The Pawnbroker is maybe the best of Sidney Lumet's New York based films. It tells the story of Sol Nazerman, former professor from Germany, Holocaust survivor, now making a living as a pawnbroker in Harlem. Rod Steiger got an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. If he had lost to Sir Laurence Olivier for Othello I might understand, but losing to Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou? All three are performances on different planes of acting.
This is one of those films like Cyrano De Bergerac which rise and fall on the ability of the person performing the title character. With a minimum of dialog and a performance mostly of anguished expressions, Rod Steiger conveys the story of a man who's really seen the worst of what life has to offer and expects very little from humanity. And in Harlem no one rises among the dregs of society that usually come peddling the last of their dreams to him.
This film was done in 1964 and that was also the year of the Harlem riots, sparked by an NYPD officer killing a black teenager. My guess is that Sol Nazerman's pawn shop, white owned that it was never saw a scrap of damage. That's because one of the reasons he stays in business is because of a little money laundering on the side for Harlem racketeer Brock Peters.
Unfortunately Steiger's assistant Jaime Sanchez sees a huge amount of cash being deposited in the safe after office hours. He's an ambitious young man and not really deciding which side of the fence to fall on. It's more his indecision that leads to tragedy later on.
The highlight of the film for me is Steiger's equivalent of a 'hath a Jew not eyes' speech when he explains to Sanchez just why the Jewish people have the 'mercantile heritage' as he puts it. Too often it's forgotten that in all the places for thousands of years where Jews couldn't own land, this was what was left to them. On a side note that's one of the reasons for the State of Israel developing its own collective agricultural institution, the Kibbutz. It was to get Jews deliberate in touch with the land, to grow things on it and develop an attachment to it.
Some of the other cast members of note are Geraldine Fitzgerald as a neighborhood settlement house social worker who tries to penetrate Steiger's catatonic personality and a really wonderful bit by Reni Santoni as a junkie trying to pawn a radio and jonesing to beat the band.
Still the film is Rod Steiger's show, one of the few times he carried a film by himself and he does it magnificently.
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