Sidney Lumet | The Pawnbroker / 1964

repetition and breakdown in the pawnbroker

by Douglas Messerli

 

Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin (screenplay, based on a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant), Sidney Lumet (director) The Pawnbroker / 1964

 

One of the most challenging films of the 1960s, certainly a movie with one of the most remarkable jazz scores ever (by Quincy Jones), is, nonetheless, nearly impossible to watch and is filled with mostly despicable characters. I saw this movie during its 1964 premiere or perhaps a few years later and remembered never wanting to watch it again, which is perhaps why it has taken all this time to reapproach this film, this time not even for its major themes, but for minor gay characters that I might easily have mentioned and closed my review. Still, it took me two full days of endurance to complete it.

     Moreover, as I have made clear, I am not interested in any film for its gay characters of subjects alone, but how they fit into the larger structure of the film, meaning that I cannot discuss a film’s gay issues without also featuring its heterosexual or even non-sexual, in this case, issues—although in The Pawnbroker there are few moments which don’t also contain some sexual content, proving my contention that no matter how much the censors attempted to hide it, we are basically sexual beings with the intellect to know how much our bodies truly mean in our life.

     I simply can’t get up the energy to replay the plot of Sidney Lumet’s “story.” Besides, something like a Gertrude Stein work, it defines its characters more in how they repeat themselves than by how they eccentrically behave. And as in Stein’s work—it seems almost surreal in describing it in this context, but Stein is actually a good fit to describe how this work functions— all “characters” are purposely reduced to type. They are what they show themselves over and over to be. Any variation is like an earthquake which shakes up the worlds of all those in the same vicinity of the basic types with whom they are surrounded.

   Stereotypes, as any gay person, any Jewish man or woman, any black individual knows are terrifyingly destructive: they delimit the fuller being the individual represents, turning him or her into a verbal construct—“faggot,” “kike,” “nigger,” (all ugly epithets used in this film)— converting real human beings into machines of negative imagery that tear at the individual’s heart.

   The important gay critic Vito Russo complained, rightfully, that the wealthy, mercenary man in control of the evil empire in which these figures live, Rodriguez (Brock Peters, yes the actor who became the victim and martyr to black prejudice only two years earlier in To Kill a Mockingbird), in being presented as a gay man—who Variety argued, mistakenly I feel, was the first actor to portray a confirmed homosexual character in an American film—simply confirmed the decades of film history as gay men being effeminate, evil, and societally objectionable.

     While I surely sympathize with Russo’s perspective, I have to ask is Rodriguez any better portrayed as a black Hispanic man, who true to both bigoted and homophobic myths has a white boyfriend. The black man Tangee (Raymond St. Jacques), a minion of Rodriguez’, may pretend with a chorus of women surrounding him at all times that he is a vital black stud, but at various moments we see him and his men perusing the pages of gay beefcake physical mags of the day.

      Various figures who haunt the pawnbroker’s shop, the literate black man just seeking an intellectual conversation with the former professor Nazerman, the former young white debating champion, and elder black women just desperate for enough money to get them through another week are all equally presented as crazed individuals, drug addicts desperate to get enough for their next fix, or deluded black housewives who believe their glass rings might be saleable for sums of money upon which they might survive. None of these figures come off any better than Rodriguez, except perhaps for the film’s most obvious stereotype, the ever-desirous, hopeful, confused young Hispanic boy, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sánchez), who isn’t bright enough to know that he is idolizing the wrong people, even if we recognize there are no other figures from who he might even attempt to learn how to survive into the future.

     Does the wronged, persecuted Jewish man Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger), the central figure of this film, survive the stereotypes put upon him any better than Rodriguez? As a concentration camp survivor, he not only disdains and ignores his dying brother, but sleeps with his wife, while ignoring the pleas for help from everyone around him, treating his foolish believer of an assistant as someone who means nothing to him, and describing all those who come to him for their survival as “scum” and “rejects.” Even the kind and gentle rapprochements offered up by the social worker, Marilyn Birchfield (Geraldine Fitzgerald), are rebuffed, she herself realizing finally that there is nothing given his isolated shell of unforgiveness she can do for him. Despite one rather profound protest against being described as a member of the mercantile Jewish class, Nazerman’s insistence to Jesus Ortiz that all that truly matters is money, presents him as the worst of the archetypical Jewish stereotypes.

      Finally, the fact that Nazerman, a man who has suffered so many moral outrages that it is nearly impossible to list or reveal them, betrays any shred of moral integrity by allowing his financially disastrous pawn shop to be used by Rodriguez as a front, who delivers up, from time to time, deposits of fairly large of sums of money into Nazerman’s safe to write them off later as tax deductions. Whatever their sufferings or good intentions, this film is filled with unlikeable, even detestable figures.

      To return to Stein, however, one must admit that to closely observe a character’s daily behavior and define him in those terms is very different from putting the yoke of general societal prejudices upon them without fully exploring them in any other manner. But then, one might argue, this is where they have each arrived in a society that no longer cares about these individuals’ humanity.

       In some respects, caught in the world of American capitalism is perhaps not much better than being asked to survive in a German Nazi concentration camp. But Nazerman, who has attempted to hide away all his feelings, can no longer perceive injustice. Only events of the past, his own suffering, still means anything to him, although he has attempted to cut off even that from his imagination.

       These characters, accordingly, are trapped in a world of repetition, now willing participants in it. If they repeat, unlike Stein’s figures they do so because they have no other choice, knowing full well that to threaten that world in even the slightest manner, would mean their undoing and the deaths of their loved ones and themselves.

       The tight ball of tangled jazz that Jones creates, and the remarkably naturalistic images of Boris Kaufman’s cinematography demonstrate that these folk may have other possibilities around them, but that they believe they can survive only through repetition, despite their occasional leap into a nostalgic moment of the past or a grab at a future they know they will perhaps never be able to reach. These are determined lives, bound to repetition the same way an army is in its dreadful march of destruction. The pawnshop is the only place left to go for a sliver of survival, an instant to daydream.

       But something has gone haywire in Nazerman’s mind. He is beginning to have flashbacks of a time just before his life was taken away from him; images of how that life was taken begin gradually to reappear, and at moments, formerly meaningless events in his repetitive life correspond in odd ways to what was taken away from him and how it was stolen. Slowly, he begins, despite having cut away most the roots of emotional response, to connect through his flashbacks the horrific world of then and the equally unsustainable world of now.

      That he first makes a real connection through the most predictable, almost bourgeoise notion of sexual morality regarding Rodriguez’s treatment of women—Nazerman has apparently been blind to the fact that the source of his income also owns the whorehouse down the street—tells us something about the former professor’s bourgeoise ideals. The connection he makes is through the Nazi abuse of women, including his own wife, and the fact that his Jesus’ girlfriend is willing to sell her own body to Nazerman in order to get enough money to prevent the young man she loves from joining up with Tangee to rob Nazerman’s safe.

      Nazerman has no comprehension about the larger picture, but his sudden link of Rodriguez to the brothel is enough to force him into some strange, rather meaningless actions, including paying large sums to needy individuals with junk while holding out two-dollar bids for those with serious objects which might be resold.

      Yet, even here he is slow in recognizing the interlinking evil of the world in which currently lives, while damning just such a world from which he’s survived. It is his slow break from repetition, accordingly, that hints at any possible alteration in his life; beginning with his decision to not pull down any of the daily calendar pages—a lame attempt to stop time—and his call to the social worker for help which she cannot provide him, Nazerman’s world begins to crack.

      But, of course, Nazerman’s gradual return to reality is not in time for any significant changes in his life. Jesus brings Tangee to rob Nazerman’s safe, but when Nazerman closes the door instead of opening it, Tangee and his men are ready to kill him, Jesus taking the bullet for his former idol.

     Jesus makes his way to the street, but still Nazerman does not act, unable to shake off the years of observing death without feeling. And the police seem only interested in quickly shuffling away the body instead of investigating inside the store how the boy might have been killed.

      When Nazerman finally goes to Jesus’ body, recognizing him as a human being for the first time and crying out to the heavens like the woman in Picasso’s painting Guernica (the image Steiger admits to having inspired him), even then, nothing truly changes. As critic Pauline Kael wrote, “…When events strip off his armor, [Nazerman] doesn’t discover a new, warm humanity, he discovers sharper suffering—just what his armor had protected him from.” He returns to his dark hole of a shop to impale his hand into the receipt spike, leaving with another painful memory without still being able to make sense of his world, past or present, presumably never to return. If he can be said to have symbolically speaking, died, it is still for naught. The lives of all the others about him return to their repetitious acts from whence there is seemingly no escape—a world made even more empty without the illusions of his pawn shop.

     There appears to be no one intelligent, powerful, or resourceful enough in the world of The Pawnbroker to stop repeating the past into a future life.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).