Author: Tony D'Ambra

Some films  challenge you. Engage you. At the end the screen goes blank and you have to pull yourself back to who and where you are. You question all the facile assumptions you use to order your life and give it some meaning – reasons to get up each and every morning. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker is such a film.

Then you start reading what the “critics” have said.  Andrew Sarris called it “drivel” and Pauline Kael said it was “terrible”.  Film scholar David Bordwell in a feint valedictory for Lumet largely agrees with these pronouncements from – his term – “the critical intelligentsia”.  I give not two figs for this intelligentsia and their pretensions.

The Pawnbroker is a great film. An attempt to comprehend how a person can survive the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust and live. Pawnbroker Sol Nazerman exists. It is hard to say he does anything more. His living is to deny life has meaning beyond the sordid need to make money. He is not a brutal man just indifferent to others and consumed with his own pain. A pain bearable only to the extent that he denies it. The broken lives that confront his caged counter every day are simply triggers for stamping a pawn ticket and handing over a few dollars from the till. That these others suffer does not enter his comprehension.  He is not above fooling himself though. He launders money for a black racketeer with indifference – until he discovers that prostitution is one the rackets.

The Pawnbroker the film has large ambitions. It succeeds manifestly by drawing out the lives of small people. The people who go to a movie for relief, an escape from an existence that denies their worth, a world not interested in their suffering, and a fate standing ready to smack them down by whim alone. Not the kind of people who read the Village Voice.  A mother alone trying to bring up a boy who lives on the streets,  loves a girl, tries to build a decent life, goes wrong, then does right, only to pay the ultimate price alone amid squalor and indifference.  The man who feels no pain for a moment gets out beyond himself – but it is too late.

All the elements of this film deliver. The screenplay weaves the past and the present by juxtaposition, with what is not said, and is economic when words are needed. Each player  has a convincing sincerity. Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Nazerman is a tour-de-force and his nominations for an Oscar and other accolades are richly deserved.  The other players are as real – even if for a few short scenes.  The direction reviled by the “intelligentsia” as being heavy-handed and overwrought to my eyes is a revelation. Stillness is respected, movement followed not led, and the camera ready to be unanchored by what is happening on the screen. The score is savagely alliterative, so much so that you take it as your own heart-beat, arcing from aching to pounding. The editing is fluid and manages the shift from the past to the present almost seamlessly.  Apart from an opening scene in a suburban backyard indistinguishable from the other backyards around it, a scene which has a meaning of its own, the streets of a proletarian New York form a backdrop and a chorus to the intersecting lives that ebb and flow on their pavements, and sometimes collide. People looking out from tenement windows attuned to the spectacle of existence played out below. While they are desensitised to the trauma and tragedy that breaks out onto those streets, it happens not often enough to deny a spectacle yet is sufficiently familiar to hold their interest for only a short time.

All you need to let this film move you and pull the world from under you is compassion. Leave your self-importance in a jar by the door. Suffering is universal and suffered by each soul alone.

Most of us reach a point in our lives when we come to the realisation that we are also-rans. Life has not delivered fame nor glory. If we are lucky we can settle into a relatively safe obscurity with family and friends, holding down a job that keeps the wolf from the door, and hope death takes us quietly and not too soon. For some though as Eric Burdon put it, all the good things have been taken, and even a safe obscurity cannot be wrangled.

Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn) fights his last boxing match against Cassius Clay and is out for the count after seven rounds. Rivera is washed up – risking blindness if he fights again. Trouble is Rivera’s manager Maish (Jackie Gleason) has taken a big bet Rivera would be down no later than the fourth round. Maish has to pay big money owed to a heavy for that bet, and is desperate to get something more from that battered body, even if it means Rivera has to sell his soul in the humiliating charade of wrestling. River and Maish, and cut man Army (Micky Rooney), have been together 17 years, and all they have to their name is what each can pack into a suitcase.

There is no easy way out, not even through the concerned efforts of an employment agency worker (Julie Harris), but deep down despite bitter betrayal there is a kind of love. A love greater than greatness. Redemption? No way. Great men of no importance. Was it ever thus.

Requiem for a Heavyweight is a great film not only for its humanity but also for the craft with which it was made. Rod Serling’s screenplay is lucid and deeply compassionate, economical, and never melodramatic.  The production team takes this scenario and in just under 82 minutes tautly builds a closely realised character study, supported by a cast that delivers soulfully and with a leanness that is rarely matched.  Director Ralph Nelson and DP Arthur J. Ornitz have your attention from the first frame, with a brilliant POV opening scene as Rivera is battered across the ring by Clay, with blurred vision, massive close-ups, and after the knockout, a demented retreat to the dressing room through an ugly hostile crowd.  Low angles, graceful pans and dollies, and long deep focus shots on New York streets make for a truly cinematic experience. You can’t imagine the picture other than in the crisp and evocative monochrome that fills the screen. Editor Carl Lerner stitches it altogether seamlessly, and a hard bluesy jazz score by Laurence Rosenthal adds a true pathos.

A movie that you will never forget. A salute to what Hollywood can achieve with an intelligent screenplay and committed film-making talent. It doesn’t get better than this.

Rod Serling’s teleplay of Requiem for a Heavyweight was first broadcast on television as a Playhouse 90 feature in 1957 and won an Emmy. Jack Palance played Mountain Rivera, after Anthony Quinn had knocked back the role. Director of the movie Ralph Nelson wrote to LIFE magazine in 1963 saying he thought Palance would have been better in the movie than Quinn!