His young, energetic assistant Jesus (Jaime Sánchez of The Wild Bunch) talks a mile a minute and many of the shop's walk-ins, a stream of addicts, hookers, thieves, and a few lonely souls more desperate for contact than cash, try to engage Sol in the most rudimentary of conversations. But Sol is an impenetrable wall of business. He's not rude or dismissive, even when slurs are spit his way, simply terse and direct and unyielding. "I have escaped my emotions," is how he explains it to Tessie (Marketa Kimbrell), the widow of his once-closest friend. To an insistent social worker (Geraldine Fitzgerald) who keeps gently pressing him to talk, he's more forthright about his dispassion and disinterest in his customers or anyone else. "Black, white, or yellow, they are all equally scum. Rejects." After losing his wife, his children, and his parents to the Nazis and the concentration camps, Sol has lost faith in God and humanity alike.
The Pawnbroker follows a few days in the life of Sol as his protective emotional shell cracks and suppressed memories cut through in jagged shards. We never return to the suburban home he shares with his sister and her family, a place he bought but feels apart from. He spends evenings with Tessie, going through the motions of love-making with the same disengaged calm he brings to a hand of gin rummy, and his days haunting the narrow tunnels behind the wire mesh of the pawnshop cage. It's not even his business, merely a front for a Harlem mobster (Brock Peters) who launders money through the storefront while Sol simply looks the other way, signing checks and papers without raising an eyebrow or changing expression. But as the memories batter his hardened heart, the lives of others start to get under his hide and he faces his complicity in the mobster's business.
Steiger, a veteran of the Actor's Studio, has a history of big, histrionic performances, which makes Sol stand out so impressively in his career. Looking decades older than his almost 40 years, Steiger gives Sol a slow, shuffling passivity, an old man's deliberation that keeps him focused on a single task at a time. Only after completing one action does he turn to respond to a question or deal with the next customer, never with a sense of annoyance or exasperation, but neither with a smile or an invitation to engage in anything but a business transaction. Sol doesn't just hide his feelings, he is unfazed and seemingly untouched by the people who pass through his life, and Steiger's performance gives us a man who is all control and suppressed emotion. Until he isn't, and even then his emotions have to fight through the resignation that has taken over his face and entire body. The silent scream and tremors of rage and fury trying to escape in the final minutes is the most internalized performance Steiger has ever given. He was nominated for Best Actor for this role, and it's far more powerful and nuanced than anything he did in In the Heat of the Night, the film that gave him his first Oscar.
The Pawnbroker is most interesting as a product of its time and its collaborators, an intriguing meeting of artists and sensibilities. Director Sidney Lumet was a celebrated TV director with a theatrical sensibility to his early big screen work--he directed Marlon Brando in Tennessee Williams' The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962)--that gives the pawnshop scenes the feel of an off-Broadway play with its social commentary on its sleeve. Lumet fights the staginess of the script adaptation, which sends a succession of patrons through the shop as if checking off the social ills one by one, with a fluid camera that drifts through the nooks and crannies of the space, and when he succeeds it's due largely to the restrained naturalism of Steiger who inhabits the space like an aging lion resigned to his zoo cage.
It's photographed by Boris Kaufman, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront (the film that Steiger earned his first Oscar nomination, as it happens), and he gives the pawnshop set a shabby sadness. But when the film leaves the shop (or the little apartment that Tessie shares with her infirm father) for the streets, the noise and bustle of the Harlem streets energizes the screen. It's dynamic and alive, an early glimpse of the Lumet who will become one of the great chroniclers of New York City life and a very different kind of New York slum than the handsomely romanticized tenement life and street culture of On the Waterfront.
Quincy Jones scores the film with a jazzy beat that sets Sol off as a man not just out of time but outside of his own world, and the editing by Ralph Rosenblum (who cut Woody Allen's Annie Hall) disrupts the carefully subdued dramatic atmosphere with narrative jumps that blur the passage of time and startling cuts to the flashbacks that come on like assaults on the mind of Sol. The flashback scenes themselves are less effective, perhaps in part because Lumet's attempts at a realistic recreation of life in a Nazi concentration camp in a few isolated shots can't help but fail to suggest the inhumanity of the real ordeal, but also because they simply look so unconvincing next to the authenticity of his New York street scenes. Fifty years ago, when so few images of concentration camps were shown on film screens, those scenes may have carried greater dramatic impact, but after Holocaust, Schindler's List, and scores of dramatic and documentary portrayals of the Holocaust, they don't ring true as either symbolic or literal representations.
More startling to audiences at the time, I imagine, or at least more unexpected, was the nudity, unheard of in a mainstream American drama in 1964. It's startling because of its matter-of-fact presentation of sex as currency in this culture, and its trigger for a particular flashback that cuts to the heart of Sol's despair. The Pawnbroker was the first American film to show bare breasts and still get the Production Code approval.
The disc features a new digital HD master from Paramount, an excellent transfer with a sharp image and strong contrasts. There is minor speckling throughout but no damage and the image preserves the texture of the filmic source. Which is to say, the film grain is not scrubbed out but neither is it prominent except for a few scenes that were shot on the streets, likely with fast film stock and possibly shot covertly from a hidden camera. The Blu-ray looks superb. There are no supplements.
by Sean Axmaker
