“I’m not particularly concerned with the future."
Director, Sidney Lumet, the consummate live television director of the 1950’s ("The Alcoa Hour", "You Are There", "Kraft Theatre", etc.) enjoyed an incredible feature film debut (12 Angry Men, 1957) and was coming into his creative stride with Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962). Then he made the first really break through movie of the 1960’s, The Pawnbroker. Simply put it made everything that came after it in American Cinema possible. Lumet continued his streak and made three minor classic Fail-Safe (1964), The Hill (1965) and The Deadly Affair (1966) following The Pawnbroker. He didn’t reach these creative heights again until Dog Day Afternoon (1975). And hasn’t since.
With The Pawnbroker Lumet made his best film and exposed American audiences to techniques from the French new wave (with the fast inter-cutting of scenes, both backward and forward in time), and the first nudity (albeit from the waist-up) in a film rated by the MPAA. American audiences had not seen anything like it. As a movie it tapped into our changing society with all of its warts and blemishes and dangerous elements.
Most American movies of the day reinforced the idea of how people saw themselves or escapist fare. The big money makers of the year were Mary Poppins, Goldfinger and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. But with The Pawnbroker the viewer experienced their darkest fears and failings, a new and uncomfortable experience.
I first became aware of The Pawnbroker from my mother. She had seen it during a movie night out with the girls at the Fox Redlands. She came away enthralled, amazed, shocked and frankly impressed with what she had seen on the screen. And she could not stop talking about it. It wasn’t until seeing it at the Fox Venice while a student at UCLA that I finally saw the movie.
Despite the many accolades The Pawnbroker received - the New York Film Critics award for Best Film and Director, the Golden Globe for Best Actor, the Silver Bear (Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival), among others - it only garnered one Oscar® nomination - for Best Actor. And much to Steiger's surprise he didn’t win. I heard him say in an interview that runs as a short on TCM from time to time, how he shifted in his seat at the ceremony an nearly ran up to the stage before he realized he hadn’t won. For the record the winner was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.
Rod Steiger, one of the greatest to come out the school of “method acting”, got his stripes in live television dramas with his major theatrical break playing opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954), earning an Oscar nomination for the trouble. He followed it with the neo-noir The Big Knife (1955) and then played Al Capone . He even made a musical Oklahoma and he was part of Darryl F. Zanuck’s star studded (albeit second tier player) The Longest Day (1962). But in the main Rod Steiger had been sidelined for over a decade in Hollywood.
The Pawnbroker was the role that reignited his career (back to the level coming out of his Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actor in On the Waterfront, 1954). Despite its unsuccessful Oscar nomination The Pawnbroker earned him international critical acclaim and launched his career as an A-list actor in major films (Doctor Zhivago and The Loved One). And the following year he did win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1967’s Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night.
Rod Steiger was barely forty when he played Sol Nazerman. But he immersed himself so deeply in the character that it's hard to believe he's not a sixty-year-old man. Sol is a holocaust survivor living on Long Island with his sister’s family. She is interested in advancing her husband’s civil service career as a teacher by making a family trip to Europe where they could see the old cities and reconnect with the charm and ways of the old-world. She has a nostalgia for the “the old country” of her youth saying, “You can almost smell the difference …” trailing off before Sol makes his nonchalant response, “It’s something of a stink, if I remember.”
Sol’s time is primarily occupied with his remembrance of the 25th anniversary of seeing his family degraded and slaughtered by the Nazi’s in a concentration camp. If it didn’t sound so cruel one might almost call it nostalgia after getting to know Sol better and his tendency toward masochism. Now Sol is completely detached from the rest of the world; he has cut himself off from human emotion and feels only shame and the guilt of a wrongful survivor, as he sleepwalks through life.
Steiger summed up his character like this, "I explained that this solitary Jew could not rise to heights of emotion; he had been hammered by life and by people. The faith he had to find was in other people, because God had betrayed him." (From Rod Steiger: Memoirs of a Friendship by Tom Hutchinson).
Upon meeting a community organizer (of the day) Sol tries to rebuff her by saying, “Sell your sorrow someplace else Mrs. Burchfield.”
While Sol is confined into spending a lunch with the social worker he announces with conviction, “You have made the afternoon very tedious with your constant search for an answer. And one more thing: please, stay out of my life.” This is Sol’s mantra.
At one point in the pawnshop he apprises a young woman’s engagement ring as being glass to her complete disappointment, this is inter-cut with a flashback of the concentration camp where the prisoners are made to raise their hands to allow the soldiers access to their rings and jewelry.
The scenes in the concentration camps production values are too high. The choice at first seems like rubbing one’s nose in the Nazi horror, but on reflection it might have been made to show-off the improved film making from a production values POV in the mid-1960. It would have been more powerful had Lumet used a documentary technique for those portions of his film.
The only human connection Sol seems to have is his assistant in the pawnshop, Jesus Ortiz, whom he tries to “teach the business.” But even this pedagogic impulse is ephemeral and he often loses patience with his pupil.
Early on Jesus asks, “Say, how come you people come to business so naturally?”
Sol answers, “You people? Oh, let's see. Yeah. I see. I see, you... you want to learn the secret of our success, is that right? All right I'll teach you. First of all you start off with a period of several thousand years, during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. Oh my friend you have no land to call your own, to grow food on or to hunt. You have nothing. You're never in one place long enough to have a geography or an army or a land myth. All you have is a little brain. A little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are special, even in poverty. But this little brain, that's the real key you see. With this little brain you go out and you buy a piece of cloth and you cut that cloth in two and you go and sell it for a penny more than you paid for it. Then you run right out and buy another piece of cloth, cut it into three pieces and sell it for three pennies profit. But, my friend, during that time you must never succumb to buying an extra piece of bread for the table or a toy for a child, no. You must immediately run out and get yourself a still larger piece cloth and so you repeat this process over and over and suddenly you discover something. You have no longer any desire, any temptation to dig into the Earth to grow food or to gaze at a limitless land and call it your own, no, no. You just go on and on and on repeating this process over the centuries over and over and suddenly you make a grand discovery. You have a mercantile heritage! You are a merchant. You are known as a usurer, a man with secret resources, a witch, a pawnbroker, a sheenie, and a kike!”
The Pawnbroker is an amazing movie. It broke new ground in its day and is just as fresh and engaging today. The performances that seem effortless and feel uncomfortably real, are at times it’s hard to watch, but you can’t look away.
