Eco del pecado

Hugo Haas had a fascinating life - a top actor in his native Czech Republic, he lost everything when the Nazis took over. He escaped just in time but he lost many relatives in the concentration camps. Coming to America, he established himself as a working character actor throughout the 1940s but in the early 50s Haas started making films himself - they usually were looked down upon by the critics of the day but a few did very good box office - like PICK UP. The film is now regarded as a terrific little noir and Haas is good as well as the femme fatale Beverly Michaels. If you enjoyed PICK UP, check out some of Haas' other films THE GIRL ON THE BRIDGE, BAIT, THE OTHER WOMAN, HIT & RUN, HOLD BACK TOMORROW, etc. Yes, they are low budget but they are always interesting and filled with good performances.

Czechoslovakia-born Hugo Haas does a fantastic job of directing, writing the screenplay and enacting the main part in PICKUP. He certainly deserves top marks for that tripartite effort.

He is helped by excellent cinematography from Paul Ivano, sharp editing from WL Bagier, and a convincingly dissolute performance from beautiful, lanky, brooding Beverley Michaels. Howland Chamberlain also does well as the down and out intellectual who steals books from the town library and keeps quoting from them. He is the Jiminy Cricket, the conscience everyone finds irrelevant - even Jan Horak, who fails to listen to the intellectual's advice to get a dog at the beginning of the fim.

Instead, Horak (Haas) gets himself a beautiful wife who is clearly a gold digger, sleeps in different quarters - you get the feeling that there is no sex in that relation - and starts cheating the moment handsome Allan Nixon turns up.

Jan Horak's temporary deafness is exceedingly well exploited. Haas' acting is sublime throughout, the highest point being when he hears wife and lover plotting against him, and he laughs with tears streaming down.

This B pic borrows a little bit from Germany's DER BLAUE ENGEL (1931), in which an older man falls for a much younger and uncaring Marlene Dietrich, and from THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (US 1944), but it diversifies the story lines completely and it holds its own without ever coming into plagiarism territory. PICKUP should earn Hugo Haas a far better reputation than it did while he was alive. In the late 50s, early 60s some rated him the foreign Ed Wood in Hollywood, which was unfair and insulting in the extreme.

I enjoyed it very much and wholeheartedly recommend it. 8/10.

The reviewer who said "Citizen Kane it ain't" got it right. This is lowbrow stuff to be sure, but for what it is, Haas demonstrates a surprisingly keen eye for both dialogue and characterization, two things supremely lacking in the cheaper and lesser BAIT produced a few years later. Best of all, this is a highly entertaining ride, with a solid and credible performance by Haas as the pigeon who all but begs for a plucking until he sees the light (or rather hears the dark) when he overhears the plotting and venomous bile directed at him by his conniving and venal wife, who believes him to be deaf.

Trumping all however is the bravura dominatrixesque performance of Ms. Michaels as the throaty pointy-bra'ed femme fatale. Here's one of the few broads I've ever come across who might be able to actually compete with Ann Savage's mouthy and devouring DETOUR chippie for supremacy over a castrated male race. And leave the male species begging for more.

Also in the movie's favor is a reasonably tight storyline which features some nice twists and reveals with great gusto the true depths of treachery to which Michaels gleefully stoops to get her $7300 out of Haas. Again, this isn't DOUBLE INDEMNITY and it certainly isn't Shakespeare but it's charmingly pulpy and has an agreeably creamy evil nougat centre.

Hugo Haas is in charge of a tank stop on the railroad. When he brings Beverly Michaels home, she gets a look at his bank book and decides to marry him. It's tough, out in the middle of nowhere, but there's young Allan Nixon whom she captivates. Meanwhile she urges Haas to claim some disability so he can retire with the cash and a pension and they can get away. Then Haas has an accident while surveying the tracks, and loses his hearing. Miss Michaels grows wilder; when another accident restores his hearing, before he can tell her, he hears her slanging him and pretends to still be deaf, while Miss Michaels urges Nixon to kill him.

Haas' first American movie as writer/director/producer was done on a tiny budget, and then sold to Columbia for distribution at a handsome profit. Although it looks like it was based on THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE Twice with a Tobacco Road air, it's actually based on a Czech novel. It's film noir at its cheapest and most tawdry, and glories in its filth, with Miss Michaels giving a fine performance. Haas would do the same thing almost a score of times through 1962. He would die in 1968 at the age of 67.

It's pretty difficult to dismiss Haas as an 'sleazy, murky old guy' or 'The Bad Director' in his exile days (read US, later). He's trying hard and the pictures do have some bright moments, when you feel like as if it was a serious drama, or when you laugh hard. The problem is -- for some people -- that you get both in one package and that you might laugh at places where it wasn't intended. But I enjoyed this picture -- and I am not saying this only because of my hurt national pride or something.