Look mister
I am so tired you’d be doing me a big favour if you’d blow my head off, says the stool to the rat.
Cigar smoking WWII veteran Samuel Fuller wanted to get inside the head of a canon, a pickpocket.
And so he (re)wrote and directed a social realist cold war film noir portraying a hooker who can’t lie to the man that lifted her wallet, a pickpocket artist, a stool taking a bullet to save a robber and a scared bandit selling secrets to a foreign government.
Pick Up on South Street was 20th Fox’s obligatory anti-communist movie, and so its French release saw its dialogues altered, against the director’s will: ‘reds’ became drug dealers, as I learned from the French bonus -copy I got from amazon.fr-, that really digs into the movie.
Violent and erotic, portraying small time criminals as human beings, a well lit example of economic story telling, with a heart.