Rod Steiger gives the best performance of his career, even better than his Oscar winning performance in 'In The Heat Of The Night'. He plays an elderly Harlem pawnshop owner that mostly thru the use of flashbacks, we find out survived a concentration camp, but lost everyone he cared about. Going thru those horrors have made him bitter, angry, distant. His experiences do not give him empathy for the suffering of others, such as his customers. Instead he despises them. When he finally lets loose nearly 30 years of built up emotion, Steiger goes from fear, to compassion, to anger, to guilt and to rage so quickly and so seamlessly he should have won the Oscar for finale alone. Sidney Lumet directs brilliantly, from extended scenes in the pawnshop, to the gritty streets of New York, to the flashbacks of the incredible horrors of the holocaust. But aside from Steiger and Lumet, the rest of the film is a mess. Quincy Jones jazz score with upbeat tempo at downbeat times seems out of place, and in fact quite jarring at times. The rest of the cast give performances too over the top to mesh well with Steiger or the material, especially Jaime Sanchez as the pawnshop assistant. Geraldine Fitzgerald's character really provides nothing to the story. She exists just to show us just how out of touch with the rest of the human race the pawnbroker is. But we already get plenty of that from his interactions with his family, customers and assistant. The screenplay was good as a singular character study of this man, but some of the dialog was horrible. Apparently in 1965 New York everyone and anyone who spoke to an elderly man called him 'uncle'. And they keep saying it. Everyone who comes into the pawnshop or runs into him on the street calls him uncle. Nobody calls him man, dude, old timer, sir, mister. It gives you the feeling that the dialog was written by somebody trying to sound hip and up with the times but without any idea of how to do it, someone unfamiliar with the street slang of the day. But in the end I still recommend seeing it, especially if you are a fan of a great performance.
Review of The Pawnbroker
