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Certain passages from cinema are submerged in the memory and only released on second viewing, often many years later. I remember the shock and pleasure of seeing Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) as a by-now confirmed cineaste in my late-20s and realising that the moment when Oedipus kills his father in the blinding sun of the desert had once knocked me sideways, though beyond my real comprehension at that point, as a 14-year-old working-class boy with little to no inherited cultural capital. Such moments of inchoate revelation sparked a curiosity in the possibilities of cinema that never left me. In October 2022, I had another one of these memories when I re-watched Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street in my early-50s, a good 25 years since I had seen it last.
The plot itself is McCarthyite Communist spy hokum: low-life criminal comes into contact with secret microfilm––commies and FBI give chase. But in Sam Fuller’s hands the moral ambiguity is such that J Edgar Hoover was known to detest Pickup for its unpatriotic message and representations of FBI bribery. Aside from the woeful plot, the film is pure hard-boiled, gut-punching noir: no-one comes out smelling of roses; but in classic noir style that does not mean we remain untouched by their plight. The performances are brilliant throughout: Richard Widmark (Skip) reprises the desperate, scheming persona last seen in Jules Dassin’s incredible Night and the City (1950); Jean Peters (Candy) delivers one of the great noir performances as Skip’s tough and tragic romantic interest; and Thelma Ritter’s performance as ‘Moe’ is rightly celebrated for its doleful pathos. Yet, in a single one and half minute scene, Vic Perry near steals the show in a great noir bit-part performance.
The scene begins in media res, with Perry observed in head and shoulders close-up in a Chinatown restaurant: greased back hair, bowl up to chin, gazing downwards into the near distance while incessantly prodding Chinese noodles into his maw. In a brilliantly directed sequence––typifying the illicit paranoid air of the film throughout––he inscrutably, almost offhandedly, interrogates Candy (offscreen initially) about her presence: ‘So who told you to ask me? …. So who told you to ask him? … So why don’t you go to the police?’ Never once looking at Candy or interrupting the mechanical shovelling of noodles down his gullet. Candy has lived a bit and is no fool: she knows people like this. Impatient for information about the lost microfilm, she chucks twenty dollars on the table to find out who ‘Lightning Louie’ is. Without ever facing her, Perry casually picks up the note with his chopsticks and slips it into his breast pocket before informing Candy that he is Lightning Louie. Candy doesn’t believe him and calls him a ‘blubbermouth’, at which point, barely perceptibly, and without breaking the constant rhythmic stroking of food into his mouth, he casually pokes her in the face with the ends of his chopsticks.
After calling the restaurant owner over to verify his ‘downtown’ identity, he offers to give up the ‘stoolie’ for another twenty dollars. Soporifically plucking the notes into his breast pocket with his chopsticks again, he gives up the address of Moe (Thelma Ritter), and his own name in the process: ‘tell her I sent you’. Cynicism, self-interest and the need for survival have entirely eroded any criminal code of honour between Lightning and Moe; and this is later mirrored in Skip’s weary acceptance that his old pal Moe has herself identified him to the police. Food first, morals later––as Brecht would say.
Perry’s performance is quintessentially noir in that it represents in unvarnished form a gross vision of self-interest and transactional moral vacuity. Failing to even as much as look at Candy while he conducts business with her, Lightning Louie expresses the social alienation such a position guarantees. Shovelling down his food without interruption, he embodies both self-satiation and the hunger for survival at the bottom-end of class society. That this is pulled off in barely one and half minutes without once meeting eyes with his on-screen co-actor is a remarkable, extracting the absolute maximum from a few meagre lines. Fuller’s understanding, even empathy, with moral ambivalence in the film sets it apart from its McCarthyite moorings, lending real pathos to the drama. Perry’s performance fulsomely embodies this ambivalence, elevating a bit-part role to the status of synecdoche for Fuller’s entire filmic design.
Neil Gray
View Movie: https://archive.org/details/pickuponsouthstreet1953_202001
