Posted on 03/21/2026 2:06:53 PM PDT by Twotone
There's a clip on YouTube of director Samuel Fuller in the early '80s talking about the opening scene of his classic 1953 film noir Pickup on South Street. He would be about seventy years old at the time but he's full of energy and enthusiasm, as you would be if you were Samuel Fuller being interviewed for what I presume is French television. Fuller was and had been for decades something like a deity for French cineastes (the director had moved to France around this time) and he would never have an audience this avid anywhere else in the world.
Fuller is, as we used to say, a real character from charactersville, explaining how and why he made the picture in the kind of broad, Northeast American accent that has very nearly disappeared, even from the New York City where Fuller spent his teens working in newspapers and supporting his widowed mother.
He talks about how studio workmen were moving the subway car set with wooden levers to mimic a moving train in the studio at Fox and how cramming his actors together so tightly was the purest of realism. "People are a million miles away when they're standing in the subway," he says. "They can be looking at a sign, they can be reading a paper. But if I'm in a subway and a man or a woman is facing me and we're that close – THAT CLOSE! I've been in a subway where the noses touch. The noses. So that's important story construction wise, to see the pickpocket at work..."
While Fuller might have tried to describe the packed subway car in his film as realistic, the scene is heightened and hyperreal, like the best kind of moviemaking.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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I plan to watch this. Hever heard of it despite many noir films I’ve liked.
“Passing classified information to the Communists” and her purse is stolen.
My kind of plot.
PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) | Richard Widmark, Jean Peters | Film Noir.
Full movie (with 5-min intro): https://youtu.be/nAIM6bCchnA?si=JF5rjXeZHyXJZEYF&t=503
Full movie (skip the intro): https://youtu.be/nAIM6bCchnA?si=JF5rjXeZHyXJZEYF&t=503
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fl5dwVgBs8
Jean Peters is quite attractive here.
Widmark excels at playing weasel characters.
I saw that movie twice in theaters.
If you like that kind of plot, you'll like "Big Jim McClain" (1952) in which John Wayne plays an agent for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) who chases Red spies through Hawaii--a movie heartily hated by the Left.
Have the dvd. Thanks for the tip, though.
I recommend I Was A Communist For the FBI. Based on the nonfiction memoir book.
Amazingly up to date with Antifa, Tim Walz, Bernie Sanders and the current Dems. Excuses for elites to be wealthy while they do so much service for the stupid underclass. Using black people to agitate in unions and demonstrations. Even signs in mobs “No Room For Fascists Here.”
Did you have Raisinettes like Harvey Korman at the movies in Blazing Saddles?
I saw Goldfinger for 50 cents, waiting for the second tier theater which cost 75 cents. People gasped and then giggled when Honor Blackman said her character’s name.
Forgot in I Was A Communist For the FBI the leaders said to “use the term democracy as much as you can.”
I find Fuller’s movies (not in a good way) unusual, especially the very strange “The Naked Kiss” starring the beautiful Constance Towers. Too beautiful for Fuller’s tawdry movies.
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