Pickup (1951)

I love this movie so much

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Widowed Hugo Hass lives in a shack by the railroad tracks doing something for the Southern Pacific. His dog just died so he knows of a guy selling puppies at the carnival, so he gets all dressed up and there he meets a blonde floozy who scams him and when she finds out he's got $7,300 ($68k in 2015 money) she marries him. Soon tho, he goes deaf and she is non too happy having to take care of him. He goes into town to see the Doctor and a car hits him, he falls to the ground and when he wakes up he can hear again. He rushes back to the shack but before he can tell his tramp bride he hears her and hunky Steve, the guy who took his place talking about him. She calls him names to his face and smiles, he pretends he can't hear. Soon she scams Steve into believing he beat her and gets him to take the old guy out for some rail repairs and shove him off a cliff, but he can't do it, so floozy has had it and packs her bag and leaves. His old hobo pal comes in and he has a puppy for him and all's well that ends well. This is not film noir. Its just a nice easy to watch tale, original story done well.

Was Fritz Lang a fan of Hugo Haas? Distinctive elements of both Lang's Clash by Night and Human Desire are foreshadowed in Haas' Pickup (there's also an element left over from Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach). But Czech-born Haas, a starvation-budget auteur of the 1950s, lacked the depth and style of his European colleagues. That's not so terrible, except that he also lacked their nerve, and as an actor rooted in comedy, the nerve for noir.Towering Beverly Michaels finds herself on queer street and spots in lonely widower Haas a way off of it. He mans a milk-run railroad pit-stop but has $7300 in the bank; she knows because she snuck a look at his passbook and married him for it. Trackside life soon proves a drag for the high-maintenance blonde, however, and she nags him to fake a disability so they can take early retirement and move back to the comparatively bright lights of town; she also strikes up a romance with his relief man Allan Nixon.Fate intervenes when Haas is suddenly struck deaf, putting his pension within reach. But just as suddenly he gets a face full of fender on a trip into town and regains his hearing – unbeknownst to his wife and his assistant. He listens impassively as they boldly exchange endearments, and just as mutely when Michaels works the flirtatious talk around to murder....The strongest hand Haas has going for him in Pickup is Michaels, his off-screen wife at the time. Her grasp of the gold-digger's ways was as firm as that of any actress, and her physical stature was exceeded only by Hope Emerson's. But otherwise the film's cheapness shows; apart from scenes at a carnival which look like stock footage, the action is confined to Haas' shanty and a stretch of railroad track. And, having indulged himself in a masochistic fantasy, Haas seems too timid to follow it where it seems bound to go, taking abrupt refuge in a jarring change of tone just at the end. And that end, too, foreshadows the final shot of another Beverly Michaels film, Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman: Her bags packed, she hits the road.

It's pretty difficult to dismiss Haas as an 'sleazy, murky old guy' or 'The Bad Director' in his exile days (read US, later). He's trying hard and the pictures do have some bright moments, when you feel like as if it was a serious drama, or when you laugh hard. The problem is -- for some people -- that you get both in one package and that you might laugh at places where it wasn't intended. But I enjoyed this picture -- and I am not saying this only because of my hurt national pride or something.

Citizen Kane it ain't, but Pickup isn't nearly as bad as one might think. Actor-director Hugo Haas deserves better, and I hope I can help the poor man (long departed) out. Haas,--no, I won't go into his career and background--let's just say the man had the reputation for being an okay actor, but as a director he was considered a sort of Central European version of Ed Wood. Pickup is about an older man, played by Haas, whose life is made a wreck of and nearly ruined by a toothy, gum-checking but withal irresistible blonde, portrayed by the unforgettable Beverly Michaels. The girl is, to be as genteel as possible, a worthless tramp, and nasty and stupid in the bargain. She plays with her adoring and naive lover like a cat with a mouse, and has an affair with a much younger man on the side. Amazingly, no one is murdered in the course of this film, which is actually at times quite sweet. Look, every novelist cannot write The Brothers Karamazov and every composer cannot write the Eroica, so why put down poor Mr. Haas whose only sin as an artist that I can tell is that is that he isn't Orson Welles. The man had a heart and soul, and this comes through in many scenes. He understands cruelty, too, and the woman in this film is, for all the melodrama, a not innacurate portrait of a certain kind of low-down broad who, if one were to show her videotapes of her inflicting her standard dose of pain on whoever the poor dope fool enough to get involved with her at the moment is, would shrug, light a cigarette and say, "Well, he was asking for it, wasn't he?". I'm not too sure about the character Mr. Haas plays in this film, but there is a kernel of truth in the mean little tale he tells; tacky though it may be, there's life in it nonetheless, which is good enough for me.