The Pawnbroker (1964) on Netflix
Sol Nazerman, a professor who survived the Nazi camps, runs a pawnshop in East Harlem. His assistant Jesus Ortiz and a social worker, Marilyn Birchfield, want to get close to him.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.6/1011,824 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Nazi Germany, Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, was sent to a concentration camp with his family. Twenty-five years later he runs a pawnshop in East Harlem and lives on Long Island with his sister-in-law, also a survivor, and her husband. Memories of the camp have numbed him: he shows no emotion, calls his desperate customers scum, and gives them far less than their goods are worth. Jesus Ortiz, the young Puerto Rican who assists him, calls him teacher and wants his friendship. Marilyn Birchfield, a neighborhood social worker, wants to know him better. The shop also serves as a front for Rodriguez, a racketeer.
Cast
- Nancy R. Pollockas Bertha
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Pawnbroker (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Pawnbroker was the first film produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor.
- Sidney Lumet took over directing after Arthur Hiller was fired, preferred James Mason for the lead role of Sol Nazerman, and knew the comedian Groucho Marx was among those who wanted the part.
- The MPAA rejected the bare-breast scenes as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful", but producer Ely Landau had Allied Artists release the film without the Production Code seal and New York censors licensed it without the demanded cuts; the MPAA then granted a 6-3 exception vote.
- The nudity earned a condemned "C" rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency, which wanted a halt to nudity in American films, while the National Council of Churches gave the film an award for best picture of the year.
- Rod Steiger said the silent anguish he played in the film's last minutes was borrowed from the skyward cry of the suffering woman at the right of Pablo Picasso's 1937 painting Guernica.
- Quincy Jones wrote "Soul Bossa Nova" for a nightclub scene in The Pawnbroker, and it later became the main theme of the Austin Powers film series.
- The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval, and author Mark Harris called the MPAA's action the first of a series of injuries to the Code that proved fatal within three years.
- The Pawnbroker has been described as the first stubbornly "Jewish" film about the Holocaust and as the foundation for the 1978 miniseries Holocaust and the 1993 film Schindler's List.
