Word: nazemann
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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...
...Nazemann, as a result of a traumatic stay in a Nazi concentration camp, has been trying for twenty years to escape from his own emotions. But the necessity of interacting with other people in the city will not permit him his stoicism, and eventually he is forced to work through his traumatic past in the manner of a psychoanalysis and return to his human responsibilities...
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...
...flashbacks consist first of glimpses shot almost subliminally on the screen, followed by a somewhat organized grouping of images. The audience thus enters Nazemann's mind as he struggles both to recall and repress his past until consciousness finally wins. A dog barking on a Harlem street, for example, calls forth terrifying, split-second sequences of German police dogs alternating with the blackness of the Negro ghetto until Nazemann begins to see the dog tearing at his best friend's heels and the man clutching the prison fence in fear...