The Pawnbroker
Sidney Lumet (1964)
As a standalone drama, it’s excessive and unsatisfying. In a historical context, The Pawnbroker is undeniably important as a Hollywood trailblazer. This was the first American mainstream film whose central character is a Jewish Holocaust survivor. (Perhaps also the first to feature, as one of the supporting characters, a pimp and racketeer who’s Black and gay.) Its extensive use of subliminal cuts – showing remembered images that flash through the protagonist’s mind – was still novel; within a few years, New Hollywood cinema had made the technique familiar. Its sequences including female nudity fell foul of the Production Code but Sidney Lumet appealed to the Motion Picture Association of America. In winning his case, he helped sound the death knell for the Code, abolished in 1968.
The title character is Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger). In the late 1930s, he was a university professor in his native Germany, happily married with two young children. Twenty-five years later, Sol works behind the counter of a pawn shop in run-down East Harlem. His wife and children died in Auschwitz, where Sol was also a prisoner. He now lives with his late wife’s sister (Nancy R Pollock) and her family on a Long Island suburban housing estate. The pawn shop’s owner is Rodriguez (Brock Peters), a racketeer who uses the premises as a front for activities that include money laundering and running brothels. Sol’s assistant in the shop is a young Puerto Rican, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sánchez), a petty criminal resolved to go straight but whose connections nevertheless spell double trouble for Sol. The young man’s girlfriend (Thelma Oliver) is a prostitute from the Rodriguez stable. Jesus also spends leisure time in a pool hall, patronised by members of a local crime gang led by Tangee (Raymond St Jacques).
Save for the flashbacks, The Pawnbroker is set and was filmed on what in retrospect feels like the director’s home turf: the film, shot in black and white (by Boris Kaufman), presents the hectic, gritty New York City that became Sidney Lumet’s trademark locale. In other respects, though, he seems the wrong choice of director for the material (which indeed was turned down by Stanley Kubrick, Karel Reisz and Franco Zeffirelli, according to Wikipedia). Lumet was sometimes a fine director of actors – Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) come instantly to mind – but he preferred a particular kind of acting, the all-stops-out kind. In The Pawnbroker, this is counterproductive in two ways, one a trickier matter than the other. The relatively simple aspect is that, as a film dominated by a single character, The Pawnbroker includes a good many parts with very limited screen time: Lumet’s histrionic appetite increases the natural temptation facing the actors concerned to make the most of their small roles as energetically as they can. The more complex issue concerns the central question of who Sol Nazerman is.
The premise of the screenplay (by Morton S Fine and David Friedkin) is that Sol is a man who has suffered so terribly that he’s numb. He says as much in an exchange with Mendel, the elderly father (played by Baruch Lumet, Sidney’s own father) of the man who was once Sol’s best friend and who also died in Auschwitz. Mendel calls out Sol’s lack of human feeling and survivor’s guilt:
Mendel And so you wrap yourself in a kind of shroud and feel you share the dignity of death with those who really died. Tell me, does blood ever flow through you, Sol Nazerman? Can you feel pain?
Sol No.
Mendel You are a fake. You breathe, you eat, you walk. You make money. You take a dream and give a dollar – and give no hope.
Sol I survive.
Is Sol really traumatised to the extent that he’s no longer capable of feeling? Or is his disengagement, rather, an act of will – eschewing human relationships, suppressing feelings and memories because the grief and horror of what happened in Europe to the people that he loved most, are unbearable to him? The Pawnbroker is adapted from a 1961 novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant (which I’ve not read). Perhaps the book sustained a tension between the options of whether Sol (who’s, by the way, Polish rather than German in the novel) no longer can feel or is refusing to let himself feel, in ways that Lumet’s film fails to do – or chooses not to do. As soon as the split-second flashbacks begin, you suspect that Sol is struggling to keep a lid on his painful past; once these momentary recollections expand into longer sequences in Auschwitz, you know he’s losing the battle. Lumet favours Sol’s willed denial of emotion – it’s obviously more dramatic than numbness – yet he still holds on to the beyond-feeling premise, to be used when it suits.
Lumet’s propensity for melodrama gets The Pawnbroker off to a bad start. In the film’s prologue, three generations of Sol’s family are enjoying themselves in lovely sunlit countryside: Sol, his wife (Linda Geiser), their little son and daughter, and an elderly couple – presumably Sol’s or Ruth’s parents, and more conspicuously Jewish than the younger generations. There’s no audible dialogue but the scene is scored to lusciously poignant strings music (which isn’t really Quincy Jones’ thing: he’s more comfortable with the music he wrote to accompany the subsequent New York street scenes). The rural idyll is suddenly cut short when Sol sees something or someone approaching. Much later in the film, Lumet reprises the last part of the sequence, revealing too the Nazi officers whose vehicle pulls up on a nearby road and who then march towards the family. This doesn’t make much sense. If the Nazi threat is already a fact of Jewish life in Germany, why are the Nazermans blissfully happy until the uniforms appear? Are those uniforms touring country roads on the off chance they’ll find a few Jews to round up? The sequence is surely meant to describe a real event rather than a symbolic representation of what happened in Nazi Germany; as such it’s offensively stupid.
Once Lumet cuts from the prologue to present-day New York, the overacting in minor parts is counterproductive. Whether at home or at work, Sol is surrounded by extroverts so noisy they’re practically deranged – the worst offenders are his niece (Marianne Kanter) and customers (Ed Morehouse, Rene Santoni and others) who rhapsodise about the object they’re pawning before turning incredulous as Sol offers only a paltry dollar or two. You don’t wonder that he’s gruffly laconic and closed off: it’s what any normal person would tend to be in this company, let alone someone with Sol’s deeply tragic history. There are a few exceptions to the exhausting histrionics. Juano Hernández is affecting as an elderly regular in the pawn shop who comes there just hoping to find social contact and conversation; Raymond St Jacques is fine as Tangee. (And Morgan Freeman made his screen debut in The Pawnbroker though he’s unsurprisingly uncredited: blink and you’ll miss him.) Some of the actors in larger supporting roles – Jaime Sánchez as Jesus Ortiz, Geraldine Fitzerald as a lonely social worker who tries repeatedly and unavailingly to befriend Sol – have the time to develop more nuanced characterisations. But the size of part doesn’t always make the difference: Rodriguez is in plenty of scenes but Brock Peters (as usual) is relentlessly stagy.
Rod Steiger went on record in saying The Pawnbroker was the best work of his career. This isn’t surprising. Playing Sol Nazerman may well have been the hardest work Steiger ever did on screen. The film’s indecision about Sol’s state of mind enlarges the task of the man playing him, who’s required to be hollowed out and a tortured soul. Steiger had already shown in On the Waterfront (1954) that he could make impersonality magnetic, a talent that’s even more in evidence here. It’s not long into the film, though, before Steiger is also delivering knock-em-dead monologues. When Jesus carelessly wonders, ‘How come you people come to business so naturally’, he gets by way of a reply from Sol the following earful:
‘”You people”? Oh, I see. Yeah. I see, I see. You want to learn the secret of our success. All right, I’ll teach you. First of all, you start off with a period of several thousand years during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. You have no land to call you own, to grow food on or to hunt. You have nothing. You’re never in one place long enough to have a geography or army or land myth. All you have is a little brain. A little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are special, even in poverty. But this little brain, that’s the real key, you see. With this little brain you go out and buy a piece of cloth. Cut that cloth in two. Sell it for a penny more than you paid for it. Buy another cloth. Cut it into three pieces. Sell it for three pennies profit. But during that time you must never succumb to buying an extra piece of bread for the table or a toy for a child. No! No, you must immediately run out and get yourself a still larger piece of cloth. So you repeat this process over and over, and suddenly you discover something. You have no longer any desire, any temptation to dig into the earth to grow food or gaze at limitless land and call it your own. No, no. You just go on and on, repeating this process over the centuries. And suddenly you make a grand discovery. You have a mercantile heritage. You are a merchant. You’re known as a usurer, a man with secret resources, a witch, a pawnbroker, a sheeny, a mockie, and a kike!’
I’ve quoted this bitterly sarcastic harangue in full to give a sense of how overwritten The Pawnbroker is, and of how thoroughly and early in the narrative the falsity of ‘unfeeling’ Sol is exposed.
Sol moves through a minefield of triggering images. A pair of outstretched hands in the pawn shop remind Sol of hands desperately clutching the mesh of a wire fence at Auschwitz. Jesus, eager to better himself, means to learn from the master pawnbroker then open his own shop; in the hope of raising funds to help him achieve that ambition, his girlfriend turns up after hours to pawn some jewellery to Sol then offer her body to him. (Don’t ask how she thinks this will raise enough funds to launch a business.) Her bared breasts remind Sol of his naked wife being sexually abused by camp guards, while another guard forced Sol to watch. Travelling on a crowded train on the New York underground, even though Sol presumably does this every working day, brings to the forefront of his mind memories of the cattle truck that brought him and his family to Auschwitz.
The effect of this last recollection is apparently enough to bring about a further character shift – and a further opportunity for Rod Steiger. Sol briefly undergoes a Scrooge-type conversion: he suddenly starts being much more financially generous to customers in the shop and to change his attitude towards Jesus Ortiz-Cratchit. Unlike Scrooge, Sol is too late. Disillusioned Jesus, having already been told by Sol that he means nothing to him, helps Tangee and his sidekicks rob the pawn shop. They arrive to do so just after Sol has refused to co-operate with Rodriguez’s money laundering and, when Rodriguez and a henchman threaten violence, has begged them to kill him. (Rodriguez portentously replies that death will come to Sol sometime but not on request.) During the attempted robbery, one of Tangee’s men pulls a gun on Sol. Jesus rushes in to protect his boss and takes the bullet.
The film’s climactic sequence, in which Jesus bleeds out in the street outside the shop, encapsulates the good and bad in Lumet’s direction. As an ambulance arrives, a crowd gathers round the dying man; the mostly Black residents of a tenement building across the road look on through opened windows. These people seem almost too worn out to be actively curious: this chimes, as nothing else in The Pawnbroker does, with the theme of Sol’s supposed disengagement. Jesus’s home was in one of these tenement rooms, shared with his Hispanic mother (Eusebia Cosme). She’s therefore one of the onlookers; the dulled, mechanical reactions of her neighbours make all the more jarring Eusebia Cosme’s emphatically theatrical playing of Mrs Ortiz’s horror at the sight of her wounded son.
As far as Sol Nazerman is concerned, Sidney Lumet has by this stage reverted to the idea of him as a man incapable of properly expressing emotion and nearly anaesthetised to pain. When he sees that Jesus Ortiz is dead, Sol goes back inside the shop. Sweating and weeping, he raises his eyes and offers up a prolonged silent scream. He then impales his hand on a spike for shop receipts before leaving the premises. Both moments would be more powerful if the film hadn’t given Steiger so many outbursts in what has gone before. Scene by scene in The Pawnbroker, from start to finish, you have to admire Rod Steiger’s amazing talent. But his amazing portrait of Sol Nazerman doesn’t – unlike Steiger’s great performance in In the Heat of the Night (1967) – add up to a coherent character.
6 May 2025