BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: stoolies, whores and thieves.

OH, what a great opening. Samuel Fuller kickstarts what may possibly be one of his best films with an opening of such brilliance, you could be forgiven for ignoring the rest of the film. Told mainly in close-ups, Fuller thrusts the viewer immediately into the narrative, the characters and the relationship. A gorgeous young woman (Jean Peters) is dolled up, standing in a crowded subway, holding her bag closely. She’s watched by two men in suits – are they checking her out or is there something more happening? A gaunt blonde man (played by Richard Widmark, arguably never better) pulls up to her, and carefully using his newspaper as a shield, opens her bag and steals her purse. The two men notice something happening but cannot react in time to stop the blonde man leaving. The woman walks off unawares. It’s an electric opening – it’s Bresson’s close-ups in Pickpocket on steroids – and totally kickstarts the film. It’s only later on that we realise that Widmark’s thief (Skip) has pickpocketed something more than just a few dollars.

Pickup on South Street was made at the time of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States, and had originally been dismissed as fitting into a genre that represented the worst of that period’s excesses. And to be sure, there are lines in the film that would appear straight out of a Patriot’s Handbook as written by Senator McCarthy. However, Fuller is much too smart to allow this to represent a one-sided view – his film looks at the subtle difference between ethics and morality, the self-interested actions of the characters and the gloomy world in which the characters live. Politics doesn’t mean a thing to these people. Fuller successfully evokes a New York underworld, of stoolies, whores and thieves, rundown buildings, crowded streets and inconsequential policemen. Fuller’s not glamourising the anti-Communist purges, he’s more interested in why people act the way they do.

And as in all Fuller films, there are trademark set-pieces that seem to come out of nowhere. Some of the fighting scenes are remarkably realistic (especially a brilliant one-shot chase in Joey’s apartment), and there are some wonderful moments of suspense, such as the elevator hideout, or the final subway scene. There’s also the typical outrageous narrative details that Fuller seems to delight in – just moments and plot points that if you thought too much about, you’d find them laughable. And there’s the typical Fullerian unsettling tactics, this time assisted immeasurably by Joe McDonald’s brilliant camerawork. Pickup on South Street is Fuller at his most enigmatic, and ultimately, Fuller near his best.