THE PAWNBROKER
US, 1968, 119 minutes, Black and white.
Rod Steiger, Jaime Sanchez, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brook Peters, Raymond St. Jacques, Juan Hernandez, Baruah Lumet.
Directed by Sidney Lumet.
The Pawnbroker has quickly become a classic, generally hailed by critics and public alike. It is a sad and suffering film, an image of so much of the world's suffering in the 40's, 50's and 60's.
Rod Steiger incarnates, in a restrained and convincing performance, the displaced European Jew who was persecuted and who survived only to hate. A refugee in a squalid New York, he can only release his hatred in petty ways to the people he encounters in his pawnbroking business. People reach out to like him, make contact with him, but find themselves rejected or unable to make that contact. It is only when he is humiliated once again that his world of hatred begins to break up and then it is almost too late. Just as he had enclosed himself in his world of hatred, so now he begins to live in a world of self-imposed reparation.
Director Sidney Lumet gets the best out of his actors. They represent so many aspects of the ugly hard world of New York - Puerto Ricans, African Americans, thieves, petty crooks, smooth criminal operators, social workers, displaced Jews and the continual stream of the poor, the addicts, the deserted, the pregnant who come into the shop.
Boris Kaufman's photography of New York and Quincy Jones style music taken separately seem to belong to two different worlds, yet together they create a strange impression of America in the 60's and its mixture of peoples and emotions.
Rod Steiger won a prize in Berlin for this performance, but not the Oscar. (He did win this for In the Heat of the Night the following year.) Sidney Lumet's successful films include Twelve Angry Men, A View from the Bridge, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Group, The Seagull, The Hill.
1. Was this a sad film? Did you find it uplifting in any way? How?
2. How did the slow-motion, slightly old-world prologue of happiness threatened affect you?
3. How did the contrast with New York twenty five years later, the city the squalid streets and shops and with suburbia, the wealthy family with the highway almost in their grounds, Nazerman's nieces and nephews, his views on a trip to Europe?
4. Did you understand Sol Nazeman's bitterness? Did he have any reason for happiness? Why could he not forget if not forgive?
5. Why did he become a pawnbroker? Did he like his work? How did the shop sequence with the continual succession of customers – Mr Smith, the addict, the lady with the candlesticks, build up a picture of Nazerman?
6. Did he have any feelings or emotions? Why didn't he relate to people? Why didn't their plight move him at all?
7. How was Ortez meant to provide a character contrast with Nazerman -an immigrant, impoverished, keen, full of life, wanting to learn, affectionate towards his mother?
8. How ominous was the visit of the thieves with their mower? Did they make Ortez afraid? Did Nazerman have any fear? Did he positively dislike these thieves?
9. What kind of woman was Miss Burchfield? Was she sincere? How did Nazerman respond to her? Did he humiliate her?
10. Why did Nazerman give Ortez lessons? He was good at his pawnbroking trade - what did he want to teach Ortez?
11. How did Nazerman widen Rodriguez’s power? Why? What kind of a man was Rodriguez? Was it significant for the film that Rodriguez was black? Why did Rodriguez despise ‘the’ Professor’?
12. Why did Sol Nazerman carry on an affair? Did it show that he had emotional needs? Why did the woman's father despise him? Did he see through him and his cold, impersonal way? "You are the walking dead," Although he came out of Auschwitz alive, there was no blood in his veins. The way that Nazerman reacted to the news of the old man's death over the phone?)
13. How did Ortiz making love to his girl-friend contrast with Nazerman’s affair, happiness contrasting with card-playing?
14. Why did Miss Burchfield apologise to him and invite him to lunch?
15. Did you feel sorry for her as she told her story in the park - her understanding of bitterness and loneliness? Were you affected by Nazerman's harshness towards her? Wasn't she entitled to her misery?
16. Did you believe Nazerman in the sequence where Ortez asks him what he believes in and he spoke of faith in the speed of light and money? Was he truthful or cynical?
17. How was the showdown with Rodriguez a humiliation and disillusionment? Did it prove that under his facade he really had convictions and feelings? What were they? Why was Rodriguez the equivalent of the Nazis?
18. Had Nazerman really closed hit mind to the ugly little world he lived in? Was Rodriguez right in saying Nazerman did not want to know the truth, that all men were manipulated? What was the significance of Rodriguez gripping his face?
19. Why was the sequence of Nazerman’s walking New York included? What insight did it give into Nazerman, New York, the world: a whorehouse and filth, the lights, the apartments, the trains, the faces?
20. Why did he go to Miss Burchfield? Did she really try to help him? She listened and heard him say that the sorrow was mat he did not die in the camp. Why could she not help him as she reached out and could not touch him and he would not take her hand?
21. Why did Nazerman hurt Ortez's feelings? Could Ortez understand? Why did his admiration change?
22. How was Rodriguez's visit and bashing a humiliation and yet Nazerman's standing by his convictions? He wanted to die - had he committed suicide in his heart? Rodriguez repeated what he had learned in Auschwitz: that a man might want to die, but cannot die in his own time.
23. Was Nazerman grieved at Ortez's death? Why? Why did he pierce his hand - to make his blood flow again (physically and spiritually)? To make some reparation? to suffer? What future was there for Nazerman?
