Title: The Pawnbroker Year: 1964 Genre: Drama Country: USA Language: English, Spanish, German Director: Sidney Lumet Screenwriters: Morton S. Fine, David Friedkin based on the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant Music: Quincy Jones Cinematography: Boris Kaufman Editing: Ralph Rosenblum Cast: Rod Steiger Jaime Sánchez Geraldine Fitzgerald Brock Peters Thelma Oliver Marketa Kimbrell Baruch Lumet Raymond St. Jacques Charles Dierkop Eusebia Cosme Warren Finnerty Juano Hernández Linda Geiser Reni Santoni Rating: 8.2/10
A Holocaust survivor opens a pawn shop in the Eastern Harlem slum, our titular pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Steiger) takes a young Puerto Rican Jesus Ortiz (Sánchez) as his shop assistant, and grudgingly teaches the latter the nuts and bolts of this line of business as Jesus aspires to open his own shop, but friendship cannot be built with Jesus's unilateral effort. Sol is emotionally shut in the aftermath to the horror and loss during his WWII days, he is the quintessential Jewish survivor who has to live with a survivor’s guilt and regards the world with a gelid gaze of contempt, coarsened beyond recognition, he loathes humanity and his dormant empathy can only be resurrected when something dramatic shatters his core. Unfortunately, it is at the expense of an ethnic character whose belatedly conscience is wrought as the stereotyped game-changer. Made in 1964, based on Edward Lewis Wallant’s eponymous novel, Lumet's picture is a vanguard in American cinema to dramatize the post-traumatic impact of Holocaust. On the technical level, Boris Kaufman’s black-and-white cinematography extraordinarily captures a grittily incarcerated mise en scène that manifests how he can operate on a dime without losing his acumen of composition and expression. Caged and trapped in his shop, Sol appears as if he has never left he concentration camp. Quincy Jones’s gutbucket soundtrack is another manna from heaven, so immersed in the sink area’s agitated, hustling-and-bustling energy and desperation, its soundscape suggests an infernal, rambunctious place where breeds a mix-bag of vice and cruelty, poverty and commiseration (appearing only in two scenes, Juano Hernández steals the limelight with his electrifying, soul-reaching entreatment as an addle-pasted, hard-up client of the shop). As an echt character study, Steiger’s cracking impersonation of Sol is the real deal. Wearing an impassive, case-hardened carapace reflecting a sheer disinterestedness of the world at large, Sol is an insensate walking dead whose most eloquent speeches sheds a veridical light of the inalienable bond between Jewishness and monetary pursuit. Known for his explosive effusion, Steiger really delivers his career-best performance by holding Sol’s cynical front upfront, even under physical duress, he never explodes, only implodes, like when browbeaten by the local racketeer Rodriguez (a bodacious Peters who swaggers and menaces like nobody’s business), his plea for perdition is earnest to a fare-thee-well. Maturing into a working character actress, an over-the-hill Geraldine Fitzgerald offsets Steiger’s high voltage of defensive coldness with a chink of sensibility as the social worker Marilyn Birchfield, whose scenes give vibes of hopefulness but Fitzgerald also registers adequate dubiety to convey that Marilyn is not one’s usual savior angel in the form of feminine tenderness, she is rational enough to know the boundary and her own limits, a fairly complicated character fleshes out with calibrated deliberation and understatement. From emphasized slo-mo idyll, French New Wave-influenced vim and vigor, to a stage-bound contradiction and confrontation, THE PAWNBROKER sees Lumet in his most proficient and aesthetically expressive days, and its crackerjack luster and emotional repercussions remain as robust as ever. referential entries: Lumet’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962, 7.9/10); Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959, 8.1/10).
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