Pickup on South Street

Pickup on South Street (1953), starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, & Milburn Stone.



At the time, August 1952, the script was deemed unacceptable by the Production Code, for "excessive brutality and sadistic beatings, of both men and women." The revised script was accepted but required multiple takes including for a scene in which Jean Peters and Richard Kiley frisked each other for loot was considered too risqué.

The film went on to great success, including an Oscar nomination for Thelma Ritter for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1954.

Wiki notes:

The French release of the movie removed any reference to spies and microfilm in the translation. They called the movie Le Port de la Drogue (Port of Drugs). The managers of 20th Century Fox thought that the theme of communist spies was too controversial in a country where the Communist Party was still hugely influential.

Today, the movie fares well. From Rick J Thompson's review of Pickup on South Street:

Pickup was also a regular fixture on top ten lists of film noir before feminist intervention in that discussion made a femme fatale mandatory for the category. Seen now, it's Fuller sui generis, making films that are like no others. Nearly always working with tiny budgets, Fuller always spent up big on cinematographers, in this case Joe MacDonald. Fuller and MacDonald build the film on two extremes: tight closeups lit for sharp facial modelling; and free, sometimes flamboyant camera movement.

Pickup is assembled from standard pulp fiction components: situations, stock characters, conventions, cliches, attitudes, images, gestures, actions, and relationships. Unlike later practitioners described as neo- or post- , Fuller's work is at one with such material, not outside it. The film draws its energy from creating a world from within this pulp paradigm in all its crudity, brutality, sleaziness, and pure improbability (Fuller had a set built for Skip's home: an abandoned bait shack built on piles ten meters out in the East River, reached by a wooden gangplank. Its refrigerator is a crate lowered by a rope into the river. Its only amenity is a hammock. Fuller gets full value out of the set, using every inch of it across several scenes--wonderful filmmaking. Living there, how does he keep his suits so perfectly pressed? Where's the wardrobe? Does he cook? Why would a professional criminal choose a place with only one way in and out? Don't ask).

This film was remade as The Cape Town Affair (1967), directed by Robert D. Webb and starring Claire Trevor (in the Thelma Ritter role), James Brolin (in his first leading role), and Jacqueline Bisset.