Released 61 years ago, this wonderful film for us is a long invisible Sidney Lumet’s forgotten and unknown masterpiece

We will never say how Sidney Lumetti was a huge film director. Coming from the theater, he will make his peaks on TV before he starts his career in the cinema as his colleague John Frankenheimer. For a special duration, since working since the 1950s in the early 2000s, at the intersection of several important periods of American cinema, Sidney Lumet was able to build a large, strong consistency work, with very little slaughter.

Lumetti, by the filmmaker of suspicion and corruption

A suspicion of a filmmaker who often puts himself in the weight of crime, corruption of evil, he has deeply mentioned the history of American cinema, where works are mostly quoted and unanimously recognized as masterpieces: 12 angry men, of course, his workshop. Also, people with snake skin, serpicist, one dog afternoon, lost men’s hill, offer, Equus, network, judgment, New York Prince, race …

In 1965, he signed an extraordinary film, Ala rarely quoted in his filmography, very little known: The Pawnbroker – about borrowing salaries. A special rod steer, who undoubtedly finds the biggest role of his career here and also awarded the Berlin Film Festival, is adapted to the story written by Edward Luis Wolant in 1961.

The story is a man named Nazerman’s soil (Rod Steiger), who left Germany, now lives in Harlem, where he performs a lender’s profession on salaries. He is a cold person, without emotion, in his work as in his relationship with others. With the memories of the memories of concentration camps and the crime of survivors, he needs an electroco to start living again. He will come from his young clerk, who roughly tries to release him from his membrane …

Here is a trailer.

At that time a very rare thread

At the cinematic level, several basic works – documentary films – have been decisive to the memory of the destruction of Jews in Europe, not only in France but abroad. It was an extraordinary and immense night and fog in 1955, from Allen Rheus, and of course, from Claude Lanzman’s film, published in 1985.

In terms of fiction, examples have been clearly rare for a long time. “On the date of release of the film, an artistic cinema, very little reminds shoah” Explains the historian and criticism of Jean-Michel Frodon. “The Americans were able to see in the news pictures that were transmitted to the theaters while reconsidering films, pictures of the camps opening the camps. But it stops very quickly, for several reasons.

The first is that people didn’t want to see it. The second is that many did not believe it, even to see the pictures of propaganda. The third reason is that after World War II, the main enemy was no longer Nazi Germany, but the Communists, with the onset of the Cold War. There were still some films but very little: Criminal D ‘Orson Welles. Film Verdict in NurembergIn 1961, which used part of the opening pictures of the camps. Or adaptation Ann Frank Magazine By George StevensIn 1959 “.

Pawnbroker, a past that does not pass through

It was found in a very specific context, as well as for a full period for the civil rights movement that was later in the United States, pawnshop “East A film that is truly far from studios and their restrictions. ” Explains a former journalist who became filmmaker Nicolas Sada. “Sidney Lumet has never seen himself as an author, the term he has always denied. But as a very great craftsman. It is for this reason that he was always surrounded by great technicians.”

He actually went to get a very great leader, Boris Kaufman. Under the influence of La Nouvelle Vague’s cinema, Kaufman packs the lumen’s work in absolutely electrical black -white, and the director watering his film in many scenes in the hidden camera in the streets of Harlem, giving his work a documentary aspect. Another craftsman, as well as fabulous, is its editor, Ralph Rosenblum, which multiplies the short sequence of Nazerman soil experienced by traumatic flashbacks.

Initially, these memories are essentially fragments, terribly sad. But the Ralph Rosenblum Assembly loans with popular shocking techniques by new wave films to show how the “simple” fight on the basketball square, a trapped wire fence. How the crowded metro skis looks like during spikes, it seems like cattle that were caught by deportation. Or how does a pregnant young girl refer to a cheap glass ring flight by Nazi jewelry by Jewish women …

The soil work environment is just as caused by: spending its days in a store literally surrounded by fences and iron bars, to avoid flights and attacks, it is also a terrible way that he has already experienced and does not go through the past.

If this is the past, it is also because the present continues to echo it. If memories return to flashbacks, if the bodies are distorted by short focal length, if the skyscrapers have a prison action, if everyday life scenes are sometimes modeled on memory conditions, this is because life in New York is also made from ghettoization, humiliation, division and violence.

“A special and unique case”

Even beyond his subject, SalomB Georgia also had a historical scale regarding censorship. On the stage, an African American prostitute (Tela Oliver) reveals breasts in the hope of gaining a loan, which provokes a terrible sequence of her husband, Ruth (Linda Geiser), a victim of sexual abuse by a concentration camp. Lumetti was convinced that the deerseed nakedness legitimately translated the suffering of the land and did not get the trouble to shoot otherwise.

But Jeffrey Shurlock, at the top Administration of production codeIt was a completely different opinion … Since 1934 it has been in force, the Heise Code may have suffered a regular blow, as well as forced filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock, to leave it clever, it was always fed by religious pressure groups. Shurlock with an influential rank The Catholic legion of decencyWho condemned the pawn.

Director Joseph L. On the advice of Mankewich, Sidney Lumetti noted that his reason for the Association of Pictures of the American Movement at the Appeal Committee, which supervised the Code. With six votes, three, the council finally granted an exception from the film that would come out of his visa in 1965, by order that it was a work “A special and unique case”Even if he does not have to create the previous one.

With this decision and without knowing it, the organization shot foot and scuted. Three years later, a new film classification system will be created, much more permissible thanks to the new Hollywood.

Pawnbroker has been invisible in France for years and even the video has been unprecedented. The publisher happily repaired this moral injury in 2021 by editing the DVD and Blu Ray film. That is, the wait will be long, but it was worth it. If you have never seen this absolute surprise, you know what to do.