A Skeleton Key To Pickup On South Street

A Skeleton Key To Pickup On South Street

Pickup on South Street is not a film, not a movie—it's a picktchah.   Along with the rest of Sam Fuller's work, it is raw and crafty, naive and profound.  Manny Farber saw "a comic lack of self-consciousness" in Fuller.  "Pickup On South Street is a marvel of lower-class nuttiness," he wrote.  "Fuller's scripts are grotesque jobs which might have been written by the bus driver on The Honeymooners."  To Farber’s point, few of the characters express more than a single emotion throughout the story, and relations between men and women are constricted by an attitude of alienation that repeatedly erupts into scenes of sexual violence.  But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.  It’s as if that bus driver—Ralph Cramden—had a penchant for elaborately worked out symbolism, and a precise analysis of covert class conflict in postwar America.  Did Fuller approach the project with these non-narrative elements in mind, or are they byproducts of his process, or just a critical mirage?

The story follows a pickpocket, Skip McCoy, who unwittingly intercepts an espionage operation just as the FBI is about to swoop down on the perpetrators. In the first scene, Skip steals a woman's wallet in the New York City subway.  He comes into the center of the frame gradually, as he moves through the crowded, lurching subway car.  The woman, Candy, stands open-mouthed, obliviously receptive.  Two men, one older, one young, are discreetly surveilling Candy.  Skip zeroes in and performs a delicate extraction on Candy's purse, then jostles her to re-close her bag as the train lurches to a stop, then he dashes out of the train.  This sexually charged theft is shown with an immediacy that implicates the viewer in the violation.  After the subway car's doors close, the younger man, Agent Enyart, asks "What happened?"  The older one, Agent Zara, replies "I'm not sure yet."  

In his autobiography A Third Face, Fuller tells a story about how the FBI tried to censor the script of Pickup before production.  He and the studio head, Darryl Zanuck, had lunch with J. Edgar Hoover, who apparently had seen the script of Pickup, and they discussed a scene which the FBI director found objectionable for its apparent mockery of the Bureau.  In that scene, Skip responds to Agent Zara's appeal to his patriotism with the cheeky question: "are you waving the flag at me?"  Zanuck insisted that Skip's response should stay in the script, Fuller recollected, "because that is his character."  In the film, Zara comes in for further ribbing from the female stool pigeon Moe, who, when she sees Zara, mistakes him for a criminal suspect, asking, "Who's the creep?  What's he in for? He looks like a second-story cat thief."  Zara’s colleague Enyart is smooth, crisp and manly, but nothing more—an empty suit.  Yet Enyart's characterization conforms to the Bureau's standard for depicting its agents in film scripts, as if Fuller were following the Bureau’s rules in order to mock them.

While Pickup On South Street pursues anti-communism on a superficial level, the script is full of references to the ordinary, low-level workings of capitalism, and the dialog is steeped in the language of commerce.  Four of the main characters—Skip the pickpocket, Moe the stool pigeon, Candy's ex-boyfriend Joey, who is a mercenary Communist agent, and Captain Tiger of the NYPD pickpocket squad, who is determined to put Skip away for life, all refer to their own means of livelihood as "business."  

Joey, who is trying to sell stolen atomic secrets to Communist agents, is a traitor not from political conviction, but for profit, and out of desperation.  A coward by nature, he licks his lips nervously and seems to sweat at every moment, a traitor to himself, uncomfortable in his own skin.  Out of fear for his own safety, he cajoles Candy into delivering the microfilmed information, passing it off to her as an act of industrial espionage.  When Candy says of the missing microfilm which Skip has purloined, "you're talking like it was hot!", Joey replies "How many times do I have to tell you?  We're not criminals. This is big business.  Cutthroat business."  And in a later scene "I told you I was in a cutthroat business. These manufacturers would do anything to eliminate each other."  

When Captain Tiger shows Agent Zara his files of profiles of New York pickpockets, suavely opening a file cabinet drawer with a backhand reach, he says simply "We're in business."  Even Moe, who is easily Pickup’s most sympathetic character (thanks to Thelma Ritter’s sly performance), is constantly looking for opportunities for profit.  As she puts it, "every new buck has a meaning of its own."  She refers to her work as "business" six times throughout the film.

Skip is an artisan of a peculiar sort.  When Candy tracks Skip down and steals into his waterfront hideout, he sneaks up and knocks her unconscious.  He goes through her pocketbook, then revives her by pouring cold beer over her face. Candy stands up, rubs her sore jaw.  “Take your time looking” she tells him, with double irony.  In order to coax information from Candy, Skip puts the make on her.  They kiss, and begin to fall in love, but Skip brutally dismisses her with an implied demand for cash in exchange for the microfilm.  When Candy returns, the courtship resumes.  Skip is still cynical and manipulative, and Candy, enthralled, is again at his mercy. She tells him “You got fingers like an artist." He replies "Mmm-hmm.  Soft and smooth.  In my business, I gotta keep 'em that way."  Getting convicted and sent to jail for his actions is "part of the business, the red side of the ledger."  Skip again ups the ante and sends Candy away.  

Among all of these characters, only Candy, whose status as a sex worker is implied early on (“a girl makes mistakes,” she explains to Skip), resists the tendency to reduce every relationship to a cash transaction or a con game.  Candy is motivated at first by her sense of obligation to Joey, and then by her attraction to Skip.  Ignoring or refusing to acknowledge the angles that others are working on her, she lets herself be played in turn by Joey, Skip, Lightning Louie, and Zara.  When she encounters the gluttonous Louie in a Chinese restaurant, and he shakes her down for a double fee in exchange for divulging Moe’s address, she calls him “blubbermouth” and shouts at him in fury “I hope you bust!”  Later in the story, Candy turns the tables on Skip, knocking him out with a beer bottle as he’s about to sell the stolen microfilm to the Communists.  Then Candy delivers the microfilm to Tiger and Zara, in an effort to redeem Skip’s lost honor.  In return, Zara sends her back to Joey in order to entrap the Communist mastermind, and Joey beats her up and shoots her.  There follows a hospital scene in which Skip reconciles with Candy, who is horribly bruised but shown in soft focus. 

Fuller's sexual politics exemplify the anti-feminist regression of the postwar US.  Candy and Moe are both complex characters, but entirely schematic, and unrealistic in pointedly opposite ways.  Fuller couldn't show the life of an actual sex worker, so he projects instead his own concept of a sex worker's motivation.  Candy is open to any attention or contact, however violent.  Where Candy is hyper-sexualized, Moe in her solitude is perfectly asexual.  Candy's transactions are in the service of relationships, and Moe's relationships are in the service of transactions.

A pickpocket, a prostitute and a stool pigeon are the heroes here.  Each is morally corrupt on some level, yet they ultimately help each other to foil the Communist plot, without much useful input from the cops or the FBI.  As they try to outplay each other for cash and information, the cops, crooks and commies constantly spy on each other, gazing surreptitiously at someone or something. Meanwhile the camera doesn’t record the action, it surveils it with conspicuously hand-held movement, frenetically swooping around corners, or gazing down from high angles outdoors or even inside a room, sometimes zooming in for extreme close-ups and out again for a wider view.  The hyperactive photography adds tension and flavor to the espionage theme.  It also calls attention to itself, like a detective who wants their subject to know that they’re being tailed.

Lines of class conflict and solidarity are more fundamental to these characters than the distinction between cops and criminals.  When two detectives, Winoki and Mac, arrive at Skip's shack to arrest him and search the premises, Skip greets them by name and offers them beer, which Winoki accepts.  Skip asks the men about their boss, Captain Tiger—"How's the whip?"  Winocki answers “You know the whip - always in the pink.”  Likewise, Moe and Skip share a quasi-familial bond, even though Moe sells her knowledge of Skip's habits and whereabouts to the police, and to Candy as well.  Skip tells Candy "Moe's alright.  She's gotta eat."  Moe says the same thing about Skip: “Well, he’s gotta live, too.”  When Moe is quizzing Agent Zara about the subway theft that he witnessed, she stands over him, planting her hands on both arms of the chair on which Zara is sitting, in a parody of a cop administering the third degree, mocking Zara's uncertainty regarding the details of what he witnessed.  And when Joey comes to buy Skip's address from Moe, Moe addresses him as "Mister," with undisguised contempt.  She refuses to sell Skip out to Joey, and pays with her life for her impertinence.  Even among the Communists, an inverted class consciousness holds sway.  The American Communist, sitting behind a desk, has upper-class manners.  The Russian Communist, sprawled across an armchair, represents the brutality of working-class sovereignty.  "Security isn't interested in all this confusion" he growls—a thinly veiled threat leveled at the man in the suit.  

Sam Fuller was no Marxist.  (Neither, by his own telling, was Karl Marx.)  These themes of class conflict and solidarity, and the tendency to view everything in terms of business transactions, remain below the surface of the story.  Fuller never discussed them, as far as I know.  He liked to show aspects of life that remained hidden, or were excluded from polite discourse, but he didn’t present himself as a purveyor of hidden meanings.  All of this lower-class nuttiness is there in the bones of the script, waiting for the actors and the camera to weave it into a tightly plotted story.  The themes of surveillance and class consciousness are not hard to spot.  The repeated “business” trope is built up from scattered references in many scenes, and is easier to miss. 

I wasn’t thinking in Marxist or esoteric terms either when I started to look into Pickup on South Street.  Rather, it was Fuller’s peculiar blend of stock characterization and realism that got me wondering.  As I said earlier, each character seems to have a specific emotion that he or she expresses throughout the film.  Take Lightning Louie, who has just one scene, which barely moves the story forward and could easily have been cut.  He’s like some medieval depiction of Gluttony.  

And there it is—it seems to me that the main characters in this movie embody the seven deadly sins.  Fuller explores this theme rigorously, but it stays in the background, never intruding on the narrative.  There is no attempt at allegory, but this ancient set of archetypes neatly fits the profiles of all of the principal roles, and it accounts for the constricted emotive range of the characters.  Skip is Avarice—that’s why he picks pockets.  When he realizes what he has stumbled into possessing the stolen microfilm, he tries to maximize his profit in spite of the risks to himself, to Candy and to national security.  Captain Tiger is Wrath—he’s angry in every scene, except when he's dealing with Zara, where his deference masks a barely concealed resentment.  Zara is Pride—Fuller seems to have enjoyed poking fun at the Bureau without appearing to do so.  Candy is Lust, redeemed by love.  Moe is Sloth, or world-weariness, leading up to her magnificent monologue in her last scene.  Finally, Joey is Envy—this explains why his character is so empty and so unhinged.  He envies the entrepreneurs whom he can emulate only through treachery.  He even envies Candy for her underworld contacts.

While the symbology of the seven sins isn’t part of Pickup On South Street’s story, it may have helped to shape the characters.  Perhaps it originated with the character of Lieutenant Dan Campion of the NYPD pickpocket squad.  Campion, who has a cameo in Pickup, was the real-life model for Captain Tiger, and was Fuller’s chief informant regarding the criminal subculture in which the story is set.  Campion, like Tiger, had been suspended for physically assaulting people in custody.  If wrath is Tiger’s defining flaw, why not give a comparable backstory to the other characters?  

Symbolic constructs that map multiple meanings on to an imaginative work can be hard to verify or refute.  There are works like Pilgrim’s Progress or Animal Farm, whose authors clearly intended them to be read allegorically.  There are others, such as Baum's The Wizard Of Oz or Kubrick’s film The Shining, for which an elaborate and coherent allegorical structure has been posited, yet the authenticity of that construct is contested.  Conversely, there are symbolic readings that are so strongly embedded in the reception of a text that we might not notice their absence from the text itself.  For instance, the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, is often read as an allegorical account of how sin entered into human life, though the concept of sin is not mentioned in that Biblical passage.  Patterns of irony such as these have to be evaluated according to how well they map onto our experience of viewing or reading the material, and whether they harmonize with something that’s impossible to define—the flavor and general significance of the work.  So, go and watch or re-watch this picktchah, and see for yourself whether Sam Fuller was up to more than you might have noticed at first.