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Pickup on South Street

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Chapter Abstract: Released at the end of the first cycle of postwar anticommunist noir (1947-1953), Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is a canonical Cold War picture; it’s also one of the most overdetermined films made during the McCarthy period, centrally concerned as it is with the atom or hydrogen bomb, sex and violence, treason and espionage, capitalism vs. communism, and the politics of informing. Whereas Pickup on South Street depicts both the police and FBI as crudely utilitarian, indifferent to the human costs of the national-security state apparatus, it simultaneously dramatizes the lives of its small-time hoods and hustlers for whom the threat of the “red menace” is less pressing than the day-to-day, dog-eat-dog grind of trying to remain in the black.
University of Illinois Press
Title: Pickup on South Street
Description:
Chapter Abstract: Released at the end of the first cycle of postwar anticommunist noir (1947-1953), Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is a canonical Cold War picture; it’s also one of the most overdetermined films made during the McCarthy period, centrally concerned as it is with the atom or hydrogen bomb, sex and violence, treason and espionage, capitalism vs.
communism, and the politics of informing.
Whereas Pickup on South Street depicts both the police and FBI as crudely utilitarian, indifferent to the human costs of the national-security state apparatus, it simultaneously dramatizes the lives of its small-time hoods and hustlers for whom the threat of the “red menace” is less pressing than the day-to-day, dog-eat-dog grind of trying to remain in the black.

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