"Pickup on South Street" (1953)

Enter: a subway train roaring down a tunnel in darkness. The train makes a stop, and we see the city people hustle out and bustle in. No one distinctly breaks out of the mold of silence that seems to increase with the noise of currents that tie the train to its tracks... no one, until we catch sight of a brunette in a white dress, her absent brownhaired thoughts adrift on the breeze that her eyes waft across a scene packed with faces and sweat and the leering eyes of two hat-wearing men who appear to understand what we understand as we steal glimpses at her. (We do not know at this point that she is Jean Peters, future wife of Howard Hughes.) But they are not merely enjoying the sight of her; they are waiting... Suddenly Richard Widmark, carrying a newspaper under his arm, bumps his way into the scene out of the fabric of tightly woven people that form the small den in which Jean Peters and the mysterious hat-wearing men inhabit, and he finds himself face to face with her white dress & the white promise of her purse as it slides close to him. He opens his newspaper as if to read, but dexterously lets his hand slip under its cover to open the white part of her that sheathes her most intimate and desired article... a small strip of film (whose actual contents we never ascertain the details of.) But whose contents bring together the pickpocket (a 'dirty no-good cannon') & the lady in white nevertheless. As he grifts the goods of her purse, she, unaware of his sly hands, looks up at him and into his eyes; he takes more than he expects: the first pickup.

Samuel Fuller, the director of muscular intimacy & violence like tenderness, uses his camera like a freight train when he's filming the descent of feathers, like a soft light when he screens the harsh clatter of shoes on pavement; to closeups of naked kisses he devotes a hard look; to violent altercations in which the dialogue of fists and bruises presides, Fuller distances the camera and allows us to gaze over a furious scene with terrific equanimity: he has Widmark rumble with the Commie heavy in a subway tunnel, their figures made momentarily small by the placement of the action within the greater darklit cave of the subway. He arches over to Jean Peters upon her exit from the shack on South Street and frames her in a seething moment of hot-cold flushes. There may be no sense nor sensibility in the inexplicable love Candy has for scoundrels like Joey or Skip McCoy, but she's a girl who gives in to brutality with a regenerative appetite. She probably admires opportunism for all its wholesome rejection of values & flagwaving, since to her, Skip's treatment falls like a hot rain on a frosty back - he hides his desperation in a noble cynicism and singlemindedness that only a girl of Candy's down-and-out culture could appreciate. He steals kisses, he doesn't beg for them; he slaps her so that he could caress the bruise he makes. That's not the sign of a pickpocket, but the mark of a craftsman. (A man with swift hands, who values his business above all else, is an artist who'll know how finely to sweep a girl.)

Witness the Renoir-like death scene for Moe Williams, the tragic stoolie who serves as the film's crucial pivot - the noir's sacrificial lamb - as she listens to a french record and declaims her poignant resignation to give up a fancy funeral for the sake of keeping her capitalist honor: Fuller gives his characteristic lurch toward her, zooms in on her face with the ease of a moth circling a candle on its way out, permits her a cutless haiku farewell, and pans out to the record player as we hear the distinct crack of a gunshot. Fade out.

Fuller's art is brevity; as he declares on a priceless commentary on what is perhaps his best film, "I write with the camera." The camera is a machine, just like a typewriter, and it constructs narratives; the director's eye is sleek & manicured just like a thief's hand, just as physical as its five fingers as they rove for textures. The pursuit of composition by the camera's framing will have to occur with a spontaneity in proportion to the viewer's own sense of instantaneous discovery: "This is called instinct."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_OJXkXU8P0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCLeu2Ngncw&NR=1
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Cf. Bresson's "Pickpocket"; filmed in 1959, was likely inspired by this film in the mechanics at play of the swindler's art.