The scene changes. We are in the back yard of a suburban home in the present time. The air is full of raucous sounds from an AM radio station, and two teenage kids, one of them a gum-chewing, Jayne Mansfield-type blonde, are pestering each other noisily. There’s a bleached, stark, strident quality. On a chaise longue sits a rumpled, balding man of about sixty years reading a paper. By his looks you would never guess that this deadened, unresponsive character is the same Rod Steiger. A woman his age approaches him and says gently, “Sol, I’ve been thinking. What do you say we take one of those tours to Europe?” As she speaks, as the teenagers fight shrilly in the background, as Steiger grunts his negative responses, we cut from his face to instantaneous glimpses of the opening sequence. At four frames apiece we can barely make out that it is the lovely young mother waving to Steiger at the picnic. “My poor sister Ruth,” the woman says. “Do you realize, Sol, it’s been twenty-five years?” Now a sixteen-frame cut, plenty of time (two-thirds of a second) to recognize Steiger’s wife waving to him in slow motion in the field. The old man’s response is curt and bitter: Europe is a stinking graveyard.
We now grasp the essential facts: Steiger is the man from the opening sequence. His wife was killed in a death camp. He is living with his sister-in-law. His heart is dead. And quick flash cuts will be used throughout the movie to represent his memories. The audience is signaled to be on its toes. As we cut to Steiger driving in his car over the Triboro Bridge, paying his toll, and entering Harlem, an unobtrusive series of black script titles present themselves on the screen, and Quincy Jones’s mournful, dissonant jazz score howls its opening notes.
The first sequence in the pawnshop establishes Sol Nazerman as a man with little or no sentiment, completely unmoved by the variety of characters who come in to pawn their belongings—each of them by turns charming, touching, or pitiable to the audience. He’s a man who doesn’t bargain, insult, or otherwise engage his customers. He states his price, a figure that always horrifies them, he sticks to it with bored implacability, and he is utterly cold and even merciless in his refusal to respond. His distance from them is somehow heightened by the paper napkin he’s wrapped around the glass of milk he drinks. At lunchtime he’s rude to a chirpy, well-meaning social worker (Geral-dine Fitzgerald) who comes in collecting for the Little Leagues: “If it’s a handout you want, why didn’t you say so?” He pulls out his checkbook and asks, “How much?”
At the end of the day the weary Nazerman drags the gates across the front of his shop and begins walking past rows of ashcans down the tenement-lined street. It’s very dark, very bleak. A dog is barking. Barking, barking. As Steiger plods along, the dog barking insistently in the background, we see another of those flash cuts. It’s just four frames, and we’re uncertain of the content. It is followed by three more in rapid succession as Steiger proceeds trancelike down the street. In each of these cuts a dog, a German Shepherd, is running toward the camera with a soldier’s legs alongside it, and by the fourth cut the dog’s head almost fills the frame, allowing us to register it for the first time. All the while a present-day dog continues to bark relentlessly in the background. Now the camera moves in on Steiger’s face as he turns to look at something. Behind a schoolyard fence a group of teenagers is surrounding and beating up a single kid. Flash back to Steiger’s transfixed face, four-frame cut to a haunting face out of the past, and then the schoolyard again, as the victim runs from the mob and leaps to climb the fence.
The boy on the fence is climbing desperately, beads of sweat gleaming on his black face; cut to Steiger, cut to another visage from the past. Then the boy, struggling, his hands gradually losing their grip as he’s pulled down from below. We are wondering, What was that second flash, that big shaved head that momentarily filled the screen?
Now we cut to broad daylight: an exhausted man in drab prison woolens, hanging on a barbed-wired fence in a Nazi camp, while on the sound track the yelling mob gives way to the familiar barking. Slowly the weary prisoner loses his grip and slides down the fence. He hits the ground and staggers backward, horribly, like a ragamuffin, bouncing off the wooden poles that scatter the barren landscape. A Nazi soldier stands by, waiting for reinforcements.
We cut to a group of watching prisoners, particularly a big man with a shaved head, trembling with emotion. Is it Steiger? Cut to a nighttime close-up of the pawnbroker in the Harlem street, his stubbly face, his cold, glinty stare piercing the boy on the fence, piercing the playground mob, piercing all of Harlem to his twenty-five-year-old memory. Back to the big shaven head—yes, it must be Steiger. He is observing the mad escape efforts of a fellow prisoner. His face is full of pity and pain, as close as one can get to crying in a place where crying is futile and even despicable.
By now enough of the memory process was revealed to allow an unfolding of the body of memory itself. From the trembling face of Steiger the prisoner we cut to the source of the barking that’s been on the sound track through all the memory cuts. It’s the attack dog, the German Shepherd, from the first flashes of memory. Then back to Steiger’s sad, shaken face, looking down in impotent pain, in sympathetic defeat, realizing the end is near for his friend on the fence. The dazed runaway, back on the fence, trying to lift his chin above the barbed wire. A quick flash to Steiger in the present, which re-establishes that this is his memory. Cuts to the running soldier and dog, the guard at the fence yelling instructions, the dog nearing the prisoner’s leg, the beaten man, still hanging, like a bewildered animal, a bundle of blank desperation, his face smudged with dirt and blood. He tries to throw his arm over the barbed wire just to steady himself.
The dog is loosed on the prisoner, who slowly sags down the fence again, the onlookers watching hopelessly. As we switch back and forth in perspective from the gnashing dog to the prisoner’s dazed eyes and his disintegrating grip, to the faces of his watching compatriots, we begin to take in more of the details—the Star of David on Steiger’s gray, pajamalike uniform, the three men standing behind him. We cut momentarily to Steiger in the present and the contrast between the two Steigers is powerful—one big and caring and tortured, the other shrunken, impenetrable, and ready to turn away.
A last glimpse of the defeated body hanging pitifully on the fence, before the close profile of Steiger in the present time resumes the former action. He turns slowly and starts to walk away. He’s walking away from the schoolyard fight and away from the horrible memory of his friend’s piteous destruction. He pauses and puts his hand on the hood of his car. He feels ill and covers his mouth with a handkerchief. Another four-frame flash of the crazed ragamuffin on the fence. This memory won’t be shut out tonight.
Nazerman struggles to enter the car. The sounds of the fight and a barking dog are still splitting the night. Another strobelike flash of memory as he turns the motor, and, vroom, he’s off. He’s a wreck now, driving to escape, the camera watching from the back seat. We see a pedestrian about to step off the sidewalk and cross the street. Nazerman doesn’t see him, doesn’t see the red light, and just before impact, there’s a final four-frame intrusion from the past. A screech of brakes, and the startled pedestrian jumps back with his hands on the hood. Nazerman sags in his seat and waits. “What are you a nut or something, you moron!!!’” the near victim screams into the driver’s window.
Another close-up of Nazerman as he turns to face the road. He made no attempt to apologize or explain; just waited for the ordeal to pass. A car honks impatiently behind him and he pulls away. Cut to a new scene at his girl friend’s apartment, and the first flashback of the movie is ended.
In the course of this flashback a great amount of detail was presented, the most important of it suggesting the process by which a soft man had been twisted almost beyond recognition into a brittle knot. Thanks to abbreviations in technique, the flashback was very quick, although, emotionally, it seemed interminable. From the moment we first saw Steiger dragging the iron gates across his storefront until the final moments of the traffic incident a m
ere one minute and forty-five seconds of screen time had elapsed. No flashback had ever been done this way before.
In keeping with the screenplay and the original novel, not one of the gross Nazi atrocities was portrayed in this or any of the subsequent flashbacks. There were no ovens or executions or horrid human experiments. The story revealed the destruction of an identity, and in this respect the delicacy of fiction was more overwhelming than the stink of explicit horrors. Once translated successfully into film, largely through the refinement of flashback techniques, The Pawnbroker achieved a stupefying impact—even greater for me than the flood of Signal Corps footage from freshly opened concentration camps that numbed the OWI in 1945.
Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman.
(Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)
11 ■ The Pawnbroker
Part II: X-Rays of the Mind
Suddenly he had the sensation of being clubbed. An image was stamped behind his eyes like a bolt of pain. For an instant he moved blindly in the rosy morning, seeing a floodlit night filled with screaming. A groan escaped him, and he stretched his eyes wide. There was only the massed detail of a thousand buildings in quiet sunlight. In a minute he hardly remembered the hellish vision and sighed at just the recollection of a brief ache, his glass-covered eyes as bland and aloof as before. Another minute and he was allowing himself the usual speculation on his surroundings.
—EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT, The Pawnbroker
There are certain young directors today—like Steven Spielberg, who made The Sugarland Express, Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind by the time he was thirty-one—who were raised in the age of television and seem to have an intuitive sense of film rhythm and film possibilities. In 1962 Sidney Lumet was the closest thing to this sort of TV-bred talent. When he was four years old, he began acting on the Yiddish stage alongside his father, Baruch Lumet (whom Sidney cast as the dying man in The Pawnbroker), and in 1950, when he was twenty-six and already a theater veteran, Lumet joined television as a director. From such popular series shows as “You Are There” and “Danger” he moved on to some 250 teleplays, including This Property Is Condemned and The Iceman Cometh. By the end of the decade, he had developed a genius for turning theater into television and then into film. His first film, released in 1957, was the unforgettable jury-room drama, Twelve Angry Men, and his sixth, released in 1962, was Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, a masterpiece.
The Pawnbroker was the first of Lumet’s films to present serious novelistic obstacles. With its frequent scene changes, location shooting on city streets, and the constant intrusion of memory flashbacks, it made the greatest demands on Lumet to break with theatrical styles and move more completely into a cinematic mode. The ease and ingenuity with which he accomplished this in The Pawnbroker and the last two films we edited together (Fail Safe and The Group), not to mention his subsequent pictures (including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, and Network), convinced me that Lumet has the greatest ease with film technique of any director I’ve known.
As a director of live TV shows Sidney had to make fast editorial choices, pushing buttons in his booth to select the best camera angle from those available on his monitor screens. As a filmmaker, the editing impulse has remained. He is the only director I’ve worked with who could tell me cut-for-cut what he wanted in a scene and even come up with tricks I had never considered. An example arose during the editing of Long Day’s Journey. I had always cut dialogue scenes by carefully choosing whether to focus on the speaker or the listener. Lumet came up with an alternative approach, “mathematical cutting,” in which we cut back and forth from one actor to the other in evenly matched but progressively shorter snippets of film, totally ignoring who was talking and who was listening, and markedly increasing the tension. Clearly, if a picture needed astute editorial consideration, Sidney was the director to handle it.
But despite his mastery of editorial technique, Lumet was respectful of the editor’s point of view and contribution; he never rejected something of value simply because he did not originate it. Under Lumet I rarely had an opportunity to work out long stretches of film on my own, and I would have found working with him in recent years unsatisfying for that reason; but we operated as a team, and I always felt well used.
During the months we edited The Pawnbroker there was a constant atmosphere of experimentation, with attendant feelings of excitement and doubt. What new film technique could be a more graphic way of representing memory than the traditional flashback? We knew from personal experience that memories, especially unpleasant ones, are not engaged in by a voluntary swan dive into the past. They intrude in flashes. Trained to reject the unpleasant intrusions of memory, a mind can usually keep itself from going into a full-blown reliving of past events. In the novel, Wallant was able to switch time frames through italicized dream sequences. Such novelistic devices have a counterpart in the theatrical monologue. Had the first flashback been transported to the traditional stage, Steiger might have delivered a passionate speech in which he cursed the shame and desperation he felt while impotently watching a fellow sufferer rush headlong into certain suicide; or cried over the nagging sensation of cowardice and humiliation that hovers over him to this day. But film has little room for soliloquies of such dimension. True, the need could be met by sandwiching a flashback between short pieces of explanatory monologue, but Lumet was trying to take the process a step further, to discard all explanations and give the audience a direct experience of what it feels like to be Sol Nazerman. And so he took a stab at suggesting the onslaught of memory by using flash cuts. They would represent the beginnings of a memory voyage, the mind’s instantaneous, semiconscious, involuntary association of current and past events. Nazerman’s reaction to this unwanted intrusion of the past would say the rest.
The execution of the plan was arduous. How long should an initial flash last in order to suggest the percolation of memory? Eight frames, a third of a second, seemed (incredibly) to linger too long. But four frames were impossible to read. Would viewers become irritated by cuts they couldn’t make out, or would they experience just the sense of anticipation we wanted? Back and forth we went from eight frames to six frames to four frames to eight frames, experimenting, screening, recutting, until every shot went through the Moviola in a comprehensive selection of lengths, and the entire flashback seemed to have experienced exhaustive permutations. Even when we had finally settled on our formula, Lumet feared that no one would understand it, and as a precaution he worked out a backup plan for editing the film in a more traditional way—a simple procedure whereby the story would dissolve from the black boy on the schoolyard fence to the dazed prisoner on the concentration-camp fence and stay in the past until the memory scene was completed. Only the initial screenings convinced him that the experiment had worked, and worked in an exponential way.
By the end of the first flashback the film has run about thirty of its hundred and fifteen minutes. Sol Nazerman spends a solemn evening with his woman friend, Tessie, and her sick, white-haired father, who raves a lot about the pawnbroker’s deadness and inhumanity—in response to which Nazerman quietly shuts the old man’s bedroom door. Tessie and her father are more sympathetic than Nazerman but barely more alive, and the scene is awfully gray, all the more so when shots of Sol and Tessie making love are juxtaposed with shots of Nazerman’s assistant, an eager young Puerto Rican named Jesus, in bed with his sexy black girl friend. The young couple laugh and talk about the future as wild jazz howls on the sound track. Sol lies on top of Tessie and silently grips the pillow, gazing icily through the headboard as he comes.
From here on there are two major flashbacks and two minor ones. The flashbacks will seem to serve as a counterpoint to the modern-day plot, but actually the plot and most of the supporting characters wither in contrast. The current story serves a number of important functions—to reveal Nazerman’s frigid bitterness, to present him with situations that trigger the memories and push hi
m to his limits, and to make certain statements about tragedy and its historical repetition. But the fact that Nazerman is cruel to Tessie when her father dies; that he tries to defy a Harlem crime boss only to be beaten and humiliated; that he makes a stab at friendship with the well-meaning social worker and fails; that his naive assistant, a sweet engaging lad who cannot bear to be going nowhere in life, decides to rob the pawnshop and is accidentally killed by one of his accomplices while trying to protect Nazerman—much of it, if scrutinized, has the ring of melodrama. Many of the gray issues and subtle character traits explored in Wallant’s book turned to black and white when translated into the movie, for there was a great simplification of almost all the material. Fortunately, the weaknesses in characterization and plot do not scream at the viewer, because the real force of the film is the unraveling of Nazerman’s mind.
Back at the pawnshop the next morning Nazerman is going through the usual ordeal with the hopheads and petty thieves and pitiful losers who come in off the street. J£sus, who considers Nazerman to be his “teacher” (a ghastly piece of naivete), says, “You look bad, Mr. Nazerman,” but Steiger brushes him off, as he usually does. There’s a half-second memory cut of a woman standing before barbed wire that primes us for the coming flashback.
A pregnant waif enters the shop. She can barely open her mouth. To Nazerman’s impatient demands, she responds haltingly, “My diamond engagement ring . . .” She pulls it off. Nazerman’s face, another flash cut. “I want to borrow,” she stutters, and then looks down in shame. “It’s glass,” he says, handing back the ring. Third flash—it seemed to be a row of trembling hands.
“Glass?” she says despairingly. Nazerman again—he’s lost; a fourth flash. The waif: “He said it was real.” Nazerman is silent; a fifth flash; he’s staring past the counter into the floor as she backs away. He’s remembering a scene from the camp. A long line of prisoners are stretching their hands over a barbed wire fence as a helmeted soldier plucks off their rings. It’s a devastating second and a half of film, and suddenly we’re back in the shop. As the pregnant girl leaves, MARILYN Birchfield, the good-hearted, chirpy social worker, comes forward pressing Nazerman to accept her invitation for lunch. She believes that his coldness conceals a lonely man in need of a friend. As she begins to speak, we glimpse his blank face and then return to the flashback. The soldier moves down the line of quivering fingers, collecting the wedding rings of the Jewish women, as Miss Birchfield speaks in voice-over: “Wednesday or Thursday?” The pawnbroker, lost in reverie: “What?” The dreary camp scene again, the ragged female hands seemingly eager to give up their precious jewelry, and again MARILYN’s cheery superimposed response: “Lunch in the park,” she reminds him. “Wednesday is better for me.” We cut away from the camp and return to Nazerman’s face. He speaks vacantly: “Wednesday, Thursday, whatever you like.” There’s a last instantaneous glimpse of the human gold mining before MARILYN says, “All right, I’ll see you then,” and exits. Nazerman had no idea a conversation had taken place.
When The Shooting Stops Page 17