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The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965) +
Lumet's powerful treatise on how memory keeps alive the Holocaust within the dead soul of pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger in one of cinema's greatest performances) even while he's living in the heart of Harlem where almost all the people are bought and sold in the marketplace by pimps and gangsters in a universe not that different from a concentration camp. Nazerman believes he's above all the ugliness he surrounds himself with because he just doesn't care, yet things at work and outside of it keep bringing him back to the past where he lost his beautiful wife and two children during WWII. He takes on an apprentice (the wonderful Jaime Sanchez) and tries to teach him how to learn a career but Nazerman's ghosts rear their heads and cause him to turn on the young man with horrible, yet perhaps, soul-saving results. The supporting cast is highly-unusual and terrific (Brock Peters, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thelma Oliver, Reni Santoni, Raymond St. Jacques, Baruch Lumet, Warren Finnerty, and the mind-blowing Juano Hernandez). The Pawnbroker is a truly unique film which is still powerful today, not only on a human level but as an American piece of cinema which borrows some editing techniques from Alain Resnais and makes them connect with the viewer in an incredibly visceral way, almost as a precursor to the brilliant editing found four years later in Midnight Cowboy.
Lumet's powerful treatise on how memory keeps alive the Holocaust within the dead soul of pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger in one of cinema's greatest performances) even while he's living in the heart of Harlem where almost all the people are bought and sold in the marketplace by pimps and gangsters in a universe not that different from a concentration camp. Nazerman believes he's above all the ugliness he surrounds himself with because he just doesn't care, yet things at work and outside of it keep bringing him back to the past where he lost his beautiful wife and two children during WWII. He takes on an apprentice (the wonderful Jaime Sanchez) and tries to teach him how to learn a career but Nazerman's ghosts rear their heads and cause him to turn on the young man with horrible, yet perhaps, soul-saving results. The supporting cast is highly-unusual and terrific (Brock Peters, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thelma Oliver, Reni Santoni, Raymond St. Jacques, Baruch Lumet, Warren Finnerty, and the mind-blowing Juano Hernandez). The Pawnbroker is a truly unique film which is still powerful today, not only on a human level but as an American piece of cinema which borrows some editing techniques from Alain Resnais and makes them connect with the viewer in an incredibly visceral way, almost as a precursor to the brilliant editing found four years later in Midnight Cowboy.