Pawnbroker, The

In outline, The Pawnbroker, a film directed by Sidney Lumet and released in 1964, has little that is unusual in the way of plot. Sol Nazerman (actor Rod Steiger), a Jewish Holocaust survivor, runs a pawnshop in East Harlem with help from his Puerto Rican assistant, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sánchez). However, the shop is a money laundering front for racketeer Rodriguez (Brock Peters). Jesus's plan to have the neighborhood gang raid the safe goes awry when he takes a bullet intended for Sol. Jesus dies, and grief-stricken Sol stumbles into the street as the film ends inconclusively.

This simple synopsis is complicated by the fact that Sol is a survivor of Auschwitz— this was the first American film made from the point of view of a concentration-camp survivor—and from this challenging starting point, Lumet explores recurring issues of inhumanity, prejudice, and the human condition against the backdrop of contemporary multicultural America. The Pawnbroker is not only a commentary on the horrors of the Holocaust, which in itself would have been a remarkable subject in the mid-1960s, but also does not spare the viewer in its conclusion that modern America has its share of parallel atrocities.

A viewer watching The Pawnbroker for the first time with no prior knowledge of its content has to work hard to piece together Sol's story. It opens with a sequence before the credits, aestheticized by slow motion, showing a family—a boy and girl, their parents (the father is a youthful Sol), and grandparents (whose European Judaism is denoted by their traditional garb) enjoying a rural picnic. The change in soundtrack from joyous music to harsh cacophony connotes an end to the idyll, but this is not yet seen.

Instead, the film moves to the present day, when Sol is visiting his sister-in-law's family, in a scene of affluent Long Island suburban life. We know Sol is with his sister-in-law because she laments about her beautiful sister and that it is almost the 25th anniversary. The anniversary of what is not expressly told, but at this point the film begins its most radical technique, a series of parallel cutting, as Sol sees flickering images of his wife taken from the idyllic precredits scene. From now on, parallel cutting will occur at key moments, sometimes too brief to be fully perceptible, sometimes long sequences that answer narrative puzzles.

The story really begins with the next sequence, as Sol drives to work in Harlem. Again, the film shows its innovation, with its authentic location shooting presenting a grimy city with a dense ethnic and racial mix. Three contrasting cross-cut scenes establish interlinking relationships, showing the details of Sol's pawnshop; Jesus's cramped apartment, in which he shows his aspiration, telling his mother not to speak Spanish; and Rodrigeuz's palatial home.

As Sol leaves the pawnshop that evening, a dog barking triggers a full-blown flashback to Auschwitz. He is plunged into the memory of a fellow inmate and friend, Rubin, trying to escape but being pulled down by a guard's dog; in Harlem, a gang is beating a man, who clings to fencing in an identical pose. In this way, The Pawnbroker is far more than a film that dares [Page 1686]to criticize the Holocaust; man's inhumanity to man has been transposed from 1930s Germany to 1960s New York, and this applies also to women. Jesus's girl (Thelma Oliver), trying to make money for Jesus's dreams of his own pawnshop, tries to seduce Sol. As she bares her breasts (this nudity is another pioneering element of the film), the parallel cutting virtually superimposes an identical image of Sol's wife. As the girl, in the present moment, beseeches him to “look,” in a flashback Sol is forced by the commandant to look as various members of the “joy division,” and then specifically his wife, service SS guards. The point is made by the editing that past and present are interchangeable while exploitation goes on.

...