Product: Pickup on South Street (The Criterion Collection) (1953)
Rating: 5.0
Richard Widmark is mesmerizing.....again!
Watching Richard Widmark chew up this movie begs the question: "Why can't they make em like that anymore"! He is simply brilliant as a cheap petty pick pocket who lifts some microfilm from a hot chick (Jean Peters) on a train only to find that he's become involved with communist sympathisers stealing secrets from our government. At first he thinks....hmmmmmm let me cash in on this, beat up Candy, Insult some detectives, and brow beat Thelma Ritter for crossing him. Later Candy (Jean Peters) gets beat up brutally trying to protect Widmark who only twenty minutes before smacked her around pretty good himself leaving the audiience to shout at the screen: "Have you lost your mind"? Anyway she can't help her feeling for Widmark and only after about an hour and fifty minutes does he turn human and allows feelings for her to surface after she is brutaly beat up and shot protecting him. Hospital bed repentance will do that everytime. He then avenges the death of Thelma Ritter and Candy's assalt and then in the last five minute of the film flashes that "killer smile", turns almost straight, and heads off into the sunset to bed down Candy in what amounts to the strangest attraction in memory between a crook and a victim. It's film noir at its best! Hail King Richard!