PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953)

Either you love Sam Fuller's work or can't figure out why he and his films are so revered. Frankly, I'm in the latter group, but I do love his PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET. Richard Widmark, at his low-rent best, is a petty pickpocket named Skip McCoy who inadvertently steals a strip of microfilm intended for communist spies. His beautiful but tough mark Candy (achingly beautiful Jean Peters (playing against type) was unknowingly carrying it in her wallet for her sleazy boyfriend (Richard Kiley), who forces Candy to find the pickpocket and retrieve the film. She manages to locate Skip's shack by the river through his friend, warm-hearted stool pigeon Mo (Thelma Ritter). All this leads to a series of double-crosses. But soon, Skip and Candy are in love, which softens his edges a bit and causes her to dump her rotten boyfriend. In one swell scene, the cops try to get Skip to tell where the microfilm is by appealing to his sense of patriotic duty. His sneering reply is, "Are you wavin' the flag at me?" Widmark delivers the line in a tone that virtually defines the word "snark" 40 years before its first reference anywhere else. That scene and many others make PICKUP STREET wonderfully watchable and, according to many critics, among the best noir films of the ‘50s. I agree.