen since college over ten years ago (dear goddess) — is that even though it’s positioned as anti-communist propaganda it displays the american identity for all its grit and failures and in doing so functions as an intriguing, anti-capitalist argument. the performances sizzle! the cinematography envelopes! thelma ritter’s death scene is the standout moment in the film given her layered, richly realized performance. i was struck by her…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★★ 16

  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 simplistically celebrating his people on the margins — usually criminals, but also sometimes those pushed aside by society; often both — Fuller invariably shows us their souls, including both the darkness and light therein.

  As for example, with Skip (an extraordinary Richard Widmark). He's our protagonist, but he's also fundamentally unlikable, for reasons that already comfortably fill several pages before his stated willingness to deal with communists is revealed. Every time we start to…

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  Review by K. Austin Collins

  Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) is a professional pickpocket, a man whose survival, whose worth, is contingent on the sly gestures of an eloquent hand. When he touches a woman in this film, first to rob her, then, thinking she's a thief or worse, to hit her, and again (and again) to caress the wound, he isn't just working her over. He's going to work. "I play everything smart," he says, and by the time he says it we're hip enough to know it's a line uttered in the spirit of his maker.

  The purest pleasure and thrill of Pickup on South Street is surely the ease with which we, like the woman, a sex worker named Candy (Jean Peters), get…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★★

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

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 18

  "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, recidivist pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) nimbly lifts a strip of film containing U.S. trade secrets from the purse of unwitting communist courier Candy (Jean Peters) while she is under government surveillance on a crowded subway train. With a bitter confidence verging on hubris, Skip commences a casual affair with Candy and uses her as an intermediary in an attempt to extort her craven ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley) and his seditious confederates—all the while acerbically stonewalling the NYPD…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  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 little low on personality outside of his constant anxiety, but otherwise this is near flawless. Ritter does get one of the best exits on American film and the evocation of Skip’s world couldn’t be better. A movie that loves every character who usually would only pass through more respectable work.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 3

  "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 beans and frankfurters? Is it my fault that the cost of living is going up?"

  1950s | Samuel Fuller | Film Noir
  Best of Its Director | Best of Its Year

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  Review by laird ★★★★½

  I can't imagine any other writer/director from the era having the guts to make a character as slimy as Widmark's Skip McCoy the center of their movie, nor being able to infuse the story with so many little authentic-feeling details about crime and criminal communities, nor writing these low-life characters with an unforced sympathy and humanity.

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  Review by shookone ★★★★ 1

  all you need to know about Fuller's talent is on display in the first five dialogue-free minutes, when eyes and gazes tell the whole story. a technical skillset that is without equal.

  on the surface this '53 tome nowadays looks like a pretty in your face anti-communist propaganda flick produced right out of Hollywood's finest hangars. reading up on the production back story though, seeing an outraged J. Edgar Hoover about the ambiguous protagonist it's getting a little more interesting - and shows how frightening the atmosphere in the industry must have been at that time.

  essentially you might be able to see a film about total alienation. everyone is to mistrust in this charade: lovers, comrades, tricksters. a climate of paranoia took over in the USA of the 50s and artifacts like Fuller's piece tell the whole story about it baked into this seemingly harmless genre fare.

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★★ 18

  "How many times you've been caught with your hand where it doesn't belong?"

  Mini-Collab w/ Rob
  Noirvember #14

  At his best, nobody could make a noir more exciting than Sam Fuller!

  Everything about Pickup on South Street (available here on YouTube) works exactly as needed for me, but there are three extra-special ingredients that really put this tough drama over the top, first of which is Joseph MacDonald's B&W cinematography. His images perfectly capture this cutthroat world of pickpocketing, government-secret-trading and detective-snooping, right on the money from the moment the story opens with smarmy crook Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) lifting the all-important film strip of Commie intel out of gorgeous courier Candy's (Jean Peters) purse on the New York subway.…