The Pawnbroker ***** (1964, Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sanchez) – Classic Movie Review 3470

Rod Steiger said: ‘You think Run of the Arrow is my best film? Haven’t you seen The Pawnbroker?’

Rod Steiger boasts a towering, Oscar-nominated performance as Sol Nazerman, the Jewish pawnbroker in Harlem tormented by his past as a victim and survivor of Nazi persecution in the German concentration camp of Auschwitz, in Lumet’s scalding study in frozen emotion and obsessive memory.

He lost his family and friends in the war, as well as his faith in God in his fellow men, until he realises too late the tragic consequences of his actions. Sol’s assistant is the ambitious Latino Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez), who wants to learn with Sol how to run a business of his own and learns the wrong lesson, leading to tragedy. Sol has laundry business he has with the gangster Rodriguez (Brock Peters).

The Pawnbroker is a brilliant, challenging, honest film, directed with great emotion and feeling by Lumet, who encourages uniformly distinguished performances from the whole cast and gets the most from exterior shooting on location in New York. Most of the action takes place on the west side of Park Avenue just to the north of 116th Street.

It is notable too for David Friedkin and Morton Fine’s stark and spare screenplay based on the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, Boris Kaufman’s sharp black and white cinematography, the crisp editing and the Quincy Jones jazz score.

Geraldine Fitzgerald as Marilyn Birchfield, Thelma Oliver, Marketa Kimbrel, Baruch Lumet (the director’s father) as Mendel, Juano Hernandez, Linda Geiser, Nancy R Pollock, Raymond St Jacques, John McCurry, Eusebia Cosme, Warren Finnerty, Jack Ader and Marianne Kanter are also in the cast. However, it is Steiger’s show – and this, along with In the Heat of the Night (1967), is his finest hour in the movies.

It was first American film to show a nude woman from the waist up and be granted a US Production Code Sea, leading to the abandonment of the Code five years later in favour of a ratings system.

Steiger said he based the silent scream at the end of the film on the faces in Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.

The brownstone building that was the set for the Nazerman Pawn Shop located at 1642 Park Avenue in Manhattan was replaced by a four-unit, four-storey brick apartment block built in 2010. That and the building next to it were destroyed in a gas explosion on 12 March 2014 that killed four people and injured 63.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3470

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/