The Pawnbroker (1964) DVD9 - Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fritzgerald

2014.08.15


The Pawnbroker (1964) DVD9 - Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fritzgerald [DDR]

The Pawnbroker is a 1964 drama film, directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. It was adapted by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.

The film was the first American movie to deal with the Jewish holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor. It earned international acclaim for Steiger, launching his career as an A-list actor, and was among the first American movies to feature nudity during the Production Code and was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. Although it was publicly announced to be a special exception, the controversy proved to be first of similar major challenges to the Code that ultimately led to its abandonment.

In 2008, The Pawnbroker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

CAST:-
Rod Steiger - Sol Nazerman
Geraldine Fitzgerald - Marilyn Birchfield
Brock Peters - Rodriguez
Jaime Sánchez - Jesus Ortiz
Thelma Oliver - Ortiz's girl
Marketa Kimbrell - Tessie
Baruch Lumet - Mendel
Juano Hernández - Mr. Smith
Linda Geiser - Ruth Nazerman
Nancy R. Pollock - Bertha
Raymond St. Jacques - Tangee
Morgan Freeman - Man on Street (uncredited)

Directed by Sidney Lumet
Produced by Philip Langner, Roger Lewis
Music by Quincy Jones
Running time 116 minutes

MOVIE PLOT:-
With the rise of Hitler, Sol Nazerman (Steiger), a German-Jewish university professor, was dragged to a concentration camp along with his family. He saw his two children die (one while riding in a cattle car) and his wife raped by Nazi officers in the camp. Now he operates a pawnshop in East Harlem, while living in an anonymous Bronx high-rise apartment. Numbed by his experiences, he has worked hard not to experience emotions. Nazerman is bitter and alienated, viewing the people around him as "rejects, scum." He is shown interacting cynically as he bargains with the many desperate characters pawning their goods.

Nazerman is idolized by a young Puerto Rican, Jesus Ortiz (Sánchez), who works for Nazerman as his shop assistant, but the youth's friendship is rebuffed, as are the overtures of Marilyn Birchfield (Fitzgerald), a neighborhood social worker.

Nazerman learns that Rodriguez (Peters), a racketeer who uses the pawnshop as a front, makes his money through prostitution. Nazerman recalls his wife's degradation and wants no part of it. This results in a clash with Rodriguez, who threatens to kill Nazerman. Meanwhile Ortiz, his feelings hurt when Nazerman says that Ortiz means nothing to him, spitefully arranges for the pawnshop to be robbed by a neighborhood gang. During the robbery, Nazerman refuses to hand over his money. Ortiz takes the gang member's bullet intended for Nazerman and dies in Nazerman's arms in the street.

CAST NOTES:-
Steiger became involved in the film in 1962, a year after the Wallant novel was published, and was involved in an early reworking of the script. He received $50,000 for his performance, far lower than his usual rate, because he trusted Lumet, with whom he had worked on television in the series You Are There.

Lumet, who took over the film after Arthur Hiller was fired, initially had misgivings about Steiger being cast in the lead role. He felt that Steiger "was a rather tasteless actor — awfully talented, but completely tasteless in his choices." Lumet preferred James Mason for the role, and comic Groucho Marx was among the actors who had wanted to play Nazerman. However, Steiger pleasantly surprised Lumet when he agreed with him during rehearsals on the repression of the character's feelings. Lumet felt that ultimately Steiger "worked out fine."

In a 1999 televised interview, actor Rod Steiger revealed an inspiration he took from an unlikely source of art. Over a quarter of a century after artist Pablo Picasso's 1937 Guernica, the masterpiece inspired emotional artistic depth again when, in 1964, Steiger borrowed the silent anguish of the skyward cry of the suffering male subject, seen at the right of the canvas. The scene in the film was in the last minutes of The Pawnbroker.
Major themes

The Pawnbroker tells the story of a man whose spiritual "death" in the concentration camps causes him to bury himself in the most dismal location that he can find: a slum in upper Manhattan. Lumet told the New York Times in an interview during the filming that, "The irony of the film is that he finds more life here than anywhere. It's outside Harlem, in housing projects, office buildings, even the Long Island suburbs, everywhere we show on the screen — that everything is conformist, sterile, dead."

The film was influenced by the French New Wave films, through its use of flashbacks to reveal Nazerman's backstory. It bore similarities to two films of Alain Resnais: Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and Night and Fog (1955). But a recent commentator observed that the film "is uniquely American, with its harsh, unforgiving depiction of New York City, all of it brought to vivid life by Boris Kaufman's black and white cinematography and a dynamic cast highlighted by Rod Steiger's searing portrayal of the title role."

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Sol Nazerman "is very much a person of today — a survivor of Nazi persecution who has become detached and remote in the modern world — he casts, as it were, the somber shadow of the legendary, ageless Wandering Jew. That is the mythical Judean who taunted Jesus on the way to Calvary and was condemned to roam the world a lonely outcast until Jesus should come again."



TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS:-
Video Codec: MPEG-2
Video Bitrate: 4514 kbps
Video Resolution: 720x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1
Frames Per Second: 23.976
Audio Codec: AC3
Audio Bitrate: 448kb/s CBR 48000 Hz
Audio Streams: 6
Audio Languages: English
RunTime: 116 mins
Subtitles: NONE
Ripped by: Trinidad [DDR]
Duration: 116 mins