Pick Up On South Street (1953) directed by Samuel Fuller is an excellent crime thriller about marginalized people in New York. It seems that Fuller drew on his experience as a crime reporter to analyze low rung criminals who populate the underbelly of society. There's a subplot involving spies and stolen documents that are meant to go to the communist, but for marginalized people like Skip McCoy who live at the edges of society, politics hold very little interest. They are trying to survive day to day. McCoy has a great line when the FBI man and the cops try to get him to cooperate by using patriotism and he replies"Are you waving a flag at me?" Skip McCoy, the pickpocket, is convincingly played by Richard Widmark and there are some great supporting players like Thelma Ritter and Jean Peters. These petty criminals have no judgments about each other and accept each other as they are. There are some great extras on the Criterion edition including the foreword by Martin Scorsese to Fuller's book A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, as well as an excerpt from the book, and essay by Luc Sante "Extra!Pickpocket Foils Doom Plot," an interview from a French TV show, and an original interview with Samuel Fuller by film critic Richard Shickel.
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