Pickup on South Street is a sterling expression of the cockeyed, contrarian and subversive logic that gives Fuller’s films such a rare intensity and remarkable emotional range. A Cold War thriller that delivers a stinging rebuke to American demagoguery and counters its moments of intense hyper-violence with a poignant meditation on death and old age, Pickup on South Street inhabits a world in which thieves and stool pigeons possess a grace and instinctual moral certitude wholly absent in the arrogant figures of the law, where the stubborn flower of redemptive love blossoms in the darkest back alleys. Fuller offered Pickup on South Street as a brash valentine to the decrepit and vivacious New York City underworld he discovered during his apprentice years as a precocious teenage crime reporter, recalled now with the strange charm and energy of Fuller’s invented patois and the colorful, almost storybook setting of the bait tackle hideout of Skip McCoy, Richard Widmark’s gleefully insouciant Artful Dodger. Pickup on South Street can also be seen as a tribute to Fuller’s resolute humanism, embodied in the indelible roles he crafted for character actors typically relegated to the margins of Hollywood films—most of all Moe, the world-weary tie peddler and informant so movingly played by Thelma Ritter. The film’s formally dazzling opening scene is nothing less than avant-garde, using bold close-ups and kinetic montage to create a strange tension and hypnotic suspension of time. No wonder, then, that Pickup on South Street would become an important inspiration for Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959).