OVP: Pickup on South Street (1953)

Film: Pickup on South Street (1953)
Stars: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Richard Kiley
Director: Samuel Fuller
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Thelma Ritter)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

Thelma Ritter was, as we stated in our A Letter to Three Wives review last month, in 1949 so little known that even with a pretty large part, she didn't merit a screen credit.  By 1953, though, she had amassed four Academy Award nominations consecutively, a huge deal for a character actress in her fifties-she'd do it twice more before her career ended.  Ritter famously never won the Oscar itself, making her the most-nominated actress in the history of the Academy to never win a competitive trophy (up until this last year, when she was overtaken by Glenn Close), and one of the questions I've frequently asked myself in the years since was-when did she come the closest?  There's no actual way of knowing this, but Ritter usually was a sturdy side presence, a whip-smart comic persona who gets the last laugh, but was largely inconsequential to the plot.  Then I chanced upon 1953's Pickup on South Street, and it became very apparent what the "crown jewel" of Ritter's career was, and where, if she was ever going to win an Oscar, it was going to come from.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses, like so many of our noir pictures this month, on a down-on-his-luck guy, here named Skip McCoy (Widmark).  In the opening scenes of the film, he steals the wallet of Candy (Peters), who is carrying around a top secret government microfilm for her ex-boyfriend Joey (Kiley).  Joey is, in fact, a Communist spy, and selling these secrets to the Russians.  Candy has been promised that Joey will leave her life forever if she gets back the microfilm, so she goes to his small one-room shack on the waterfront to find it, and tries to seduce Skip, but in the process she's both A) roughed up by him and B) suddenly falls in love with him (feminist this film is not).  Unsuccessful in getting the documents back, she goes to Joey, who then intends to kill Skip.  Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth, Skip does the proper, patriotic thing, and turns in the microfilm rather than trying to blackmail Joey to get cash for it, and he & Candy go on their merry ways, Joey headed to jail.

This is pretty standard-fare film noir, and while it's good (Peters & Widmark both are great, and have terrific chemistry), I'd argue that its best element is Ritter as a side character.  Ritter plays Moe, a professional informant for the police who will sell out her friends...for a price.  She's the one who initially pinches Skip for the robbery (something he doesn't begrudge her-she's gotta eat too), and for a while you kind of assume it's yet another washerwoman style role for Ritter, who is too kindly for this world of thugs.  But as the film progresses, she gets to show her dreams, and really fleshes out her side character in a way you wouldn't expect from such a part.  She gets a killer (literally-she dies) monologue at the end of the film with Kiley, who is intent on murdering her if she doesn't finger Skip, and just aces it.  She's trying to save for a fancy funeral, a way to send her off in elegance that she never got to enjoy in life, and gives a great soliloquy to Kiley about being old, being tired, but not understanding a way of not continuing on.  It's marvelous-in one great scene she shows the entire life of a woman, totally selling her as someone worthy whom life kept giving bad hands.  It's the best I've ever seen Ritter, and makes this her most deserving Oscar nomination.

This is what stuck out to me while watching the movie.  The film is noted for its deeply anti-Communist plotline, taken at the height of the Red Scare, which might rub some people the wrong way (though to my knowledge no one associated with this picture "named names"), but it's interesting and has fun dialogue.  However, it's Ritter that makes this film worthwhile, creating a woman emerging where most people just saw shadows.

Previous Films in the Series: Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep