Very few actors ever hone their craft to the knife’s edge
the way Rod Steiger did. Bogart, DeNiro, even Denzel Washington are all
recognizable as themselves in most films. Steiger was on a par with Frederic
March, another actor with that chameleon like quality which enabled the viewer
to suddenly go, “Hey, isn’t that (insert name here)?” half way through a film,
and still not be sure it was until the final credits rolled. Walter Huston had
that same magic. He was tall, about 6’2”, yet he is always remembered as the
wizened little miner in “Treasure of the Sierra Madres.” A giant of an actor,
he just played it small.
Rod Steiger’s credits include the corrupt union boss in “On
the Waterfront”, the Police Chief in “In the Heat of the Night” (it took him a
year to stop chewing gum after that film), the disgruntled juror forced to face
his own prejudice in “Twelve Angry Men” and a score of other roles. But more
than any other role, his performance in “The Pawnbroker” was possibly his most
searing as he portrays a man who has lost his wife and children to the the Nazi’s,
along with the ability to love or even feel.
His assistant in the shop wants to learn to be a
businessman, just like his boss. He even asks the Pawnbroker to teach him how
to be a Jew- to make money- to share his secrets. The Pawnbrokers scathing
reply is in the clip below.
There is always a steady succession of people who are down
on their luck who come to the shop to pawn the most trivial of their possessions
in order to survive. The Pawnbroker dispassionately serves their needs, all the
while cursing his own past and the misery of the world about him. He has a
partnership with the local crime boss, who used the pawnshop to “launder” the
profits he makes from dealing drugs and pimping prostitutes. The Pawnbroker
seems indifferent to the misey which supplies the money he lives upon.
Constantly plagued by memories of the concentration camp, he
inhabits a world filled with flashbacks to the most horrifying moments of his
wartime ordeal. One of those memories involves being forced to look into the
building where the female prisoners are forced to work as sex slaves. One of
the women he sees is his own wife. When one of the local working girls comes to
him with something to pawn she offers him sex in addition to the trade as a way
of getting more money.
The Pawnbroker finds himself in a moral dilemma; haunted by
the memory of his wife’s ordeal and at the same time facilitating the misery of
others in his present day world. He goes to see the crime boss, stating that he
did not know where the money came from. The boss just laughs at him and asks
him the same question Jews the world over posed to the German people at the end
of the war. “How could you not have known?”
In the meantime his assistant has taken the Pawnbroker at
his word that money is all that matters if you want to get ahead in the world.
You must have it at any cost. So, he decides to help some local hoods rob the
pawnshop, where the Pawnbroker keeps some of the laundered money from the crime
boss. There is to be no killing. That’s the plan.
But in the end there is always killing. Nobody gets out
alive, even if they sometimes are still walking and breathing. This is an
intense and moving drama about the human condition and the lines we draw to
identify ourselves; and others; as good or evil. And, sometimes we find that
they are both just different sides of the same coin.
With a great script from a great book, directed by Sidney
Pollack and filmed in a gritty New York City, this film makes good use of the
soundtrack by Quincy Jones as it navigates the question of morality which we
all must face at one time or another; “Am I a good person; or a bad one?”
