by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
CAST: Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86%
PLOT: A Jewish pawnbroker, victim of Nazi persecution, loses all faith in his fellow man until he realizes too late the tragedy of his actions.
One of my favorite books about movies is Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, in which the legendary director explains in detail the moviemaking process from script selection through the preview screening and ancillary rights distribution. He uses, of course, the movies from his own career as examples, from 12 Angry Men through Guilty as Sin (the book was first published in 1995). One of the films he brings up many times is one I had not heard of when I picked up the book for the first time: The Pawnbroker, from 1964, starring Rod Steiger. After reading the book many times, I found myself obsessed with finding and watching this, to me, unknown film.
For a long time, it remained a kind of missing link in Lumet’s filmography. It wasn’t available on home video, and it wasn’t streaming anywhere. In 2008, it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, and the New York Times calls it one of the 1,000 best films ever made. Lumet is one of my favorite directors. I was desperate to see this movie.
Some time ago, I finally found a (relatively) cheap copy on Blu Ray, and I sat down and pushed PLAY with anticipation. I mention all of this because I believe I inadvertently made myself a victim of my expectations. The film that unfolded was not quite as hard-hitting as I had hoped, even though the story is deep and dark. Perhaps I am too jaded as a modern filmgoer, with so many other Holocaust-related films under my belt, to fully appreciate this intensely acted character study of a man in crisis. I can see myself changing my opinion of this movie at some point in the future, maybe when I’m a little older. For now, in my opinion, The Pawnbroker is a well-crafted film, thoughtfully written, but a little too heavy-handed for its own good.
Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is the aging Jewish owner of a pawn shop in New York City…I’m not familiar with the specific neighborhood, but I wanna say somewhere in the Bronx, or maybe Queens. He and his Puerto Rican employee, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sánchez), run the shop with maximum efficiency and minimal customer interaction. (Hey, look at that, a guy named Jesus with a Jewish boss, I only just now got that…) Sol is not interested in the backstories of these desperate folks who bring in radios and candlesticks and school trophies in exchange for a couple of bucks each. “Here’s your money, get out.” Jesus, on the other hand, is a bundle of energy who sincerely wants to learn the trade and earn some money so he can get out of the 2-room apartment he shares with his mother. Sol tolerates Jesus the same way a parent tolerates a hyperactive child.
Lumet and his production designer, Richard Sylbert, are very careful to show Sol’s store as nothing but a series of cages and bars. We learn the reason for this as we see a series of flashbacks from Sol’s past: he was a Holocaust survivor. (There’s a brilliant scene where Jesus asks Sol what those numbers on his arm are. “Is that a secret society or something? What do I do to join?” Sol’s one-line answer is one of the best things in the script, followed later in the film by a monologue about clinging to a “bearded legend” that showcases Steiger’s talent to the nth degree, but feels a tad over-dramatic.)
Sol’s tragic past is the fuel that runs the engine of the film because it’s made him the man he is today: someone who doesn’t believe in anything anymore, not God, science, art, anything at all…except for one thing: money. “Next to the speed of light, which Einstein says is the only absolute in the universe, second only to that, I rank money!” While this sentiment seems as if it would feed into a racist stereotype, Sol never overtly occupies that space. He is just a man who has seen too much and wants nothing except to get by.
There are suggestions that he is experiencing survivor’s guilt. In his shop is a tear-a-day calendar showing September 29th. When Jesus wants to rip it for the next day, Sol stops him. Later, someone asks him if it’s an anniversary of something. He says it is: “The day I didn’t die.” That was the day he was powerless to stop a tragedy, and he should have died, but didn’t. But he doesn’t frame it as a dramatic act. I found that a marvelously layered response. (There is another “suggestion” of his guilt in a monologue by a much older man, but that’s another one of the movie’s heavy-handed moments, so the less said about that, the better.)
There is also a suggestion that Sol is accepting payoffs from a local slum lord to launder money through his pawn shop. A man comes by, says he needs money to repaint the building, Sol writes the man a check for $5,000, and the man gives him $5,000 in cash. Why does Sol willingly acquiesce to this process of aiding and abetting a criminal? I think it’s because he has learned to survive no matter the cost. In one of his increasingly disturbing flashbacks to his days in the Nazi concentration camp, we watch as a man frantically attempts to scale a fence. There’s no real hope of escape, but he tries anyway. The guards don’t shoot him, but watch almost in bemusement. One of them finally calls for another guard with a German shepherd. And just yards away, Sol and other prisoners watch helplessly as the man is torn apart. (Presumably, anyway.)
I haven’t even mentioned the social worker who comes by one day to solicit donations for a youth center, the local thugs (former friends of Jesus) who reek of foreshadowing, the slum lord himself (Brock Peters, playing totally against type as an amoral crook), or Jesus’s hooker girlfriend who knows how desperate Jesus is to get some money of his own and boldly offers her body to Sol in exchange for some cash. Her act of desperation (featuring the first waist-up female nudity in a post-Code Hollywood film) only triggers more flashbacks for poor Sol. [HA! Jesus has a girlfriend who’s a prostitute…I only just got that one, too…]
By the end of the movie, events conspire that trigger even more feelings of guilt for Sol so that the film ends with him wandering out of his store and into the inner-city jungle with his hands bloody and his head bowed. Has he realized the error of his ways, of his tendency to reject any kind of human connection? Certainly his last act seems to demonstrate his remorse, but…has he really changed? It’s said that, to figure out what a movie is about, look at how the main character changes from beginning to end. Maybe I’m naïve, maybe I’ve been lucky enough in my life not to have experienced anything remotely resembling the tragedy of Sol’s life, but I felt nothing except mild shock at the end of The Pawnbroker, not because of any realizations about Sol’s character, but because of the events of the plot. I don’t think that means the same thing as character development. So, ultimately, I couldn’t really say what this movie is about beyond the ability of a fine director and a courageous actor to show the details of a man wounded so grievously in his past that he can barely tolerate mankind in the present. Yes, we see the error of his ways…but does he? You tell me.