Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

elvircorhodzic THE PAWNBROKER is an anxious drama about a man who lives, without emotion and compassion, in his bitter past and a brutal present. It is based on the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant. One man, who has survived the Holocaust, wanders between two realities, and constantly pushes people around him.Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, works as a pawnbroker in East Harlem, while living in an anonymous Long Island apartment. He has survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, while his wife and family did not. He works hard and cynically watches the people around him. The devastating experience and unrelenting memories inhibit Sol from emotional involvement with life. His pawn shop is the perfect cover for a local racketeer...The topics related to alienation, loneliness and inability to adjust give a disturbing tone to this melodrama. The main protagonist is a deeply traumatized, intellectually exhausted, and emotionally damaged person. Every event in his life, wakes a painful and disturbing memories. He is completely lost in his inner anxious struggle between two worlds. However, his pictures of the past is covered by a burden of the present. He is finally awake and able to accept a guilt and shame for his daily actions towards other people. The point is reflected in the abuse, the horrors of concentration camps and the life of the middle class around New York.The atmosphere is eerie and sexually exhausted, characterization is very good, and the sound emphasizes a kind of disorder in society.Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman is a man who is a prisoner of his own past, bitterness and cynicism. Mr. Steiger has showed the great versatility of a troubled and broken character. His support are Geraldine Fitzgerald (Marilyn Birchfield) as a social worker who, in a clumsy and spontaneous way, tries to attract an alienated gentleman in her life, Jaime Sánchez (Jesus Ortiz) as Sol's assistant and a young man on a verge of criminality and Brock Peters (Rodriguez) as a believable and brutal crime boss.This is a strong and convincing work, no matter what the intensity of the story depends on Steiger's excellent performance and some nudity.

sharky_55 The Pawnbroker deals not within the Holocaust but in its aftermath - such an event having an undeniable aftershock in the world's community. This type of treatment has a different power in 1964 than nowadays, where the Holocaust is a sacred and delicate topic reserved for but the most revered directors, demanding utmost solemnity. Compare this to Lumet's direction. See, for example, how the lively character of Jesus Ortiz is introduced to us. The setting is the dim, still pawn shop, and then Jesus bursts in from the side entrance like a sitcom character, blasts his trumpet a few times, and bumbles around without doing much work. The second person who breaches Sol's cage is a loud black woman, almost a walking stereotype, who reacts to his meagre offer for her ornate candlesticks with hysterical, over-the-top laughter, as if they were both in on a practical joke. Sol remains unmoved. Rod Steiger is a frigid and cold type. He shuffles silently around the interiors of his pawn shop, and Boris Kaufman captures his profile in a way so that it is always obscured and hidden behind layers of protection and distance, either physically in the shadows of bars over his face and the steel-mesh cage, or in his body language, in the way Steiger never holds a gaze while his customers unload the tales of their merchandise. They might as well be talking to a brick wall. Sol is unwavered by their nostalgia for these relics, and has a good reason for being unwilling to delve back into the past. His curt, clipped replies offer no weakness to probe or enter, and act as a foil to the emotional desperation of the customers who are often parting with treasured belongings because of dire financial need. In one particularly haunting sequence, a man walks hobbles in looking not for money but merely a face to talk to and an ear to listen, and Sol coldly turns him away. Lumet unveils the cracks slowly, as if wanting to avoid the branding of a Holocaust film immediately so that we are not so quick to cast our sympathies out. The direction doesn't force Sol's hand, but merely presents his circumstances in a way which reveals his past and how unforgettable the torment of the concentration camp must be. At first, subtly, he introduces characters which shake up the equilibrium of the lowly pawn shop. When black boys come in to pawn an expensive lawnmower, Sol directs a thinly veiled accusation at its origins, and we can feel the tension in the room. The object rocks his apparent cold impartiality, and through Steiger's eyes we witness him wresting between his disdain for the 'scum' and the silent front he has forged through years of suffering and mourning. Another is Marilyn Birchfield, the local social worker, who is so entirely honest and open-faced that we wonder how she has survived so long in Harlem. Because she presents herself as a figure of charity and future change, Sol rejects the very idea of her; such kindness and humility does not agree with his pessimistic worldview, forged from the horror of his experiences. When she tries to reach out (on the balcony of a sunny, skyscraper apartment, no less) he bitterly unleashes what he swore he would not release, and refuses her hand. The past is revealed in stuttered flashbacks, not as grand condemnations but as filtered and intensely personal memories which resurface despite Sol's insistence on pushing them down deeper. Lumet channels Alain Resnais, who in Night and Fog created a haunting juxtaposition of the past and present. While the camera hovers all around the city and slums, it picks up on indiscriminate events which are magnified through his vision; a man trying to escape from a gang of thugs reminds him of the barbed wire walls of the camp, and a pregnant girl pawning her ring forces his mind back to the image of Jewish wedding rings being picked off the conveyor line of the same fence. One sequence involving an prostitute's offer plays out like a tape rolling between two scenes over and over, as the site of bare breasts invokes an ugly memory of the rape of his wife. The unsettling effect is combined with overlapping sound tracks until the two scenes converge into one painful, singular moment for Sol. Sexual bliss has been long eradicated from his life - see how the edits flit from Jesus and his girlfriend in an animated tryst, and then to Sol and his partner, who treat sex like an oft-forgotten obligation, an act of silent passion.Steiger's greatest moment comes when he realises his complicity all these years with the local racketeer Rodriguez and his prostitution den, and his entire face scrunches up in agony because his distance has been all for nought. Quincy Jones' jazzed up, uninhibited score hurtles along with the camera through Harlem, and betrays Sol's old world sensibilities by being piped out from every murky street corner and store. There is excitement and energy leaking from the seams of the post-war society, one that he is quick to stamp out of his protégé. But in Jesus' death he finds new meaning and existence. The man who once felt the greatest pain of them all is allowed vulnerability once more, and perhaps a new start can finally begin.

evanston_dad Oooph, this movie hurts.Film buffs can find evidence of schizophrenia in any movie decade, but perhaps none more so than in the 1950s and 1960s. It is nearly inconceivable to me that "The Pawnbroker" came out in the year that "The Sound of Music" won the Best Picture Academy Award. Don't get me wrong, I very much like "The Sound of Music" too, but it almost seems like it was made in a different century compared to this film.Rod Steiger was justly nominated for and wrongly lost the Academy Award for his performance in "The Pawnbroker," as a concentration camp survivor who has lost all faith in humanity and sees people as no more or less valuable than the possessions they come to him to pawn. The film was directed by Sidney Lumet, and it creates the same sweaty, grimy atmosphere that Lumet would occasionally revisit (like in his 1975 film "Dog Day Afternoon") and that Martin Scorsese made a career of throughout the 1970s. It's a bleak film, one that uses the horrors of the Holocaust to shape its main character's psyche without giving him or the audience any real hope for his future. It's a film that suggests that the Holocaust broke something fundamental in human nature that will never be repaired. It's a message at odds with so many films that try to find closure or hope or at the very least a lesson to be learned from such a dark chapter of history, and it makes "The Pawnbroker" feel years ahead of its time.The film is also trailblazing in its acknowledgement of blacks and homosexuals at a time when the former were the subject of mostly preachy white guilt movies that starred Sidney Poitier and the latter were not to be found in films pretty much anywhere. In "The Pawnbroker," both exist without commentary; they're just part of the world Rod Steiger's character lives in, as disenfranchised from the rest of humanity in their own way as he is. It's rather remarkable that the film includes so many black and gay characters without the film being ABOUT black and gay characters. The casual inclusion of them is a greater statement for the time than a movie about them would have been.This is by no means a pleasant film to watch, but it is an awfully good one, and one that may very well leave you shaken.Grade: A

Mike Davenport If you truly want to see something awful, ugly and be depressed in the end....Watch this! The subject matter could have made an interesting film, yet the characters, the setting, the music all contribute to nothing but wallowing in squalor! The plot has already been described here. Missing was the contrasting element to these pathetic characters and their equally dreary existence. It was all one tone. You wait for it to get better but alas, it never does. A bit of humor would have added an element of relief to an otherwise pitifully self-indulgent seediness. I like gritty as much as anyone, but when you see this, you will want to watch something like.....The Exorcist, just to get the taste of this one out of your mouth.Not all of us see a classic here, to some of us the emperor is naked! (and it isn't pretty!)