Trailer
Plot summary
Skip McCoy, a pickpocket just out of jail, works a crowded New York subway car and comes away with Candy's wallet. Inside is microfilm of classified government material that Candy had promised to deliver for her ex-boyfriend Joey. Government agent Zara, who has been watching Candy in the hope of reaching the head of a Communist spy ring, asks police captain Dan Tiger to name the thief. Informant Moe Williams sells the name. Zara confronts Skip, who denies everything. Joey talks a reluctant Candy into hunting the thief down herself, and her search brings her to Moe. Skip, meanwhile, works out what his haul is worth and sets his price at $25,000.
Cast
- Frank Kumagaias Lum
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Pickup on South Street (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the female lead, Samuel Fuller turned down studio favorites Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner, who looked too glamorous, Betty Grable, who wanted a dance number written in, and initially Jean Peters, whom he disliked in Captain from Castile.
- When Betty Grable insisted on being in the film and threatened to cause problems, Fuller threatened to walk off the film, and Jean Peters got the role instead.
- In August 1952 the Production Code rejected the script for "excessive brutality and sadistic beatings, of both men and women"; even after a revised script was accepted, the studio had to shoot multiple takes of a scene where Jean Peters and Richard Kiley frisked each other for loot as too risqué.
- FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told Fuller and Zanuck at lunch that he detested their work, objecting to Richard Widmark's unpatriotic line "Are you waving the flag at me?"; Zanuck backed Fuller but stripped FBI references from the film's advertising.
- The French dubbed release cut every reference to spies and microfilm and was retitled Le Port de la Drogue; 20th Century-Fox's managers thought communist spies too controversial in a France where the Communist Party was an influential and legitimate part of public life.
- Fuller researched the film with Detective Dan Campion of the New York Police Department, on the pickpocket squad since 1929, and based the police detective "Tiger" on Campion, who had been suspended without salary for six months for manhandling a suspect.
