Word: lumet
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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...
Director Sidney Lumet brings the movie alive when his camera turns on Harlem's blighted streets, sopping up the juices of a slum that breeds thieves, spivs, prostitutes and all their prey. Then in flashbacks-some spliced subliminally into the narrative two or three frames at a time, others developed in excruciating detail-Lumet adroitly dramatizes the agony of memories. Sunning himself on a lawn in a bleak outpost of suburbia where he lives with relatives, Nazerman's mind melts back to an idyllic day in the old country with his wife and children. In a teeming subway...
Though The Pawnbroker is full of emotional shocks, it is seldom deeply moving. At times Lumet's style seems self-conscious and stagy, unable to distinguish brass from gold, with more clever camera work than the somber occasions warrant and too many theatrically glib vignettes. One jarring note is struck by a vicious black racketeer and brothel master (Brock Peters) who supports Nazerman's pawnshop as a front for his deals while basking in the luxury of an improbable white-on-white world adorned with white jackets, white walls, and a blond loverboy...
With almost identical plot and characters, Fail Safe pretends to be a high-minded discussion of the same topic. But it comes off as a monstrous joke. Where Strangelove is mocking. Fail Safe is sententious, and where Strangelove is incisive Fail Safe is obtuse. Director Sidney Lumet has merely placed a stock collection of political and military figures in an unrealistic situation and had them mouth inanities about cold war and atomic destruction...
...Director Lumet, cursed with a terrible script, compounds his misfortune with unimaginative photography. With one shot of a B-52 flying low over its target, Stanley Kubrick represents the conflict of a desire for victory and a fear of destruction more effectively than does all of Fail Safe. But Lument's camera work, instead of adding to Fail Safe's statement, merely wears out the viewer with its monotonous tension. He uses all the standard melodramatic shots, close-ups of sweating brows and tight lips, prolonged views of radar screens and bug-eyed pilots in oxygen masks. This technique...