Worth Watching: Pickup on South Street (1953)

Title: Pickup on South Street
Director: Sam Fuller
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Pickup on South Street isn't the best film noir I've seen, but it's held together by some powerful scenes, most notably Thelma Ritter's character, Moe Williams, summing up her life as a man points a gun at her head ("I have to go on makin' a living so I can die").

The main character is a pickpocket, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), a smirking jackass for the most part; throughout the movie people keep wanting to deck him, and I don't blame them. At the start of the movie, he steals from Candy (Jean Peters), a 'fallen woman' who's got principles and guts, but also has the unfortunate tendency to give herself over to men like Skip or, even worse, her old boyfriend who deceptively uses her to deliver top-secret information to the Commies.


Because the movie was made in the early 50s, the anti-Communist message gets hammered in a little too much, as lowly criminals and stool pigeons repeatedly tell each other that they'd never stoop to helping the Commies out. Never ever. But the movie isn't about the Cold War; the Commies are just convenient villains. What the movie really focuses on is how petty criminals and other people well-acquainted with street life stay one step ahead of the local police, the FBI, and the Commie villains; they tangle with powerful forces and often come out on top.

Thelma Ritter's performance as Moe Williams is what I recommend most about Pickup on South Street. At the start, Ritter is hilarious, playing what seems to be her usual delightful role of straight-talking wisecracker. But then her character slowly cracks open, revealing sadness and depth. Moe walks the streets selling ties; she also rats people out by selling information to the cops. Her greatest goal in life is to get buried with dignity, not in potter's field but in a classy cemetery. She's the kind of character I love to come across - not a type, but a person.


*All images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

C'est magnifique

Le Flâneur (music by The XX) from Luke Shepard on Vimeo.

Check out Paris in 2000 images at National Geographic Traveler for an interview with Luke Shepard about this project.

A photographer strolling through a city can be thought of as le flâneur: an observer, someone perceptive, thoughtful, attuned to broader patterns and smaller exquisite details, mapping out the city on foot.

One reading of 'Smell and Envy'

I thought of this poem after a conversation with a friend about the best type of place to live in, with the main contrast springing up between the city and the countryside.

Douglas Goetsch wrote Smell and Envy in the voice of a city poet scoffing at the nature poets, who think that because of where they live and what they're surrounded by, they have some sort of monopoly on the poetic.

so it blooms and withers only for you,
so all you have to do is name it: primrose
- and now you're writing poetry...

I like the suggestion here that there's a poetry just in the sound of words - like primrose - and there are many words from nature that lend themselves to this poetry. And that it's not just the poets of nature and countryside who can take those words and make poetry out of them. Though in the mind of a city poet the words take on a new form:

we dunk your roses in vats of blue

There's also a suggestion of laziness - that all a nature poet has to do is look out the window and there's the poem, right there, ready to be plucked from a tree. While a city poet has to wring a poem out of concrete.

And it's not only nature words that have poetry to them. There are urban words with poetry and music in them too, though maybe those words lend themselves only to a harsher kind of poetry (is there a word associated with city life that's comparable to, say, primrose? There might be, but it's likely more difficult to find).

As the poem continues there's also an implication of city poets being more knowledgeable about human nature (likely in a more cynical, wordly wise, "seen everything" sort of way). Not that a nature poet can't capture human character as well. Maybe it's that city poets get at the grittier parts of human nature and the greater varieties and idiosyncrasies (and downright insanity) of human personality - they can't help it; in a city everyone's crowded together. No one's flaws go unnoticed. You're nose to nose with a stranger in the subway and the wart on his chin is right at your eye level.

Maybe another contrast is that poems of nature capture the roots and foundations of human character, because we all once lived in nature; the truths of those poems seem to echo in your bones. With the city there's more a sense of displacement, distortion and dysfunctionality - maybe it's a poetry of feeling uncomfortable in your own skin. The Pleiades aren't the remote wonders of the starry night, when you're in the city:

When the moon is full
we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades
you could probably buy downtown.

But nature can give you grittiness too, and the knots and intricacies of humanity. And maybe there are some lovely (possibly deeply resonant or maybe just uncomplicated) poems set amidst urban life; you know, the beauty of buildings, of city parks (oops, there's nature encroaching a little), and people standing out strikingly on a street corner.