by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Pickup
Alley, a 1957 British production
from an independent called Warwick, released through Columbia, and originally
called Interpol when it was released in
the U.K. because it dealt with the efforts of the international police agency
to coordinate the law-enforcement efforts of its member countries against drug
smugglers and dealers. The star is Victor Mature, older and seedier than in his
glory years but in ways that actually add to the authenticity of his
characterization (much the way the visible aging of Robert Taylor added to his credibility in films like Rogue Cop and Party Girl). He plays Charles Sturgis, a federal narcotics
agent who was an excellent cop until his sister, who had infiltrated the drug
trade at his request by pretending to be an addict, was murdered by
super-dealer Frank McNally (Trevor Howard, chillingly effective in one of his
rare out-and-out villain roles). Then he became a crazed vigilante and proved
increasingly difficult for his nominal bosses to control. The film opens in New
York (surprisingly credibly reproduced for a film made by a British studio) but
it jaunts around the world as Sturgis gets a lead on McNally when his
lieutenant, Salko (Alec Mango), is nearly killed by Gina Broger (Anita Ekberg),
a basically decent person who has got caught up in the gang as one of McNally’s
couriers.
Broger shot Salko with a gun she grabbed to protect herself from
being raped by him, so we know the homicide was justifiable, but she knows she’s enough of a part
of the demi-monde the police won’t believe
her and that gives McNally a hold over her she can’t shake — especially since
for the middle third of the film both Gina and the audience are led to believe
she actually killed Salko, and it’s only when he turns up alive only to be
genuinely dispatched later that we learn she didn’t. The film jets around
Europe to Lisbon, then Rome, then Athens, before it high-tails itself back to
New York as Sturgis traces McNally, Gina, and a shipment of $3 million worth of
heroin around those countries and finally catches up to it on a ship where it’s
been concealed inside a refrigerator the captain (a relatively new hire for the
line) insisted on taking along with him even though it meant delaying the
ship’s departure from Athens to New York. Pickup Alley is sometimes referred to as a film noir, which it is visually — director John Gilling and
cinematographer Ted Moore get some beautiful chiaroscuro atmospheric shots and use oblique camera angles
effectively — but it isn’t thematically: Gina Broger is the only character who
has the potential for the kinds of emotional and moral conflicts that drive the
great noirs, and neither John
Paxton’s writing nor Ekberg’s acting actually dramatize any great internal
torments for her, though Ekberg turns in a coolly competent portrayal that will
surprise anyone who knows her mainly as the big-breasted joke Fellini turned
her into in La Dolce Vita. What’s most fascinating about Pickup Alley is that it seems like an early-1970’s movie about
a decade and a half early — Mature’s character is strongly premonitory of Dirty
Harry in his cheery disregard for legal nuances as he goes after the baddies,
and the overall conception is closer to The French Connection than any previous movie made about the
international drug trade.
There are a few jarring shortcuts — like the use of the same set for the seedy bar to which the morally dubious
characters repair to listen to overly loudly recorded jazz and either buy or
sell drugs (down to the same record album always appearing on a shelf over the
cash register!), though in the London scenes there’s a contrast drawn between
this bar and the respectable nightclub the good guys go to (where they hear a blonde chanteuse named Yana sing a nice song called “Anyone for
Love”) and it was fascinating to watch how a movie actually made in late-1950’s Britain dramatized the club scene
of the day so soon after seeing the 1980’s version of the 1950’s London club
scene in Absolute Beginners. Pickup Alley is one
of those maddening films that had much more potential than it actually
realized, and for that I mostly blame director Gilling, who had very little of
a sense of pace; and screenwriter Paxton, who moved his plot around the world
to surprisingly little effect — Charles joked that the only thing the set
designer seemed to do to represent which country we were supposed to be in was
change the lettering on the signs advertising the various businesses in each
city. Pickup Alley was an O.K. movie with an
interesting lineage — one of the producers was Albert R. Broccoli (grandson of
the Italian agronomist who hybridized the cauliflower and the artichoke to
produce the vegetable that bears the family’s name to this day), five years
before he made his name and his fortune making the first of the James Bond feature film and
launching a movie franchise which incredibly is still going today. (Broccoli
has a connection to Absolute Beginners as well; it was filmed in the big studio he built with the profits from
the Bond films.) But the basic plot premise had been done better earlier (To
the Ends of the Earth, 1948,
with Dick Powell as the obsessed nark) and would be done better later in The
French Connection.
