Pick-up

Gary Cooper was supposed to do Pick-up with Sylvia Sidney, but Paramount had lent him to MGM for a film and shooting ran over. So George Raft got the part and I think it worked out better. Not sure if Coop's Montana accent would have worked as well as Raft's most urban persona.

Sidney and husband William Harrigan both went to jail after a badger game con cost the mark his life. Sidney got 2 years and is being released Harrigan has 3 more years to serve.

Sidney got a lot of notoriety and has trouble finding work and that's when she meets Raft who's a cabdriver with ambition. It's the usual boy meets girl stuff with Sidney not confessing she has a husband in stir and Raft gets picked up by spoiled society girl Lillian Bond.

This one is Sylvia's picture though Raft gets his innings in. The climax is in a courtroom and it's a wild one.

Pick-up still holds up well.

I love Sylvia Sidney. She was easily one of the greatest and most underappreciated actresses Hollywood ever had. She should have easily won multiple oscars but supposedly she was hard to work with and the academy looked the other way. Then the studio didnt help her much,as great an actress as he was she was given mediocre scripts and she never made a huge popular movie. She was mostly cast with second rate leading actors and was expected to carry the movie alone. In this one she is paired with second rate leading man George who manages not to ruin this movie which is an acomplishment in itself. The story is likable and so are the characters. This rather obscure little movie is easily one of the best Sylvia Sidney ever did.

Just released from prison (her husband, to whom she is bitter for getting her involved in a badger game that had resulted in a suicide, still behind bars), a woman with no place to go and caught in the rain takes refuge in the back of a taxi. The cabbie, at first ordering her out of his hack, then relents and lets her come back to his place for the night. Things will slowly develop between them in this Paramount programmer.

Sylvia Sidney and George Raft star, and their presences are the chief distinctions of this fairly ordinary Depression era romance about a pair of people living on the edge. There's more involved in the story than that, of course. Sidney keeps her true identity and prison time a secret, though she eventually acknowledges to Raft that she is married. Getting a divorce would only cause undue publicity though she doesn't open up about exactly what that publicity would be. Raft, who loves her by this time, doesn't press the issue.

Complications arise from Raft meeting a free spirited society girl (Lillian Bond) who wants to use him as her play thing, and, even more so, Sidney's jealous, possessive former husband (she does manage a divorce, after all), played by William Harrigan, who gets released from prison and starts looking for her.

The film has a cute scene in which Raft is eating a meal prepared for him by Sidney. He only wants ketchup on his "he-man" food, he informs her, but she sprinkles some mushroom sauce on his steak. He tries it. "Well?" she asks. "It's great," he says, "Give me the ketchup."

I wondered about a few aspects of the film, though. In the next to opening scene when Sidney is in the warden's office for her final instructions before release there is a hard boiled newspaper reporter there talking to her, as well. The reporter gets on the warden's phone and calls in a report on Sidney's release right from that spot, his loud voice even interrupting the warden's conversation with the about-to-be-released inmate. What kind of media courting prison warden is this, I thought?

Later in the film, after Raft starts his own garage business and he and Sidney are doing a little better, they hire a maid (Lousie Beavers in an unbilled role) for their still modest apartment. A maid? They don't appear to be doing that well. Raft appears to be doing much of the garage work himself (still wearing a fedora, by the way, don't ask me why). Beavers, a likable actress, doesn't have much to do in her typical role as a domestic. She would soon, at least, get a better role and billing at the studio in Imitation of Life, one of the box office hits of 1934.

This was the first of three films that co-starred Sidney and Raft (the others being You and Me and Mr. Ace). Pick-up is watchable but there are no surprises. A party scene at Lillian Bond's house seems like unnecessary padding. The film does, at least, benefit from a sensitive performance by Sidney. Raft is still developing as an actor but he has screen presence.

Sylvia Sidney was Paramount's low-class weeper star in this period, with a lower-class accent and a beautiful face that could suffer stoically or break out in helpless tears just when the plot demanded it. In this one, she has just gotten out of prison because she and her husband were involved in a badger game and one of their victims killed himself. Her husband is still in jail and she falls in with George Raft, whose hair is always perfect. They encounter various problems that keep getting worse and worse until they reach the point where you're ready to laugh -- except that Miss Sidney is so perfect in these roles, that you simply want to hug her. George Raft is adequate and for those of you who like such thing, Charles Middleton, best known as Emperor Ming of Mongo is on hand.

It's exciting. It's original. It's crazy but believable. It's beautifully made and like most of Vina Delmar's popular novels, it's the woman who's the hero.

Sylvia Sidney is fabulous in this, she's perfect as the utterly likeable, intelligent and passionate protagonist determined to get what she wants. What she wants is respectability, security ....and George Raft. What she doesn't want is her violent, criminal husband coming back into her life. That unfortunately is exactly what she gets. What she also doesn't want is her boyfriend being seduced by Lilian Bond's sexy society 'it girl' but he's only human and she's Lilian Bond - literally throwing herself at him. It becomes obvious to Sylvia Sidney that Bond is simply using him as a sexual plaything. This is not something George Raft perceives because he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Some people have criticised George Raft for acting like a wooden plank in this but that's exactly what his character needs to be. He's not the lead player in this picture. He is the equivalent of the good looking airhead, the sexy bimbo. The male- female roles are cleverly switched. Like with her fabulous film which made her famous, BAD GIRL, Vina Delmar has written a story from the female perspective. It's Sydney who is calling the shots, it's her who is controlling the narrative, it's her who turns Raft into a success, into what she wants him to be. This isn't quite an early feminist anthem but her star is a strong woman which is exciting and refreshing to see in an early 30s movie.

The court case at the end by the way is both jaw droppingly stupid but also absolutely brilliant - it's got to be seen to be believed.

It's not quite a classic but overall, despite Sylvia Sidney perpetually looking like her cat's just been run over, it's a very positive, uplifting and thoroughly entertaining picture.