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 noen ★★★★½ 5

  The dirty New York reflects a nation’s paranoia. A feverish portrait of post-war America, where anti-communism flowed from headlines into fiction. At the height of McCarthyism, when any minimal and distinct change outside the “normal” could be read as a threat to the homeland, the director plunges us into an underworld of pickpockets and informants, where the foundations of patriotism are negotiable and ideology is a currency. The film in a way does not align with the rigid moralism of the time; it punches hypocrisy, revealing that the struggle between capitalism and communism, these two ideologies that in a way in small details, know how to read what happens in reality, but ultimately dissolves into the law of the smartest.…

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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🪼🩵 ★★★★ 5

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

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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 Christian Ha ★★★★

  Pickup on South Street was a pretty great movie, and it’s made me excited to check out more of Samuel Fuller’s work. Even though I wasn’t completely locked in while watching—partly because I’ve been sick and not feeling 100%—I still really enjoyed it. Some of the movies I’ve watched recently might hit differently on a rewatch, but even in my slightly foggy state, this one stood out.

  The film has such a raw, pulpy energy that makes it feel distinct from a lot of other noirs. The dialogue is sharp, the characters are gritty and lived-in, and the tension never lets up. Fuller’s direction gives the film a rough, street-level feel that makes the danger and desperation feel real. It’s…

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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 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 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 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 CriticalLemon97 ★★★★ 2

  Thanks to @zombiepalaka for the recommendation! This is my first Sam Fuller movie, and probably won’t be my last after watching this.

  The beginning scene had no dialogue but was still very powerful. One of the biggest themes present in this film is deception and more specifically how Skip uses it. The first and last scenes of this movie perfectly portray the magnitude to which Skip uses deception to make it through the world. On the other hand, Candy believes anything she would hear and therefore gains trust in Skip, leading to one of the more unique and unsuspecting romances in film. I guess opposites really do attract.

  The dialogue and camerawork in general are a few of the big…