Pickup on South Street

Crime reporter-turned-pulp impresario Samuel Fuller wrote and directed this gleefully amoral Cold War thriller, in which Richard Widmark’s flagrantly unpatriotic pickpocket becomes embroiled in a communist plot to steal government secrets. Bursting with sassy dames, bullish cops, hard-nosed Feds and slippery spies, this almost Hitchcockian tale, made during the redbaiting McCarthy era, managed to upset everyone from the US censors to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for its unapologetic violence and lack of a flagwaving hero, but remains to this day one of Fuller’s most compelling noirs. The subversive Hollywood auteur of all time earned the adoration from French New Wave directors, culminating into Godard giving him a cameo in his 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. 

Venice Film Festival: Bronze Lion

7/5 (Sun): Film talk with Joyce Yang