- Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street features one of the more memorable assortments of anti-heroes ever to inhabit the dark alleyways of film noir. Let's start with the protagonist, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), a sneering three-time loser of a pickpocket whose only goal in life is to take down one big score. Then there's Candy (Jean Peters), a sweetheart stuck running errands for a creep named Joey (Richard Kiley) in an attempt to escape her unseemly past. Perhaps the most memorable character is Moe (Thelma Ritter), a world-weary tie peddler who gladly sells out her grifter pals to save up money for her own funeral. Even the police captain, the aptly named Tiger (Murvyn Vye), would rather wipe that smirk off McCoy's face than ensure that justice is served.
- Tying together the fates of these strange characters is a simple theft that takes place near the film's start when McCoy slyly pinches a small package from Candy's purse. It turns out that the package contains some top-secret microfilm that the unwitting Candy was smuggling to Joey's mysterious friends, and I suppose it's just McCoy's bad luck that those friends were communists who, in turn, were being tracked by the Feds. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't bad luck at all. Once Moe snitches on McCoy to both the cops and Candy (after they buy a few ties, of course), the two groups practically trip over themselves offering inducements for McCoy's cooperation. But McCoy's a little too smart to accept the first few offers. In fact, McCoy may be a little too smart for his, or anyone else's, own good.
- While the plot of Pickup on South Street is nothing that can't be summarized as "Crooks vs. Cops vs. Commies," the film itself is something else entirely. The term "hard-boiled" doesn't really begin to describe this harsh world in which a leering, lying crook like McCoy could transform into an avenging hero or a stingy sad-sack like Moe could finally encounter an organization so deplorable that even she wouldn't deal with them. The dimly-lit scenery, too, including McCoy's terrifically seedy shack on the pier and Moe's cramped upstairs apartment, looks as wonderfully worn-down as the characters, while the fight scenes are particularly brutal by mid-1950's standards. If there's an intended moral to this story, it's probably encompassed by Moe's observation that everybody's "gotta draw the line somewhere," but maybe the real message is that morality can crop up where you'd least expect it.
