Le prêteur sur gages

This has to be the most depressing film I have ever seen. I seriously stopped in the middle because I was getting so bummed out.

Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, the pawnbroker of the title is brilliant in the role. I doubt if there is anyone else who could have brought froth the depths of despair that Nazerman was experiencing. He lost everything, not just a family, but his who reason for living, and, as he says, there was nothing he could do about it. He was utterly helpless as his world crumbled.

He was a man without compassion or felling. His only comfort was money, and that really did him no good. It did not help him when he was reliving the flashbacks from the Holocaust. All he wanted to do was die, but apparently did not have the will to do it himself, so he set himself up for killing.

Steiger wasn't the only person that made this film worth watching. There was Brock Peters as a gangster, Thelma Oliver as the girlfriend of his assistant (Jaime Sánchez), and Sánchez himself.

The gritty and dark setting was perfect for the film. Sidney Lumet was excellent as the director.

I recently saw again a couple Lumet projects that I admired, so turned to this.

I think there is something to be said for artists who invent and then convince everyone afterward that what they have just experienced is the way the world is put together.

Some filmmakers do this consistently. Or they do it once, and then just live in the world they've created. Others are amazingly clever at some point, and equally banal at others. Polanski comes to mind.

When this was new, it was groundbreaking, truly an achievement. It worked.

Lumet's approach is actor-centric, not something I particularly value. But it is perfect for an exploration of a man: world growing from an individual. Lumet also likes to use space, but he doesn't know the containment properties of space, only the dividers, so we have the shop will all sorts of walls and fences. The lover's apartment as well.

What was new was this was the first movie — mainstream US movie — to use nudity. Its underwhelming today thank heaven, but rather shocking in its day, especially because the woman is black, and a seller of sex.

In the project, it triggers the most extended flashback sequence, one that involved our hero's deepest disaster. Overlapping flashbacks had been used, most famously in "Manchurian Candidate," which resembles this in some ways. But it hadn't been so fragmented, so apparently integrated into the fabric of the man. We see a desperate whore; he sees his humiliated wife. We see street thugs beating up a drunk; he sees the holocaust.

This cinematic device is now so common as to not be remarkable. Sex (in the form of exposed breasts) and Nazis both had more cinematic power then than now.

Is it greater art if we digest it, even if the work itself becomes ordinary in the process? Seeing this will do to you what happens with the character we see. It will undress your memory, your cinematic memory. If you saw this when you were both young, it will give you a flashback, you living both now and then.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Rod Steiger gives the greatest lead-actor performance I have ever seen in the title role of the Pawnbroker. Lumet's direction strikes no false note and neither does the incredibly well-researched and painfully honest script. It's hard to believe how virtually forgotten this true masterpiece of a survivor's private hell. It shows very vividly that even those of us lucky enough to survive the camps need to be ever more rare of spirit to survive without significant trauma scars. Steiger extracts every piece of emotion from his character with a performance that exceeds all that came before it and has never been surpassed. Every aspiring actor needs to view Steiger's performance to realize how magnificent it truly is.

A very impressive and dramatic movie. I remember when I saw the first time this movie as a young teenager, I was deeply impressed by it, and after many years it still one of the movie that are important to me. The thing that hit me in the movie is the wire between the violence in the streets of the city and the violence in the Nazist concentration camp. It's the story without any hope of a survivor, a dead man walking, living an impossible life in the violent modern society. It has been the first movie that I saw about other movies about the Holocaust and still Ithink it's one of the more impressive about this argument. I saw many movies about the Holocaust, ma no one treats as this, the difficult life of survivors who lost their family.

A classic. One of the few if not only who portrays not the atrocity at the surface, but the trauma afterward. No evil SSers in their black uniforms of death. It might have been more entertaining and simple to understand. Instead the movie captures the evil in the victim. There are the walking dead. Those who survived. For them living was nothing but survival. The setting is NYC of the 60s. This movie will outlive most movies. It is a true classic in the psychological genre. The only minor flaw is the clownesque character of Jesus. Rod Steiger puts down an excelling performance as the character of the pawnbroker. A very esthetic filming in black and white.