Before Skip McCoy (Richard Windmark) pick-pocketed Candy (Jean Peters), he was just a three-time loser swinging for a fourth strike on his record. The narrative of Pickup on South Street (1953) structures a cloak-and-dagger story around these two characters and a pivotal act of illicit artistry to suggest a deeper significance to typified personalities. Through expressive close-ups and third-person perspectivalism, director Samuel Fuller provides a character ethology that interweaves anxiety with personal identity. Although the script’s overt anti-Communist slant helps establish characters, this merely superficial element is secondary to Fuller’s expression of the self-serving trend that operates within human relations.
The film’s spectacle establishes itself as an impersonal character study. The audience sees the story unfold chronologically from the third-person objective, setting the viewer up as a voyeur, a spectator outside the real-time action. In the opening sequence, after the suspenseful score portends doom, the direct sounds of train movement and the bustling city draw the spectator into a slice-of-life scenario. Little dialogue occurs. Most of the communication happens through eye-level and tracking shots of two men ogling or trailing an attractive woman. Although the characters in the train scene are unidentified, the audience forms judgments about them the same way we do everyday strangers in reality.
However, the spectator’s interpretation is complicated by the film’s internal character suppositions. For example, Candy’s meddling distorts FBI agent Zara’s (Willis Bouchey) opinion of Skip. Despite Skip’s ostensible willingness to betray his country, Zara confidently asserts that there is a difference between the pickpocket and a traitor, but Skip is worse than a traitor. He is an apolitical, amoral, mercenary—similar to Joey in this way, yet the audience sympathizes with one and not the other. The film also blurs the line between cop and crook, as every man wears a suit. This is especially evident by Moe’s (Thelma Ritter) need for a description of technique over mere physical appearance, and by Skip’s mistaking the cops for burglars when they burst into his shack.
While the characters attempt to assert themselves as their personas (a cannon, a prostitute, a stoolpigeon, etc.), each character’s identity is actually more ambiguous. At least, the way the characters perceive themselves disagrees with the perception of them by other characters and the audience. In the frame where Moe writes down the names of potential suspects while Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) and Zara hover over her, the placement of each character in shallow space suggests a power relation contrary to expectations. Since the focal object is the names, the chain-of-command goes informant-cop-FBI, which Moe’s irreverent attitude toward the “big thumb” supports. Skip’s reaction to the question, “How’d you get to be a pickpocket?” epitomizes the film’s visceral attachment to personal identity. In this scene, the music tenses and Skip pushes Candy away. “How’d you get to be what you are? Things happen, that’s all,” he retorts indignantly. Skip refuses to question what he is or has become; such questioning is “stupid” in his mind. Nevertheless, Candy sees decency in him, Tiger pegs him for a two-bit loser, Moe respects him, and the audience fluctuates between these judgments.
Fuller’s misdirection of the audience allows him to exploit the anxiety that accompanies uncertainty to build suspense. During action sequences, the camera pulls out and/or tracks the actor, giving the spectator a wide view of violence situated against the environment. The three most prominent action scenes in the film are when Skip manhandles Candy after she comes up short for money, Joey (Richard Kiley) nearly kills Candy, and Skip beats Joey around the subway station. In each of these scenes, the camera zooms from a close-up or medium close-up of the subject’s face(s) to a long or medium-long shot, accentuating the sudden shifts in emotions and situation. Often, these sudden shifts create uneasiness for the spectator as (s)he must negotiate contrasts between the artificial frontality of an actor’s countenance and dramatic pans to a naturalistic mise-en-scène. The interactions between Skip and Candy especially keep the viewer on edge because Skip’s compassion often precedes his callousness the same way that close-ups precede outward zooms.
In several scenes (when Candy realizes her wallet is missing shortly followed by Joey’s reception of this information, when Zara tells Skip the jig is up, and when Moe sells-out Skip for fifty dollars to Candy), the actors’ facial expressions evoke anxiety and uneasiness. Each instance is accompanied by either a literal revelation of danger (Zara claims that Candy should be scared) or a figurative one (the image of Moe’s guile visage fades to black after she sets her price to Candy). When Candy regains consciousness after Skip punches her, she groans, “I think I’m sick,” which underscores the atmospheric tension with a physiological panic attack. The spectator’s sympathy for Candy heightens the more her victimhood gets established. In this scene, our affinity with Candy amplifies because Skip, her only counterpart present, totally alienates himself by acting boorish and arrogant. Thus, Fuller urges the audience to share her malaise.
The film’s narrative utilizes symbolic artifacts to further the message of social anxiety. Prominent metaphors in Pickup, including Candy’s purse, the microfilm, and the gun, indicate mementos and objects of desire that play off character personas. Candy’s purse, with its ornate floral pattern, embodies the feminine mystique: it holds something valuable, every man is drawn to it, yet she gets no pleasure from his (mis)use of it. The purse is an extension of Candy; it is always with her and it is knocked around as much as she is. As a culturally prominent object, the purse calls to mind security, opulence, and womanhood, and the despoiling of it, the erosion of those things. Conversely, Moe, whose agedness and costume portray her as more grandmotherly than womanly, keeps her bankroll wrapped with a rubber band in her pocket. Ironically, Tiger warns Moe to be careful with her money, but Candy’s conventional way of carrying her money does nothing to prevent the frequent pillaging of her purse.
The microfilm represents anything that men vie after; it is Fuller’s “great what’s-it.” Tying the microfilm, however, to international espionage and Communism directly incites the paranoia of the 1950s Red Scare. But Fuller could have garnered similar reactions through an alternative plot device. For instance, Joey’s gun—an obvious phallic representation of masculinity—analogously incites angst once it is placed in the hands of the greasiest and most cowardly character. Through the gun, the cabal gives Joey the most power he has had up until this point. Before, he was pleading with Candy to help him; he appeared pathetic. Now, he is assertive and demanding. After Skip confronts Joey in the restroom (a reference to male vulnerability), he instantaneously loses his confidence when he goes for the gun and it is not there.
Ending the film with a sentimental denouement seems offbeat with the rest of the film’s gritty façade, but Fuller achieves a balance in doing so. Instead of resounding in the film’s beginning, the protagonist undergoes a seeming personality adjustment. Skip and Candy standing side-by-side resemble a bride and groom, a marital unit. Candy, who never wanted to be a criminal (seen by her contempt for carrying a stolen “patent”), is willing to bet on Skip’s transformation (reminiscent of the wager between Moe and Tiger), but the audience cannot be so sure. In spite of the audience’s unresolved perspective of Skip, he maintains his humanity along with Moe and Candy. When he rescued Moe from being interred anonymously in potter’s field (a reference to the biblical “stoolie” Judas), Skip redeemed himself and, indirectly, Moe.
Like Moe, Candy and Skip suffer from their histories; they are victims of circumstance and time: essentially innocent, but battling internally with “something decent trying to crawl out” because they have been tarnished by the coarse reality of life. Their innocence, especially Moe’s and Candy’s, is offset throughout the film by their environments (Moe’s squalor and Candy’s decadence). The environment, for Fuller, is as essential as the human subject in creating emotion. For in New York City’s demiworld of crooks, turncoats, and mercenaries, even the innocent need redemption.