Last night’s film noir on Netflix Disk: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953), written and directed by Sam Fuller, starring Richard Widmark, Thelma Ritter, and Jean Peters.

And for some time you can be forgiven for thinking you’re watching something first-rate.

Widmark is a low-level subway pickpocket who rifles through the purse of tough dame Peters, starting a citywide search for the microfilm she was delivering, which is wanted by the commies. The great Thelma Ritter is a police snitch whose grandest ambition in life is not being buried in an unmarked grave. Widmark is terrific. Peters is terrific. Ritter is beyond terrific. The hardboiled dialogue is terrific. The black and white cinematography is absolutely spectacular, right down to a climactic fistfight in a subway tunnel, and if you love nothing else you will love the waterfront bait shack where Widmark’s character lives, an open-air hellhole that cannot provide much in the way of shelter, and that he nevertheless rules like a penthouse. The movie deserved an Oscar just for that set. Sooner or later, though, you will realize that the story itself is Just Plain Stupid. Forget the actions of the cops, which are dumb as hell. When Peters comes looking for the microfilm, Widmark knocks her unconscious with a punch, revives her with a face-full of beer, and then during the negotiation that follows starts groping her face like it’s a grapefruit and he’s trying to determine its freshness, something she has absolutely no problem with even though he’s robbed her and knocked her out in the same day. The circumstances render it not a love scene but an outright molestation. Twenty minutes of screen time later, less than a day of story later, she’s madly in love with him, and he with her — though he doesn’t treat her any better. It’s not a movie for the age of #MeToo, and when I said that her character doesn’t make a whit of sense, Judi aptly noted, “She was written by a man.”

At the end, Widmark and Peters head off for a fine ’50s happy ending, which kind of ignores that, among other things, he’s a penniless three-time loser who lives in a shack by the river. They face a boundless future together.

You want to say, “That’s not the way it works. That’s not the way any of this works.”

Individual scenes are terrific; the story makes no sense whatsoever.

Tags: Jean Peters, Movies, Pickup on South Street, Richard Widmark, Sam Fuller, Thelma Ritter | Category Movies, Mystery