All over the world, you'll find small-time crooks like Skip, Candy, and Moe living on the underbelly of society, struggling to survive with their scams, abiding by their own unwritten code of ethics. I'd seen plenty of these people firsthand when I was a crime reporter. They are individualists, trusting no one, beyond politics, changes in governments, intellectual labels, and fashion.
My yarn opens in the New York subway at rush hour. There isn't a single word of dialogue in the scene. People are packed together on the crowded train like sardines. Candy is being trailed by two FBI agents when Skip masterfully edges closer and closer to her and slowly opens her pocketbook, drawing out her purse with his agile fingers. Like a neurosurgeon, his hands are his future. Skip doesn't know that there's a piece of microfilm in Candy's grifted purse. It contains a new patent for a chemical formula. Joey, her ex-boyfriend and a sonofabitch, is selling the hot item to some communist spy ring. Candy's making the delivery until Skip filches the microfilm without knowing its value. Joey and the spies will go to any length to recover it.
Thanks to Moe's tip, the cops haul Skip in for questioning. An FBI agent tries to make Skip cooperate, but he's contemptuous of all authority. Naturally, he's only thinking about saving his own skin. Skip's too marginal and irreverent to fall for their patriotic appeals.
Richard Widmark was perfect for the role of Skip in Pickup, an antihero you root for even though he doesn't do a damn thing to deserve it, except beat the crap out of my heavy in the climactic subway scene.
FBI AGENT
That film you stole had government information on it. Classified. We'd been following this girl for months. And just as we were about to grab a top Red Agent receiving the film from her, you broke up the ball game. Now can't you see how important this is? We just want your cooperation and the charges against you will be dropped. Isn't that right, Captain?
TIGER
You know, I'd like to make this rap stick. But what he's got to do is more important.
SKIP
Well, you guys are talking in the wrong corner. I'm just a guy keepin' my hands in my own pockets.
FBI AGENT
If you refuse to cooperate, you'll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-Bomb!'
SKIP
Are you waving the flag at me?
TIGER
I know something that you should get....
SKIP
And I know you picked me up three times, got me convicted three times. And made me a 3-time loser. And I know you took an oath to put me away for life. Well, you're tryin' awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash. But get this. I didn't grift that film and you can't prove I did. And if I said I did, you'd slap that fourth rap across my teeth no matter what promises you made.
FBI AGENT
You know what "treason" means?
SKIP
Who cares?
TIGER
Answer the man!
SKIP
Is there a law now that I got to listen to lectures?
That night, Candy comes looking for the microfilm at Skip's shack on the waterfront. In the dark, he takes a swing at the intruder's jaw, and coldcocks her. They end up in each other's arms, kissing passionately. It's a mercenary kiss. Candy and Skip both want something from each other. It isn't sex. Neither of them yet knows the microfilm's importance. Candy's naive about politics, but she's streetwise. She knows Skip's not a nice guy. She'll never see him feeding birds in the park. He's too busy scheming his next scam. Yet she's attracted to his no-bullshit style.
Skip quickly figures out how he can get a bundle for the precious microfilm, setting himself up for the rest of his life. And he isn't going to let Candy botch up the deal. No woman is worth that. He wants nothing to do with women. Home? Family? Love? Useless middle-class pipe dreams to Skip. Candy irritates the hell out of him, interfering with his work. Everything changes when Candy gets beaten up trying to save Skip's life. Why would anyone risk her neck for him? It makes no sense in Skip's primitive world, where sacrifice is laughable. Nevertheless, the seeds of love have been planted.
All the newspapers at that time in the United States were talking about Klaus Fuchs, the spy who operated from England, selling secrets on microfilm to the Soviet Union. There was general paranoia in our country about communists. Richard Nixon had just been chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate, having made a name with his phony Alger Hiss expose.
But alluding to those cases, I wanted to take a poke at the idiocy of the cold war climate of the fifties. Sure, there were communists who believed fervently in Marx and Lenin. But there were also crumbs like Joey who'd go to work for any "ism" if there was a payoff. People living on the edge of society don't give a damn about politics. I wanted my film to be told through the eyes of the powerless. Cold war paranoia? Hell, these crooks were more interested in just getting by.
One of my first casting choices was the great Thelma Ritter as Moe, the stoolie. She is at the bottom of the criminal food chain but understands the difference between her and Joey's kind of crooks. One night, Moe comes back to her dingy rooming house after a hard day peddling ties and information. She puts a French record on her Victrola. Joey comes out of the shadows with a pistol, putting his dirty shoes up on her clean bed. He's in a rush to get the microfilm back.
MOE
... You haven't got a lot of time? Listen, Mister, when I come in here tonight, you seen an old clock rennin' down. I'm tired. I'm through. It happens to everybody, sometime. It'll happen to you too someday. With me, it's ... a little bit of everything ... backaches, headaches. I can't sleep nights. It's so hard to get up in the morning and ... and get dressed ... walk the streets. Climb the stairs. I go right on doin' it. Well, what am I gonna do? Knock it? I have to go out and make a livin' so I can die. But even a fancy funeral ain't worth waitin' for if I have to do business with crumbs like you! And I know what you're after.
Captain Tiger, played by Murvyn Vye, extracts intbrmation from Moe, the stoolie, played by Thelma Ritter.
JOEY
What do you know?
MOE
I know you Commies are lookin' for some film that don't belong to you.
JOEY
You just talked yourself into an early grave. What else do you know?
MOE
What do I know about Commies? Nothing. I know one thing: I just don't like them.
(Hearing JOEY cocking his pistol)
So I don't get to have the fancy funeral after all? Anyway, I tried. Look, Mister, I'm so tired, you'll be doing me a big favor if you blow my head off.
My camera panned to the Victrola. As the French ballad plays on, the scene closes with a violent pistol shot. That ballad was a popular French tune entitled "Mam'zelle." I went to see Al "Pappy" Newman, the legendary music composer at Fox, to see how we could get those rights from France. Newman burst out laughing.
"That song's not French!" said Newman. "Edmund Goulding wrote the song himself for The Razor's Edge. We already own it."
Goulding, a veteran director, stopped by my office one day during preproduction, happy that I wanted to use his little song for my picture. A lovely man, Goulding was in the twilight of his career, having made pictures since the twenties with every major Hollywood star, notably Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932), Paul Muni in We Are Not Alone (1939), and Bette Davis in The Great Lie (1941). Goulding told me his secret ambition had always been to be a songwriter, so he was delighted for me to use his tune.
I was going to call my film Pick-Pocket, and this was years before Robert Bresson would make his film with that title, in 1959. As we started prepro duction, Zanuck called me in for a meeting with some top executives at Fox. They loved the project, but not the title. It was too "European," whatever the hell that meant. I argued without prevailing. They asked me to come up with another title. I had Cannon in mind, but that would've conveyed the idea of a war movie. New York's South Street had a special memory for me from my newsboy days, so I came up with Picku
p on South Street.
For my research, I went back to New York and paid a visit to Detective Dan Campion of the NYPD. He gave me plenty of background material to make Pickup look realistic. Campion knew every cannon in the city. They knew him, too. One look at Campion's face on a subway and any self-respecting pickpocket who wanted to stay out of prison abandoned his prey instantly. The captain gave the cannons some rope to exercise their craft, though you never saw that kind of thing in a movie. When Campion came down on a pickpocket, he came down hard. He'd been suspended without salary for six months for manhandling a suspect. I based Tiger on Campion, making my cop one tough sonofabitch, too.
The movie's decor came from sketches I drew for Lyle Wheeler. The look of Pickup on South Street was primordial. How could you tell a story about petty thieves, informers, and spy rings without a realistic portrayal of their dilapidated, predatory world? The murky bars. The flophouses. The out-of-the-way streets. The tattoo parlors. The subway stations.
In the fifties, filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti had established a gritty visual style with Rome, Open City (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Bellissima (1951). They shot their films on city streets, capturing everyday life in postwar Italy. I envied their "neorealistic" approach, because I was stuck on the back lot at Twentieth Century Fox with make-believe streets. I needed the noise, the traffic, the towering buildings, the elevators, the alleys, the things that make a big city feel like a big city.
Lyle Wheeler could work wonders on a Hollywood soundstage. I asked him to make Pickup look as natural as possible. What great work Wheeler did for that picture! For example, he made Skip's shack on the waterfront look just right. I remembered those rickety wooden things built on pilings over the water, connected to the shore by wooden bridges oscillating above the river. Two-bit criminals lived down there. They put their beer into wooden crates and, with a rope and pulley, lowered their drinks down into the river to keep them cool. My pickpocket lives in one of those shacks and chills his beer in the river too. Except Skip arranges his booty in cellophane paper and hides it in the false bottom of his refrigerator crate, knowing exactly what he's going to do with every hot item he's filched. Being on Lyle's sets for Pickup was like being transported back to the beguiling Manhattan of my journalism days on the Graphic.
Preproduction on Pickup on South Street meant making the sets look believable. Skip's waterfront shack by Lyle Wheeler was essential.
The sets for the movie were coming together faster than the cast. The only actor I ever had in mind to play my lead was Richard Widmark, who was under contract at Fox then. A born individualist, Widmark had a strange face, with that twisted, arrogant smile, that didn't fit into anybody's scheme of Hollywood handsomeness. He walked and talked like nobody else, yet there was nothing ostentatious about him, the kind of man who wouldn't call too much attention to himself on a crowded subway. Widmark was perfect for Skip.
Plenty of actresses approached me about playing Candy. Shelley Winters wanted to do it, but she wasn't right for the part. Ava Gardner was after me to read for it. She was too luscious a beauty to be credible. The character's not sexy enough to be a hooker, not smart enough to be a housewife. Betty Grable wanted the role as long as she got a dance number. For Chrissakes, a dance number! Even if she was one of the highestpaid stars in Hollywood at that time, Grable wasn't at all right. I needed my Candy to be an average-looking woman, not a glamour-puss. Grable started lobbying Zanuck for the role. We were approaching the production start date, and I still didn't have the right actress for the part.
We turned our attention to other characters. I'd seen Richard Kiley on a TV drama and picked him to be Joey, the communist agent. Kiley played my heavy with just the right amount of paranoid fury. It was hard to believe that in real life, Richard was a devout Catholic, a loving family guy with lots of children. Kiley would later become famous playing that marvelous dreamer, my kindred spirit, Don Quijote in Man of La Mancha. As Moe, Thelma Ritter would give one helluva performance, for which she'd receive an Oscar nomination. For Tiger, I brought the solid Murvyn Vye out from New York.
One day, I was rehearsing Widmark and Vye in my office at Fox along with Billy Gordon, our casting director. A good-looking gal appeared at the doorway, a scarf over her hair, wearing sunglasses, a big sweater, and no makeup. We all looked up. For a split second, you couldn't tell who it was.
"Can I just sit here and watch you work, Sammy?" said Marilyn Monroe, with that breathless voice of hers. "I'll be as quiet as a mouse."
I motioned her in with a wave of my cigar. I'd crossed paths with Monroe at the studio, and we'd become pals. Who could forget those sparkling eyes and that radiant skin of hers? Monroe sat down in a corner and watched us rehearse, never uttering a sound. After the session was over, Marilyn asked me if she could read for the part of Candy. I gave her a script and showed her the scene I wanted her to do. There was something childlike about her that you wanted to protect, an innocence that was sincere and untainted. After she read for a while, I knew she wasn't at all what I had in mind for the part. Marilyn didn't speak, she purred. I told her straight that if she walked along my decrepit waterfront, her overwhelm ing sensuality would obscure my yarn. She was so disappointed. I put my arm around her and said we'd look for another picture to do together.
When Billy Gordon first proposed Jean Peters for my female lead, I didn't even want to have her read for the part. I'd seen her in an uninspired sword-and-dagger picture directed by Henry King, Captain from Castille (1947). Then one day I was having lunch with Henry and actress Jeanne Crain at the studio commissary. Jean Peters came by our table, and I was introduced to her. Jean had just finished her biggest role yet, playing Marlon Brando's wife in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). She had a lilting voice. As she walked away from us, I looked at Peters's pert figure and her legs and thought to myself that she had Candy's bowed legs, the kind of gams you get from streetwalking. Peters came to read for me on a Friday afternoon. The sets were all built. We were going to shoot a week from that coming Monday.
"So," said Jean, smiling. "I guess I'm the bottom of the barrel."
"Not at all," I said. "I just didn't like those phony gypsies in Captain from Castille."
"Blame your pal Henry King, not me," she said. "I'm just an actress. Besides, that was my first movie."
I loved her spunkiness. We chatted for a long time about a wide range of subjects, from literature to politics. I found myself talking with a very intelligent woman, a fine human being. Jean read a scene. I realized she was perfect for the part and told her she was going to be Candy. Jean asked only that she be accorded the same rehearsal time as Widmark and Ritter. She knew that she had to hold her own with two experienced actors. So in the final hectic week of preproduction, I came in at dawn and worked with her every morning from six to ten a.m.
A big car would slowly drive onto the Fox lot and deliver Jean to my bungalow-type office right on time every morning. While we rehearsed the scenes, Jean's driver sat behind the wheel of the car reading newspapers. He always wore sunglasses. I couldn't make out his face, but I knew the big guy wasn't just reading. He was constantly keeping an eye on Jean, too. When we finished the session, Jean went outside and got into the front seat of the waiting car and they drove away. On the second day of rehearsal, it became pretty obvious that the driver was her boyfriend. I asked Jean if she wanted her fellow to come inside and wait for her on the couch in the outer office where he'd be more comfortable.
"No, no, it's fine this way," she said, grinning at me.
Widmark came by the last couple of mornings and ran through the love scenes with Jean. There she was in Richard's arms, rehearsing hot embraces and smoldering lines. Jean's boyfriend observed their make-believe passion from the driver's seat of the big car parked outside. It was a little uncomfortable at first, then we forgot about the situation. One of my secretaries clued me in. Jean's driver who never budged from the parked car was Howard
Hughes. Hell, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world was chauffeuring jean to my morning rehearsals and keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings. At the time, their romance was top secret. Hughes ended up marrying Peters, the woman he was so zealously chaperoning.
During those last rehearsals, and only a couple of days before the picture was to begin shooting, I got an urgent call from Zanuck's secretary to get over to Darryl's office on the double. I rushed out. When I got there, Darryl might as well have hit me in the face with a baseball bat. Betty Grable was insisting that she be in my picture, even if she didn't get to dance. To make matters worse, Grable had an option in her contract with Fox that stipulated she had to be indemnified if she were turned down for any role she wanted. To refuse her would cost the studio three hundred grand.
Candy (Jean Peters) is grilled by Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) and an FBI agent, trying to manipulate her into cooperating with them. She won't.
I told Zanuck I wouldn't do the film without jean Peters. But I was stuck. If I walked, I knew that there were other directors who'd be happy to direct the picture with Grable. Forlornly, I went back to my office. I said nothing about the situation. Rehearsals continued. The scenes flowed so naturally with Peters. I had the whole film in my head visually with her as Candy. I put the situation with Grable out of my head until a little before six that afternoon. The phone rang. It sounded like a death knell.
"You're shooting on Monday," Zanuck said. "With Peters."
My heart pumped with joy. I don't know how Zanuck arranged it with Grable, but, once again, he'd stood by me. I never mentioned the Grable incident to Jean. She was a pleasure to work with, exquisite and dedicated, a true professional.
When we were already into production, jean asked me one day, "What made you change your mind about me, Sammy?"
"The truth?" I said.
"The truth."
"Your legs, kid. They're very sexy. They're also a little arched. I'm not saying a tank could drive through them. But maybe a small jeep."
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 31