Mostly regarded and remembered for Rod Steiger’s implosive title performance—he plays Sol Nazerman, a haunted Holocaust survivor now running a Harlem pawn shop—The Pawnbroker still manages to shock the system thanks to its stark, near-subliminal editing techniques. In this sense, it’s one of Sydney Lumet’s most cinematic efforts. (Notably, he’s working from a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant rather than the sort of prestigious stage material that had defined his feature directorial career up to this point.) After a dreamy memory sequence that starts the movie—employing close-ups, a lilting camera, and subtle slow motion—we settle into Sol’s morose, daily routine of opening the shop and interacting with customers as little as possible. Then the first, sudden insert shot comes—no more than an instant—of Sol’s late wife, drawn from that memory. Other, increasingly pronounced inserts will follow, including a moment when a woman attempting to sell her engagement ring ushers in a stark, mournful pan across hands being lifted to the top of a fence, where a Nazi soldier plucks the rings from the fingers. Ralph Rosenblum served as editor, while Boris Kaufman provided the black-and-white, street-scene cinematography and Quincy Jones wrote the jazz-inflected score. Aside from Steiger and his performance—full of simmering, self-directed fury—also notable are Jamie Sanchez, who is lively and doomed as Sol’s eager employee, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, who is persistently open-hearted as a neighborhood youth worker who gets Sol to pry open his past just a bit.
(8/28/24)
