The Pawnbroker

It is not an exaggeration to state that 1964's THE PAWNBROKER is one of the most somber, despairing features I've seen.  I've avoided the word "depressing", but it certainly is that as well. This is a relentlessly grim film, one in which rays of sunlight never quite break through.  Or, but for a moment.  Sunshine as defined as hope for the human experience.  For love, the arts, science, politics.  Sol Nazerman lists each of those as things he does not care about.  He does care about money, believing it is everything.  He runs a dingy pawn shop in NYC, wearily eyeing the trinkets a series of desperate characters try to sell/pawn.  He's stingy with assignments of value for each item, unfeeling as his teary eyed customers saunter back out onto the mean streets of Harlem.

Sol is a deeply unhappy and troubled man, unable to show affection or even the most basic decency to those around him.  He's only able to offer subsidization for his sister's family, and staid companionship for his deceased friend's wife and her ill father.   He coldly rejects the friendship of a social worker, and barely tolerates his employee, an eager young man named Ortiz, who wants to learn the trade.  Sol will even tell Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez) that he means absolutely nothing to him.  He views everyone - white, black, Jewish, Catholic....as "scum".

The opening frames tell us why.  Sol is a Holocaust survivor, witness to the capture and deaths (and rape) of his loved ones.  It was twenty five years earlier, but the memories come flashing, triggered by everyday occurrences.  As THE PAWNBROKER moves forward, the memories get stronger, more vivid, until Sol finally breaks down.  But will he have a deliverance? Accept love?  Will he find his soul, and the God in which he doesn't believe? Or will the terrible realities of contemporary life, with its corruption and debauchery, possibly even funding his own livelihood, be the final nail?

Rod Steiger delivers a marvelous, heartbreaking performance as Sol.  His quiet seething and resignation occasionally gives way to anger, though he never overplays.  It is just right.  His soul destroyed, Sol is nonetheless not drawn in Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin's script as a one dimensional monster.  There are indications of humanity, of a willingness to reach out.  Perhaps the most gutting moment involves that social worker, Ms. Birchfield (Geraldine Fitzgerald) reaching out a literal hand of kindness to Sol.  It is not returned.

Sidney Lumet directs masterfully.  Some early scenes feel a bit theatrical, but otherwise THE PAWNBROKER takes its claustrophobic sets (including that pawn shop and its highly symbolic cage) and makes them as cinematic as humanly possible.  Then Lumet cuts across city streets and subways with an electricity of the time period and place that still feels so impossibly lonely and sad.  It's as if the city is a personification of Sol's torment.  That's an easy analysis, and so vivid.

The holocaust images are stark and haunting, as they should be. Usually brief.  This was the first Hollywood film to really deal with the subject.  Lumet and editor Ralph Rosenblum also take a bid from French New Wave artists with super quick cuts of the horror as it invades Sol's mind.  Highly effective.

My only complaint: Quincy Jones' dynamic score.  It's peppy, then dissonant, occasionally melancholy.  On its own, it's outstanding.  How could it not be with participation by the likes of Freddie Hubbard, Toots Thielemans, Tony Williams, and Elvin Jones? But accompanying this movie, it's frequently distracting and inappropriate.  I get that Lumet wanted the film to be uncomfortable and harsh, but a minimal (or absent) score would've been so much more effective.