PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET DIRECTED BY SAMUEL FULLER CRITERION COLLECTION HEN REDS and ...

UTH STREET DIRECTED BY SAMUEL FULLER CRITERION COLLECTION

HEN REDS and Feds get in a mash-up with the dames and the damned for a fast, furious crime noir as rushed as any heist, Sam Fuller can't be far behind.

Fuller, a hard-boiled news scribe turned auteur, had been directing films for four years before happening on to Dwight Taylor's potboiler and Richard Widmark-character actor cum scumbaggish leading man whose fearful leer in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947) made him a household name.

Instead of playing to their strengths, Fuller made his own hyper-noir based on the rat-tat bluntness of the crime-blotting tabloid biz he knew so well. His 1953 script barely touched Taylor's text; instead, Pickup, unlike most of noir's lingering, malingering melodramas, raced hard and fast through its shadows to a downright taciturn finale. There's nothing fussy or French about it. Pickup was a sniper's single shot-short (80 minutes), concise, done.

Widmark's cretin's laugh was replaced by a growling impertinence and spittle-spraying insouciance when it came to his sneering Skip McCoy, an oddly narcissistic petty-ante pickpocket whose laconic iciness and laissez faire freneticism is so free of sentiment that a singular show of chivalry cuts through his glacial apolitical mien. The cold was infectious. Take the women in Skip's life: Thelma Ritter and Jean Peters, the chilly vixen and unwitting communist courier whose picked purse turns everything Red. The men-FBI, communists-are faceless amidst the hustle of a bleakly backlit Manhattan, a tight, gray tangle of bureaucrats prepped for a gangbang on McCoy's non-nationalist sensibilities in the face of death or jail.

Pickup politicized fingerpointing is refreshingly now-a he-said/she-said of crime and punishment wrapped in microfilm. When McCoy spits, "Are you waving the flag at me?" Widmark could be talking to Rummy or Condi Rice, expressing a loathing of overly American sentiment so seething you can taste it.

But Fuller is the true star. His burgeoning raw-knuckle cinesthetic was in league with the trumped-up headlines of an all-consuming communist scare-one that would frighten America and inform filmmakers of all stripes. But Pickup was more than trumped. Like a steroid freak or a shotgun, it was a fast-filmed, cheap carnival of harried crime and harsh reaction that leaps like a delicious pulpy tabloid lead from its very start into the fray, capturing beads of sweat with tight close-ups and manic zooms that fly in from LaGuardia. Despite his heat and haste, Fuller's brusque cynicism was not without knowledge or the psyche-saintliness of the subconscious that made film noir so nuanced. But like any great newsman or dancer, Fuller knew best-if it bled, it led. Pickup did both.