Word: lumet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sidney Lumet, who directed The Pawnbroker, makes movies of lower-class people moving in atmospheres of filth and crime but still retaining their humanity. Such is the case of Nazemann, a pawnbroker in Spanish Harlem who operates as a fence for a Negro pimp...
...Lumet's parallel between Harlem and the concentration camp creates the impact of the film. Nazemann is constantly seen behind the pawnbroker's cage dealing with his customers as through the prison fence. The cage also symbolizes his isolation, emphasized by Lumet's close-up shots of Nazemann locking himself in and out. Inside the cage he is the Nazi officer responding to human misery with utter callousness, the Jew playing persecutor. But when a destitute woman enters to sell her wedding ring, he cannot avoid his own memories, shown as flashbacks, of German soldiers tearing gold rings from...
Finally he pays a dawnbreak visit to the apartment of a middle-aged social worker who has befriended him and who lives in one of those indescribably ugly housing projects. Lumet has the two play out an extremely dramatic scene on her balcony, from which several of her building's hideous cousins are in full view. Her sympathy and his despair confer humanity on that sterile setting seen in the early morning light...
...creating his modern tragedy, Director Lumet has contrived to effect his catharsis. Why should Nazemann, who has been living in New York for twenty years, exposed to the same influences, suddenly wake up? Why should he be able to recall traumas from repression when anyone else would need an analyst? The death of a Puerto Rican boy who intercepts a bullet meant for Nazemann seems far too circumstantial. Also questionable is Lumet's use of stomach-turners, such as the sequence where Nazemann jabs a long pin through his hand...
...experience in the manner that true tragedy demands. But we must remember that Nazemann has fallen in life and we arrive at his story in medias res. The pimp he works for calls him "professor," and it vaguely suggested in other places that he once held such a position. Lumet's failure to clarify this point or indeed to provide his audience with a strong picture of Nazemann before his fall constitutes a major flaw of the film...