Sleep and Indifference

Pickup on South Street, playing Monday night at the Parkway Theater.

The tombs are beautiful,
the naked Latin and the engraved fatal dates,
the coming together of marble and flowers
and the little plazas cool as courtyards
and the many yesterdays of history
today stilled and unique.
We mistake that peace for death
and we believe we long for our end
when what we long for is sleep and indifference.
–detail from Jorge Luis Borges’ "La Recoleta"

When Moe Williams wakes every morning, she can barely move her hips for the pain. As she sits up and puts her glasses on, it makes her ashamed to see the filth she lives in–when she was younger she could keep a clean house. Arthritis, a bad ticker, swollen ankles, have all conspired to keep Moe buckled and nearly broken. Life has worn her down.

Moe sells ties. And in her advanced years she can barely lug that satchel of cheap neckties around town. Up and down the stairs, up and down the sidewalks, up and down and into the subways. Tossed out of Wall Street by some cheap cop who doesn’t know a hard worker when he sees one. Sipping coffee to make it last longer. Taping the soles of her shoes to do the same. Moe eats cheaply and has long ago stopped caring about the taste of food.

Her joys are simple and come in a pair: visiting the cemetery and walking amongst the dead she hasn’t known, the respectable people who had the cash to put themselves into a nice plot with a good view and air that doesn’t reek of taxicabs and reverberate with the sound of the El. And she likes to listen to her Victrola, though she can barely crank the thing anymore. Oh, everything aches now.

All Moe has to go by is that grift: selling the names of cannons–pickpockets–to the cops. Every little bit helps, every little bit gets her closer to Borges’ eternal sleep and sweet indifference. The money she gets from New York’s finest, rolled in a tight bundle and kept on her day and night, will buy her a plot of land next to some banker. Most importantly, it’ll get her a good place to rest forever.

Pickup on South Street has a plot, and a good one: in a crowded subway, Skip McCoy (the great Richard Widmark) lifts a wallet from Candy (Jean Peters). Trouble is, the broad’s unwittingly delivering a red-hot MacGuffin: a piece of microfilm that contains the blueprint for some awful government weapon. See, our lady’s delivering the stuff right into the hands of tough, yet subtly effeminate Communists. The Feds were following her, hoping to catch Candy in the act and nabbing the lot all at once. Only Skip fouled everything up. Now everyone’s chasing our hero (if you can call a cheap hood a hero). For his part, Skip’s after the bag of money he knows the Commies will pony up for the microfilm. He’s no patriot–he simply wants the cash and the Feds can go to hell. So the FBI’s after Skip. Candy falls for him. And the ruthless brute, police captain Dan Tiger (Murvyn Vye) is trying to nail our pickpocket for the fourth and final time. Four strikes and you’re in Sing Sing for the rest of your days.

As with any great film–and Pickup is a great film, probably Samuel Fuller’s finest–the plot matters little in the overall picture. And the big picture is the emphasis on the small details. Fuller may or may not have intended to capture these details so beautifully: he was a raging, wonderful ape of a filmmaker who chewed cigars and shoved his cameras in the faces of his troupe. His plots moved at the speed of a tabloid headline falling hot off the press. There’s an unwholesome violence in his films–in one scene it is as if he provoked Richard Kiley (playing Candy’s former beau and current Commie heavy) and Jean Peters to bring a primal loathing to a rolling boil and let it spill and burn the both of them. His characters seethe and sweat, live in shacks and are as sad and selfish as every poor sucker I’ve known.

Then there’s Thelma Ritter. Thelma always looked worn, as if she’d never once trusted her turn as a character actress to pay the bill and so spent her evenings pouring coffee at an all-night diner. Character actors get little room to express themselves, a few minutes here and there, fusing the story together as it leaves one star and alights on another. She was playfully irritable in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and held her own in the bitchy maelstrom of All About Eve. But in Pickup on South Street, Thelma Ritter grabbed what little she had, and ran with it.

Her Moe is hardly memorable at first, just a lady in a policeman’s office, peddling ties. Slowly she comes to assert herself, her character a woman so tired all she can do is wait for the quietude of death. She’s saving for that plot and equally terrified she’ll be buried, nameless, in the Potter’s Field. She rats out on pickpockets, thieves, and grifters, cashing in her leads to whatever cop’ll fork over the money. Oddly enough, these pickpockets, thieves and grifters all hold Moe close to their collective hearts. Moe is one of them.

Pay attention, now: Moe, tired, aching, lonely as all hell and hoping only for a sip of cheap liquor and five minutes of music, returns home and finds a killer in the shadows. Moe Williams does not tremble or cry for help, nor does she fight back. She has failed to escape from poverty and worse, failed to escape an eternal fate in Potter’s Field. But she shrugs off the irony of this cruel world, summons up the dignity that she has also banked these many years, and reaches for a weary and spectacular grace.

Go see this beautiful little noir Monday night at the Parkway. Don’t rent it on DVD, at home with the lights on and the cat meowing, the phone waiting to ring. Watch it in the dark of the Parkway, with other people who will be moved with you. This damn film reeks with the aroma of the New York City docks and crowded subways. You’ll marvel together at fat, blankeyed Lightning Louie (the great Victor Perry, uncredited, one of only two movies he ever made) slurping noodles and then asking for more; Widmark pulling beer from the river, resting in his skiff, swinging in his hammock in the coolest pad in New York (but one that must have smelled like… what? The river? Cigs? Fish?); a giant grunting on the tugboat to the cemetery, as he moves coffins to get to Moe’s; the diners, the docks, the subways. Lose yourself in Pickup on South Street for one night, in a crowded movie theater, and give Thelma Ritter her due.